Blackmailed into Sex Slavery - Episode 4

Court filings describe how Raniere used Nxivm as an umbrella company to mask a secret society called "DOS," which blackmailed and branded unsuspecting victims before forcing them to participate in sex acts. Raniere supposedly rewarded Mack with money and "other benefits" for every victim she convinced. The women were pressured into providing "collateral" before they could join the elite secret society, providing naked pictures, sensitive information about themselves and loved ones, and even rights to their assets.

This blackmail was then used to both keep them in DOS, and maintain its secrecy. During the branding ceremonies, slaves were required to be fully naked, and a master would order one slave to film the branding while the others restrained the slave being branded. The indictment does not make clear whether there was any direct relationship between the sex-trafficking pyramid of DOS, and the more public-facing self-help pyramid scheme of Nxivm.

The actress is, however, a known co-creator of programs that enlisted other actors for Nxivm's increasingly expensive "empowerment" classes and workshops. Several aspiring and established Hollywood actresses have had varying levels of involvement with Nxivm. There's a personal essay called "Nobody's Concubine," published in an anthology of academic and survivor writings called Not for Sale: In "Nobody's Concubine," Kim is abused as a child and raped as a teen, and starts working as a dancer in a strip club before joining an escort service.

She is not kidnapped. There is no sex-trafficking ring and no Las Vegas casino air duct. Instead, there is a less juicy, more complex story of abuse, victimization, racism, sexism, power, and desperation. The author writes of believing she was not worth anything except when she was dancing, feeling the rush of men's desire and women's jealousy. She had already been the victim of abuse and rape, she writes. Kim describes becoming clean and sober in , then starting her life as a spokesperson for women and children "who are victims of sexual violence and exploitation.

But by , Kim's first-person autobiographical story had changed, at least her story as it is archived in the online resource The Survivor Archives Project survivorarchivesproject. As a child, Kim writes, she was sexually abused by her father's friends, male principals and teachers at school, and her babysitter. She became "hostage" to a man who held her in an abandoned home in Oklahoma, then escaped him and met a woman "I thought I could trust," but who sold her.

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I was involved in trafficking for more than six months up to 2 and [a] half years. Repeatedly, I witnessed the beatings, rapes, and murders of innocent women. Finally, I was able to escape from my master through a wealthy client who bought me for an undisclosed amount of money.

This "wealthy client" is not part of Kim's life story as described in her and interviews. From the interview between Charles Powell and Chong Kim:. So what is the story again? Does it involve a sex-trafficking ring or not? Did she start off willingly or did she start off at gunpoint? Was there an air-vent escape or not? Some of these details aren't just different stories, they are different premises on which the stories are built. Chong Kim firmly denies the allegations and knows that the real truth will prevail. My attempts to get Kim's side of the story—to get at "the real truth"—were unsuccessful.

Recently I found her on Facebook, where I am identified on my profile as working at The Stranger , and sent her a friend request. She accepted the request within moments.

I wrote, "I'm writing about Eden from here in Seattle. Do you have a minute to chat here back and forth about the movie? In an attempt to understand the contradictory narratives that were already out there, I asked, "Do you feel your story was accurately told by Eden or were there parts you had to compromise on in order to make the movie more 'saleable' or whatever other forces come to bear on moviemaking? The movie is washed down compared to what I went through. I wrote, "I have to ask a difficult question: How has it felt to be accused of not telling the truth of your story through Eden?

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What do you say to people who doubt? Her next message was, "If you have any questions direct them to my manager or my attorney. You don't go on here befriending me to ask my [ sic ] questions. Have a good day. I wrote to both her manager, Angela Allen, and her attorney, Dan Schneider. Allen declined my request to speak further, and Schneider never replied.

Barnes, of the anti-sex-trafficking group Breaking Out, told me he believes the real truth will prevail, too. He told me that when he called the casino hotel in Las Vegas where Kim claimed that she climbed out the vents, "The head of security told me a mouse could barely fit through those vents. And he reiterated that other details "didn't add up" either. Barnes's Facebook post questioned Kim's credibility by referring to Kim's conviction of a felony charge of theft by swindle in St.

Paul, Minnesota, in Barnes, who says he works with federal law enforcement doing Breaking Out's work, told me he's heard behind the scenes that officials are investigating Kim's claims. I called the Department of Justice and asked whether they had any open investigations involving Chong Kim or her accusations that federal agents are involved in domestic sex trafficking. Send an e-mail officially requesting that information, they said.

I heard nothing back. The FBI said the same thing, adding that I needed to know which field office would be involved. I asked Barnes; he didn't know. Again I e-mailed a request, and again I heard nothing. Both agencies' representatives on the phone sounded confused. They asked me whether Kim had filed any charges related to a domestic sex-trafficking ring or just made vague accusations.

Well, I guess just vague accusations, I said, suddenly feeling very foolish. I told him I knew my request sounded strange. He told me that the attorney general in Texas handles only civil cases, "unless a DA asks us specifically to take something. You need more specific information before you pursue it. Otherwise, you're in the dark.

D id Eden director Megan Griffiths do this same research only to find herself equally confounded? There's evidence that Kim has told her story in different ways at different times, but what does that mean? Did she slowly "come out" as a survivor, at first telling one version of what happened and gradually revealing more? Is an earlier version closer to the truth, or is the truth somewhere in between? Which truth did people most want to hear from her, whether they were academics or fellow survivors or sex workers or activists or Christians crusading against trafficking?

Why are people on the right and the left so happy to join together on the issue of sex trafficking when they can agree on absolutely nothing else? Why does Kim have to be a fraud or a saint? What if she is a fraud for a good cause? False narratives have been known to get the job done before—if you want to, say, invade Iraq. When Barnes posted his accusations, the internet exploded. Facebook and Twitter lit up with partisans. People lined up to debate the substance of a series of events that can never, ever be reviewed or actually revealed.

The events of Kim's life are only known—and maybe even then, only incompletely understood—by those who were actually present for them. Legal action and investigations will settle nothing of the small truth of one woman's life. And as for big truths, pretend you're in a class, assigned a reading comprehension test. The story you have to read is the script of Eden , this article, and all of Kim's writings and interviews.

Using textual evidence, prove the size and scope of domestic sex trafficking in the United States. Then propose useful policies based on your findings. Trauma leads to PTSD, Gomez emphasized, and "a lot of what comes from that is memory loss, so the story is not always going to be the same exactly, because you remember things the next time that you may not have remembered before.

But "I personally have never met anybody who's in that situation that she was in. I personally have never heard of that happening to anybody. I mean, the real story that people need to know is Or it could be a gang, but it's normally not that sophisticated. And I'm wondering why there was no, well, was anybody ever prosecuted? What's important to her, she said, is focusing on "domestic trafficking as it really is, which isn't that.

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It's still fair to ask whether Seattle director Griffiths vetted Kim's story before tagging Eden "based on a true story. But Griffiths did indicate, in her taped interview with HuffPost Live, that she prepared for Eden by "researching not only Chong's story but other survivors' stories and non-survivors' stories and trying to find out what the realities of these kinds of situations are so we could depict them in the movie. I e-mailed Griffiths after Barnes published his accusations. I told her I wanted to talk to her, to ask whether she still believed Eden was substantially true, and why.

If she didn't want to talk specifics, I told her, I just wanted to discuss what risks and responsibilities she thinks artists take on with biographical and historical material—and whether she still feels it's worth it. I wanted to know whether she was drawn to the story because she believed it was true, or whether she believed the story was true because she was drawn to it. Asked not to comment by whom? I posed this question, but Griffiths went silent.

Human trafficking: 'I was forced into prostitution'

So all we have to go on is her June tweet, that the news of Barnes's accusations "came as a shock" and that she was "deeply concerned" about it. What is the allure of "based on a true story," anyway? The only answer from the Eden crew that I'm able to dig up in all the interviews is a side note made by Colin Plank, the producer, in his "Production Notes from Inside Eden.

But deep in the notes, Plank wrote, "We wanted to make a great and important film about difficult subject matter; but in the world of distribution, that can make it hard to sell. Thus, it is important to know who your audience will be for your film before you make it. I chose Eden because I believe a narrative is a much more effective way to get people to talk about the insidious problem of human trafficking.

Presumably, he meant that "a narrative is a much more effective way" than a documentary "to get people to talk. I attempted to ask two Seattle documentarians about this, Elisa Haradon and Gabriel Miller, who for more than two years have been working on a documentary film that started out as a general portrait of Seattle's red-light district on Aurora Avenue. Megan had a troubled upbringing.

Her parents divorced when she was four and both her father and mother had problems with alcohol. Her childhood was chaotic and punctuated by fights: So when, on the first night away in a local bar in a seaside town, Megan caught the eye of Jak, a handsome Albanian man, and he started paying her attention, she responded.

Within days she felt herself to be in love. Within weeks Megan had persuaded her mother not to return to England and had set up house with her new boyfriend. In the book Megan recounts how her mother had also struck up a relationship with a local bar owner. Greece seemed to offer them both the opportunity to start again. Her mother moved in with the bar owner; Megan moved in with Jak. Jak, dark-haired and dark-eyed, was attentive and kind at first, despite the language barrier which meant that neither of them could communicate beyond a few words. By her own admission, Megan was deeply naive.

I loved him and he loved me pretty much instantly. He was charming, really. He started talking about how his mother was ill with cancer and how the family needed more money for treatment.

He told Megan he dreamed of having children with her, of living in a nice, big house in the future. Megan agreed, even though it meant leaving her mother behind. It was only when Jak gave her a cardboard box and deposited her outside an office building telling her to deliver it to a man on the top floor that she began to suspect something was awry: A man opened the door to her, took her into a small, windowless room with a single bed.

At the foot of the bed was a video camera mounted on a tripod. He was filming it and I was paralysed, because I was really shocked. As Megan was leaving, she saw the cardboard box she had been asked to deliver contained several packets of condoms. It was the first time she had ever had sex.

What, I wonder, would the Megan sitting in front of me today say to that scared teenage version of herself if she had the chance? He made her think that escort work was the only way to raise enough money for them to be together. He would shower her with affection one minute and, the next, humiliate her in public. If she said she wanted to stop, he would threaten to kill her mother. Gradually her confidence was eroded to the point of no return. She was utterly reliant on Jak and his network of underworld associates for everything: On one particular night, she says she had sex with men before being violently sick.

The owner of that brothel closed up early when he saw how ill she was. She was in a mental fog for much of it. She was ill — underweight and exhausted. She contracted syphilis and salmonella six times.