10
Another Escape

Lisa and I were on the sofa. Gary had paid Tanya’s dad again to have sex with both of us, but Lisa wanted to go first. She had deep feelings for him. So did I, because we thought he loved both of us. I’d never had a man in my life who showed me such kindness. He expressed love like a father and yet at the same time like a boyfriend, all wrapped into one.

That afternoon, I must have just come down after a heavy dose of the white powder. As I waited for Gary and Lisa, God spoke to me. Out of nowhere—I wasn’t even praying. Yet when I heard those words inside my heart, I didn’t doubt them.

This isn’t love. You don’t belong here.

I was confused.

The voice spoke again: I have a plan for your life, and this isn’t it.

My heart began pounding and I didn’t know what to do.

Get out of here. Now. Leave.

I knew I had to obey. I had to get out of that apartment.

Until that moment—although I had occasional doubts, at least until the next cocaine fix—I believed the traffickers’ lies and lived the lifestyle they wanted for me. I was doing coke regularly and denying to myself that it was wrong.

Just then, not only did I hear God speak, but I said to myself, “This isn’t who I am. This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. My mom has no idea where I am. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Usually a friend of Tanya’s dad guarded the door whenever there was an appointment with a man. They said they wanted to protect us and make sure that nobody walking by became suspicious. That day, however, Lisa, Gary, and I were the only ones in the apartment. By then, they had gained our trust and we had become compliant and no longer asked about going out anywhere.

In a rare moment of clarity, I knew. I knew that everything the men had told us was a lie. They intentionally made us dependent on them so they could use us.

I stared at the door and no one was guarding it. I don’t remember that ever happening before. I walked quietly to the door, unlocked the four locks, and softly closed the door behind me.

I hurried down the stairs and into the parking lot. I hoped someone would see me—a kind person to take pity on me. I had no idea how I got to that location or how to get home, because they still blindfolded us every time they brought us to the apartment.

I was totally disgusted with myself for being so stupid. I was now in a horrible lifestyle and my life was in danger. I knew what would happen if I didn’t comply.

God, I’ve been so wrong. Help me. This life—it’s a big lie. I’m lost and I want to go home. I don’t want to be a part of this. I don’t want to live this way. And I don’t want to be a drug addict. I don’t want to do these things. This isn’t love. Lord, I want to go home.

Tears began to flow as I stood in the parking lot, trying to figure out what to do. I was stranded in an unfamiliar neighborhood; the parking lot of the complex was immense. I didn’t seem to be able to find my way out of there. I was lost and felt I had been kidnapped, and I was confused.

I didn’t know how many days we had been in the apartment. But standing in the parking lot, the sunlight burned my eyes and the feelings of being afraid and lost overwhelmed me. I cried uncontrollably, and in that moment, I knew with utter clarity they didn’t plan to take me home again.

I knew that if I didn’t get away they would force me to go back and have sex with men. I didn’t want to do that—not ever again. I wanted to be a good girl, and I wanted God in my life. Their deception—their false love—was turning me into somebody I never wanted to be.

I can’t remember how many men there were or how many sex acts took place in that apartment, because parts of my memory have been traumatized and blotted out by the experiences. Yet in that parking lot, while I was in the deepest darkness, God reached down and rescued me.

Finally able to push away my tears, I walked around the parking lot, searching for some resident or passerby to help me.

Nobody came.

Within ten minutes after I left the apartment, Lisa had gotten dressed and was outside looking for me. “Kat, it’s your turn. You’d better get back in there.”

“I don’t want to. This is a lie. They’re lying to us.”

“Gary loves us—”

I continued walking toward the rear of the parking lot.

“Come on back,” Lisa said.

I shook my head. “I won’t go back.”

“Hey, come back,” Lisa pleaded. “It’s not that bad. We can do this—”

“They’ve been lying to us. Gary doesn’t love us—none of them do. Don’t you see that? What they gave us isn’t love.” In my heart the lie had been exposed, and I wasn’t going back. “Come on, Lisa, wake up. Don’t you realize that they’ve been lying to us the whole time? They don’t love us.”

“No, no, that’s not true. Gary loves me. He told me so.”

Gary came outside then and I argued with both of them. “I don’t want this kind of life!” I screamed.

“Aw, come on inside,” Gary said. “Calm down and then we’ll talk about it.” He meant he’d give me cocaine to destroy my resistance.

“I’m not going to do this anymore,” I said, surprised at my own defiance. “I’m not going to live like this. This is not the way life should be. You stay if you want, Lisa, but I’m done. I’m done with this and I’m going home.”

“No, you can’t. They’re not going to let you go. Don’t you get it?” she said. “You can’t walk away. Besides, if you leave, you’re going to mess things up for everybody. All of us will get in trouble.”

“I don’t care. Let them do whatever they’re going to do.”

“What if your mom finds out what you’ve been doing?”

Before I could answer, Gary said, “Don’t go, Kat. I love you.” His voice was as sweet as always. “I really, truly love you.”

“I don’t want to hear it, and I’m not going to listen. I want out of here. Now.”

I kept on talking that way, and finally Gary must have gotten sick of me. “Okay,” he said. “Go then.”

Lisa still didn’t want to leave. She truly felt Gary loved her, so she stayed.*

Back then, none of us knew about trafficking. If it had happened today, Tanya’s father would have ended up in federal prison for twenty years for selling his daughter and her friends.

Gary drove both of us back to Tanya’s home, and no one said a word on the long drive. This time there were no blindfolds. Just as we got out of the car, Gary said, “I’m going to let you go because I love you.” I almost believed him until he added, “But I don’t want any trouble.”

Gary grabbed my arm and we went inside. Once there, Gary didn’t yell at me and was again a kind man. But Tanya’s dad and the enforcer were irate. They yelled at me and threatened me.

“Sit down!” Tanya’s father said. “We’re going to let you go home. But not before you sit in that chair and we tell you exactly what’s going to happen to you if you ever tell anybody.”

They scared me, and I couldn’t stop shaking. They threatened me and my parents if I ever said anything to anyone about them. “And we’ll kill you if we have to do that,” the third man said.

Because of my previous experience with Mary’s friends, I had no doubt that they would if I ever told.

“We know where you live. We know your brother, your teachers, and your friends. We also know how to take care of your parents.”

It was a horrible, frightening situation, and even after all these years, it’s painful to think about the things I did and had to experience. Even worse was the shame.

None of us girls realized it, but we had become prostitutes. They hadn’t given us money, although they had paid Tanya’s dad for us, but they provided enough coke to keep us numb to the reality of the life.

They intimidated me so much, I didn’t speak about that experience for twenty years.

After they scared me, Tanya’s father allowed me to make a monitored phone call to my mother. She and my dad came to get me.

“Why did you skip school?” she asked. “Where have you been? I was worried about you!”

Mom was yelling at me and Dad was yelling at her. I didn’t say much, and I certainly didn’t tell them about the apartment, the sex, and the drugs. If they found out, I was sure those men would kill them and me as well. I had to protect them. My mom had enough problems dealing with my father; I was not going to give him more reason to hurt her.

“You’re degraded and you lose your dignity,” I tell kids today, “and you don’t know who you are or what you are. But you know you’re not living right. You know what your mother or father taught you. And those values that you were brought up with as a kid fly out the window.

“That’s when you realize you’ve become somebody’s property. You’re so addicted to drugs and the lifestyle, intimidated and living in so much fear, you’ll do whatever they tell you.”

I wish someone had talked to me that way.

I had heard God say he had a plan for me and he wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t understand how I had been trapped a second time into a sex trafficking ring, but I had. And the shame increased.

God, in his faithfulness, saved me for a second time. But something else happened on that car ride home from Tanya’s house with my mom and dad fighting in the front seat. I knew I had changed; I was different. That lifestyle had become normal.

At age fourteen, I had lost my virginity to rape. I tried to have a normal relationship with a boy I thought I loved, but I only interacted with him as being his property. There are so many aftereffects of being trafficked; we have to relearn how to relate to men and to life. And it takes a lifetime to recover.

As much as I wanted to know and serve God, I had so many hurt and unhealed parts that I didn’t know how to trust God to set me free. I was no longer a sex slave, but I wasn’t free. And because I wasn’t healed emotionally, I was still susceptible to traffickers. It was as if I had become an adult overnight.

I felt angry—angry at myself, angry because I couldn’t tell my mother, and angry that she had believed my lies and let me go with Tanya. In my heart, I blamed her for most of what happened. Why didn’t she ask more questions? Didn’t she care about what those people were doing with us girls?

I was angry at the school authorities. Why had they allowed such terrible things to happen? School was supposed to be a safe place, but it wasn’t safe for me anymore. After experiencing bullying, drugs, and then trafficking, I knew darkness could dwell anywhere. If such terrible people could lure innocent kids into sexual activity and dope, how could I be safe?

My life felt horrible. I didn’t want to go back to that brothel apartment, but I wasn’t happy at home. I didn’t tell a soul what happened. I was ashamed. “Everything’s okay,” I told myself and anyone who asked where I had been.

But everything wasn’t okay.

In fact, nothing was okay.

I began to feel suicidal. Was life worth living? Who would care if I died? I didn’t think about God’s voice telling me about a plan. I didn’t want a plan; I didn’t even know if I wanted to live. I was still scared, but I went to school and tried to be like everyone else—even if I didn’t feel like anyone else.

My first day back at school after leaving the brothel apartment, I saw Dahlia and Tanya. They had returned to school too. Several times throughout the day they tried to entice me to go back with them, but I wasn’t interested. I was deathly afraid that they would try to do something to me like Mary’s friends had done.

“You’re a narc,” Dahlia said as she walked up to me my first day back at school. “I know you. You’re going to tell. You can’t hang around us ever again. You can’t be a part of our group. And you remember what Tanya’s dad said would happen to you if you told, right?”

“I’m not going to tell anyone, I promise. Please, I just want you to leave me alone.”

“You will talk because you’ve turned against your friends.”

“No, I promise. I won’t—”

“Okay, you can prove it. Hold my cigarettes for me.” Without giving me a chance to answer, she thrust them into my hand and hurried on as the bell rang.

Something deep down inside of me felt terrible about accepting those cigarettes. Dahlia didn’t smoke, so that seemed strange. But then, I thought, maybe she’s smoking now and doesn’t want anyone to know.

About an hour later, the school superintendent called me into his office. “Do you have something in your purse that shouldn’t be there?”

“No, of course not.”

He held out his hand for my purse. “May we look inside?”

“Sure.”

He sorted through things, and after he pulled out the cigarette package, I said, “Those aren’t mine.”

He opened the package anyway. Only then did I realize he had been told what the package contained. He pulled out a joint that had been hidden in the back. “Whose is this?”

“That’s not mine.” It wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t going to get in trouble. At the moment, it still hadn’t occurred to me that Dahlia had set me up.

“Really? Well, if they aren’t yours, we have to conduct an investigation. I’m sorry, Katariina, but until we find out or you can prove otherwise, you’re suspended.” His voice made it clear that he didn’t believe me.

As I left his office, Dahlia and Tanya were sitting in the outer office. As I passed, we didn’t speak to each other, but their hardened faces told me everything. Their angered looks seemed to shout, “This is only the beginning of what’s going to happen if you tell anybody.”

I knew what message they were sending me. I didn’t talk to either of them again, but they spread rumors all through the school about what a bad person I was. They said I took drugs and gave them to others. They told about some of the sexual things I had done—except, naturally, they weren’t involved. They said I had told on them and that I was a narc. I was ostracized.

To her credit, Mom understood and did the most natural thing: she transferred me to another school. There were kids there who knew kids at JFK, so it didn’t matter that the new school was in North Miami Beach. Kids talk. Even though there were addicts in that school, no one seemed to focus on them. It wasn’t long until kids called me a narc and whispered about me.

I felt miserable and hated going to school. Every day was torture, and no one liked me. That may not have been true, but that’s how I felt. In my pain and misery, I told Mom, “I’m not going back. I don’t care what you do, I’m not going back.”

I dropped out about two months into the ninth grade. Mom tried homeschooling me, but neither of us had the self-discipline to follow through.

Unable to cope with me, Mom became depressed. “I don’t know how to deal with this,” she said more than once. I had changed, and she saw the deterioration in me. As a last resort, she enrolled me in what is called a preparatory school in Miami, but it was actually a school for troubled kids.

In some ways, that school was worse than JFK. Everywhere I went in the facilities, kids were on drugs—far more than I had seen in my previous schools.

I hated the kids at that school as well, and didn’t feel there was a safe place for me. Suicidal thoughts kept racing through my mind. I met other kids who were on drugs and thought, Oh, that’s all I am—one of them.

After a few weeks, I couldn’t take sitting in a classroom. I became rebellious and argued with my teachers. I yelled at my mother—something I hadn’t done before. I didn’t understand myself, and yet I couldn’t be the girl I had been. Something inside of me had changed. “I can’t sit in a regular classroom and listen to all those stupid rules from adults,” I told my mother. I still seemed to be the target of bullies everywhere I went. My self-esteem fell even lower.

Mom tried so hard to help me, but I sank down deeper and deeper into the life of a troubled teen.

Mom gave up on the prep school. In fact, I think she just gave up altogether. It was only a matter of time before another trafficker picked me up.

__________________

*Months later Lisa became pregnant by Gary. Because Lisa was only fourteen, her mother had Gary arrested for child abuse.