I bet you’ve seen the Walt Disney movie “Pretty Woman,” starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. It’s a classic rags-to-riches romance story with a twist: a golden-hearted prostitute is picked up by a handsome, wealthy, but lonely businessman. But in reality, if Gere’s character had been Black, he would have been charged with sex trafficking and Roberts’ Viviane seen as his helpless victim.
And today, Black men, particularly those who consort with white women, are being charged with sex trafficking in numbers that have not been seen since the height of the War on Drugs of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Two More Than Our Crimes network members are among them.
Attorney Kathleen Williamson (University of Arizona) and Anthropology Professor Anthony Marcus (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) have extensively researched this issue. In their 2017 book, “Third Party Sex Work and Pimps in the Age of Anti-Trafficking,” they analyze the high-profile coverage of racially selective arrests, prosecutions and sentencing. They found that Blacks (who make up 13% of the U.S. population) constitute 37% of drug arrests, 42% of death row prisoners, and 40% percent of incarcerated people overall.
You think that sounds bad? According to the National Institute of Justice, Blacks account for 62% of sex-trafficking prosecutions. Dig a little more, and another pattern emerges: leniency for madams and female sex workers, and convictions for their Black pimps and boyfriends. Williamson and Marcus conclude that “substandard expert witness testimony has combined with popular racist stereotypes and tropes from hip hop culture and pulp fiction mythology.”
Consider the case of one of our network members, Anthony Willoughby. To support the testimony of the young female accuser, the government’s expert witness, an FBI agent, cited items found in a home raid: pictures of him dressed in flashy clothing and jewelry, rap lyrics in his in-home recording studio, a sticker with the word PIMP attached to a music sampler, a collection of Donald Goings’ novels, an adult magazine featuring white women, and five, large, custom rim wheels and tires. According to the agent, these items are synonymous with the life of a sex trafficker.
Long history of sexualizing Black men
The “White Damsel in Distress” narrative has been used against Black men since the founding of America. It was often used to support false charges of rape, kidnapping and sexual harassment, resulting in beatings, lynchings and lifelong prison sentences. Think of:
- The destruction of the aboriginal people of K’Gari Island, after Eliza Fraser and her husband shipwrecked on the strip of land in 1836 and she accused them of cannibalism and brutality. Much historical research later debunked her claims – but not until after the indigenous people were largely wiped out.
- The hanging of 32-year old Rubin Stacy in 1935 after he was kidnapped from deputies by a masked mob, which accused him of attacking a white woman.
- The lynching of Lint Shaw just a few months later, after he allegedly assaulted a white woman.
- The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 after the young white woman Carolyn Donham accused him of whistling at and accosting her.
Emmett Till
More recently, remember the 2020 case of Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was reported to NYC police by a white woman who claimed he was “threatening” her. If he hadn’t recorded their conversation on his cell phone, police and press would likely have believed her version of events.
“There’s no question that human [including sex] trafficking in the United States is a serious problem. Even so, our anti-trafficking criminal laws are written in such a way that makes it far more likely that young Black men are prosecuted significantly more than other perpetrators,” writes Vanessa Bouché, associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University and the principal investigator for HumanTraffickingData.org.
Social phobias about sex work
“Trafficking, in practice, is less a clear-cut crime than a call to moral panic,” writes Noah Berlatsky, a contributor to The Atlantic. “The vagueness of the definition allows or even encourages governments, organizations and researchers to claim that there are tens of millions of trafficking victims worldwide on the basis of little more than hyperbolic guesses.”
The phrase “sex trafficking” sounds monstrous. One researcher quoted by Williams and Marcus who requested to remain anonymous stated, “It’s an issue no one wants to talk about. If you know anyone who’s ever been accused of it, you run the other direction.”
Alison Bass, author of Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, says the term “sex trafficking” was originally coined to refer to the migration of women from the collapsing Soviet Union to the United States. However it has morphed to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—including when the woman consented. In fact, Bass says, many times when women are apprehended in such cases, law enforcement officers find out they are sex workers. The women are then induced to cooperate against the men involved in exchange for monetary and other incentives.
In the case of Taquarius Ford, his co-defendant was an adult film star and explicit nude model before they met. Court documents showed she was a Ukrainian migrant working in the United States, and she stated on the record that they were in love. Nevertheless, she was later persuaded to testify against him to keep her family from being deported. Note that the females who accused Willoughby and Rahim McIntyre (see below), as well as Ford’s co-defendant, were sex workers. After the trials, they went back to prostitution, either independently or with new pimps. (The Willoughby case is a good example of how media accounts and Department of Justice announcements are sensationalized and incomplete. They depict as totally innocent the 16-year-old girl who accused Willoughby of trafficking. Yet a review of at the court records shows that she was a prostitute before becoming involved with Willoughby and went back to that work after the proceedings were complete. That evidence, however, was not presented at trial by Willoughby’s white lawyer.)
Note that both Willoughby and Ford make it clear that they are not claiming that all accusations of sexual abuse against Black men are lies or distortions. And despite the fact that they deny the trafficking allegations leveraged against them, they regret many aspects of their former lifestyle. However, they also believe it is clear, from what they have seen and based on the few public investigations of the use of the human/sex trafficking charge, that it is being grossly misapplied.
Is this justice?
In the majority of these federal trials, many of the alleged victims, along with most jury members, are white. Consider the case of United States v. Rahim McIntyre. Eleven of the 12 members of his jury were white and not one of them were residents of his hometown, Philadelphia.
Years ago, someone cited for pimping and pandering could expect a virtual slap on the wrist. However, as the charge of sex trafficking has gained popularity, that has changed dramatically. Ford is serving a sentence of 33 years. Willoughby is incarcerated for 30.
Most of these Black men did not lock women in basements and strip them of their possessions and passports. They didn’t smuggle them across the border or sell them into terrorist organizations. They are merely domestic panderers and low-level pimps, some of whom were romantically involved with the sex workers involved. Yet they end up spending decades in prison, while their female co-conspirators go free. This is not equal justice under the law.
Our society’s irrational villainizing of any charge remotely sex-related stifles any serious examination of the misuse of sex-trafficking charges. People who have committed murder often receive lesser sentences. It’s time to shine a light on this glaring lack of justice.
