My Life As A Sex-Trafficking Victim

Shandra Woworuntu arrived in the US hoping to start a new career in the hotel industry. Instead, she found she had been trafficked into a world of prostitution and sexual slavery, forced drug-taking and violence. It was months before she was able to turn the tables on her persecutors. Some readers may find her account of the ordeal upsetting.

HER STORY

I arrived in the United States in the first week of June, 2001. To me, America was a place of promise and opportunity. As I moved through immigration I felt excited to be in a new country, albeit one that felt strangely familiar from movies and TV.

In the arrivals hall I heard my name, and turned to see a man holding a sign with my picture. It wasn't a photo I cared for very much. The recruitment agency in Indonesia had dressed me up in a revealing tank top. But the man holding it smiled at me warmly. His name was Johnny, and I was expecting him to drive me to the hotel I would be working in.

The fact that this hotel was in Chicago, and I had arrived at JFK airport in New York nearly 800 miles away, shows how naive I was. I was 24 and had no idea what I was getting into.

After graduating with a degree in finance, I had worked for an international bank in Indonesia as an analyst and trader. But in 1998, Indonesia was hit by the Asian financial crisis, and the following year the country was thrown into political turmoil. I lost my job…

…I arrived at JFK with four other women and a man, and we were divided into two groups. Johnny took all my documents, including my passport, and led me to his car with two of the other women.

That was when things started to get strange.

A driver took us a short way, to Flushing in Queens, before he pulled into a car park and stopped the car. Johnny told the three of us to get out and get into a different car with a different driver. We did as we were told, and I watched through the window as the new driver gave Johnny some money. I thought, "Something here is not right," but I told myself not to worry, that it must be part of the way the hotel chain did business with the company they used to pick people up from the airport.

…But the new driver didn't take us very far either. He parked outside a diner, and again we had to get out of the car and get into another one, as money changed hands. Then a third driver took us to a house, and we were exchanged again.

The fourth driver had a gun. He forced us to get in his car and took us to a house in Brooklyn, then rapped on the door, calling "Mama-san! New girl!"

By this time I was freaking out, because I knew "Mama-san" meant the madam of a brothel. But by this time, because of the gun, there was no escape.

The door swung open and I saw a little girl, perhaps 12 or 13, lying on the ground screaming as a group of men took turns to kick her. Blood poured from her nose and she was howling, screaming in pain. One of the men grinned and started fooling around with a baseball bat in front of me, as if in warning.

And just a few hours after my arrival in the US, I was forced to have sex.

I was terrified, but something in my head clicked into place - some kind of survival instinct. I learned from witnessing that first act of violence to do what I was told…

…Then I looked at my escort and saw he was concealing a gun, and he was watching me. He made a gesture that told me not to try anything.

Later that day our group was split up and I was to see little of those two women again. I was taken away by car, not to Chicago, but to a place where my traffickers forced me to perform sex acts.

The traffickers were Indonesian, Taiwanese, Malaysian Chinese and American. Only two of them spoke English - mostly, they would just use body language, shoves, and crude words. One thing that especially confused and terrified me that night, and that continued to weigh on me in the weeks that followed, was that one of the men had a police badge. To this day I don't know if he was a real policeman.

They told me I owed them $30,000 and I would pay off the debt $100 at a time by serving men. Over the following weeks and months, I was taken up and down Interstate 95, to different brothels, apartment buildings, hotels and casinos on the East Coast. I was rarely two days in the same place, and I never knew where I was or where I was going.

These brothels were like normal houses on the outside and discos on the inside, with flashing lights and loud music. Cocaine, crystal meth and weed were laid out on the tables. The traffickers made me take drugs at gunpoint, and maybe it helped make it all bearable. Day and night, I just drank beer and whisky because that's all that was on offer. I had no idea that you could drink the tap water in America.

Twenty-four hours a day, we girls would sit around, completely naked, waiting for customers to come in. If no-one came then we might sleep a little, though never in a bed. But the quiet times were also when the traffickers themselves would rape us. So we had to stay alert. Nothing was predictable.

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Hugh Hefner: Same Dirty Old Playboy At 83!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Although the American media has successfully elevated 83-year old Hugh Hefner to the status of a “legendary icon,” many people loathe him with unqualified contempt, and disdainfully dismiss him as one “dirty old man” despite his great wealth and fame. 

*Hugh Hefner: 

Icon Of Moral Irresponsibility?

In an interview with TIME magazine published in its January 26, 2009 edition, Mr. Hefner gleefully celebrated what he considered his paramount contributions to society: “When I first published Playboy [magazine], nice young people did not live together before they got married. Having a baby out of wedlock was a scandal that drove some people to suicide. Oral sex was illegal. Playboy played a major part in changing all that,” he declared. 

Asked whether he sometimes feels like a dirty old man, Hefner replied: “Not for a moment. I’m on the side of the angels and always have been.” What an affront!

Recently, at the Palms Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Hefner, America’s most notorious bachelor, marked his 83rd birthday surrounded by current and ex-girlfriends. “As you can tell I am very, very happy. To celebrate my birthday with new girlfriends and former girlfriends is perfect, it’s wonderful,” Hefner said in an interview in the course of the celebrations, which had received more colour and attention because of the American Country Music Awards holding at the same time and place. During Hefner’s 82nd birthday last year, another symbol of Western depravity and immorally advanced culture, Pamela Anderson, appeared topless to serve the “old, frail playboy” his birthday cake!

 
 Born on April 9, 1926, in Chicago, Hefner studied Philosophy at the University of Illinois, worked briefly for Esquire Magazine, before coming up with the idea of his own magazine to be known as “Stag Party.” But when he discovered that somebody else had already trademarked that name, he chose another name, Playboy. The first edition, which featured the picture of Marylyn Monroe, and which he was said to have put together on his kitchen table, appeared in December 1953, and sold 50, 000 copies. Encouraged by this initial success, Hefner reinvested his profit in the venture, and by 1959, he was selling about one million copies monthly. 

With two crashed marriages to his name, Hefner has endeavoured to be a human demonstration of his magazine’s name. He is now known as the “ultimate playboy” – always living with several “official girlfriends” who many believe are flocking around him because of money and fame. Rumour has it that he invites countless girls, many of who are young enough to be his great grand daughters, after a couple of dates, to reside with him, and compels them to star at “the twice a week orgies” he organises with immense relish in that his house of boundless immorality.

Recently, Hefner added a new girl-friend to his harem. She is 22-year-old Crystal Harris, a Psychology student at San Diego State University. Already, he had the 19-year-old twin sisters, Karissa and Kristina Shannon, who had enjoyed the limelight as his newest addition until Crystal arrived. A photograph of him and this “trio of bland way too-young girlfriends” is already being widely circulated to reinforce his playboy image and show the world that at 83, he is still mired in shameless immorality and very unrepentant.  

“Dirty, lecherous old man,” Hugh Hefner, with girlfriends  (sin-partners)–Crystal Harris and the twins –Kristina and Karissa Shannon– Revolting! Isn’t it? (pix:nydailynews)

Now what kind of desperation and lust for fame and wealth would push two sisters, twins for that matter, to agree to become one man’s sin-partners, probably performing threesomes with him from time to time? Given the obscene excitement with which the American, and indeed, Western media, celebrated this unqualified abomination, one is tempted to conclude that most of the Western society have lost the capacity to be sickened by anything, no matter how revolting. 

But a thoroughly sickened Daily News reader posted this comment: “Doing sisters at the same time – that’s weird and nasty to me. I wonder if he has dates for each? The whole thing seems to be about publicity – I think it is.  It keeps his empire alive if people are talking about it.” Hefner had chosen the beautiful twins to replace Ms. Holly Madison, who had to break away from him, heartbroken, after her determination to tame him, and make him marry her, so she could have the child she desired so much had failed.

Hefner hit the headlines again during the recent US presidential elections when he called on the Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor, Mrs. Sarah Palin, to pose nude for Playboy magazine if she failed to be elected. “Palin would make a great centrefold. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about a really sexy-looking woman wearing glasses. Imagine what she’s like when those glasses come off. It would be a new definition of the word vice in vice president,” he told OK! Magazine.  

Sometimes, I wonder what human dignity still means to the Western mind. Why would anyone in his right mind be inviting a state governor, vice presidential candidate of the ruling party, wife and mother, and anti-abortion and pro-abstinence advocate to pose nude for a magazine that services the depraved taste of a decadent society? In Nigeria, even with all our imperfections, such a proposal would have provoked a national uproar. And the governor concerned would have considered it a grave insult, and may even resort to legal actions because of the damages her mere consideration for such an obscene pre-occupation may have caused her.

Former Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Alaska Governor, Mrs. Sarah Palin: Hefner once invited her to pose nude for his dirty,  immoral magazine (pix: cbs)

What people do in these parts to earn instant and, maybe, perennial isolation from decent society transform them automatically into well sought-after celebrities in the Western world. When the identity of 22-year-old Ashley Alexander Dupre, the high-end prostitute that brought down the former New York Governor, Elliot Spitzer, became public knowledge, Larry Flint, publisher of Hustler magazine, immediately announced a $1million payment to her if she would pose nude for his men’s magazine. The publisher of Penthouse Magazine, Ms. Diane Silberstein, also immediately joined with an offer to put her on the cover of her magazine. There were book and movie offers, and even invitations to appear on such high-profile programmes like Dianne Sawyer’s “Good Morning America” on the ABC. 

I am sure that Monica Lewinsky is now a very rich “celebrity” because of her most outrageously immoral behaviour that shook the American Presidency. And if she would let out the word today that she is ready to pose nude, she would become an instant billionaire! Indeed, something must really be wrong with a society that celebrates its weirdoes, its deranged and the incurably depraved in its midst: a society where the human being has lost the slightest hint of dignity and respect.    
But once in a while, however, one also finds a lone voice of reason. The Vancouver Sun titled the Miss Dupre/Spitzer story thus: “Call Girl Could Parlay Infamy Into Payday.”

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 

The fellow that called Hugh Hefner a “media-sponsored paedophilia” may indeed be right. Many in America and other Western nations are already bemoaning the silly interpretation their society had given to freedom many years ago, which has now turned their worst nightmare. Hefner’s Playboy Mansion which first existed in Chicago, but now located in Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, California, hosts all sort of obscene and depraved shows weekly. There is no stopping the frail, dirty old man! It is said that “he pops Viagra like candy.”  

What is the “over-liberated” American woman saying to the unending abuse Hefner subjects her gender to, using little girls as mere playthings to amuse himself? In a more decent clime, a man like Hefner would be abhorred by decent society and labelled a shameless old dog. But he is a rich American “celebrity” and pays huge taxes to the Father of soulless Capitalism, so, why would he not be celebrated by the West? Any hope of reclamation then for this morally challenged old man at 83?

____________

(First Published April 23, 2009)