A Sex Trafficking Survivor’s Take On The Diddy Trials

Medium | Archive.ph

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So, I can’t seem to get away from the news headlines this week. As everyone has found out, Diddy has gotten arrested for sex trafficking — among a litany of other charges.

For those who are not in the know, several major revelations came out:

    He’s facing three federal charges.

    Diddy had an entire criminal enterprise called “The Enterprise” to bring sex workers to the parties, lure children, drug victims, and silence people.

    Many major names in Hollywood, including Justin Bieber, attended his “Freak Offs,” which were days-long sex parties involving trafficked people. The Freak Offs were recorded so that people would remain silent.

    FBI raids revealed thousands of gallons of baby oil, sex toys, et cetera.

As someone who was trafficked, I really wanna hug Justin Bieber right now. Watching this has been very hard for me, but I feel like there’s a lot of nuance that’s being lost in the news headlines.

I have not been to any of Diddy’s parties. However, I was a product sold at parties like his, and I have actively sat down with FBI investigators to help put my traffickers behind bars.

What I’m saying is that I’ve seen similar shit. Here’s what I don’t think is being discussed enough in the news about Diddy…

We are not talking about the grooming that happened with Diddy’s sex trafficking.

I’m about to drop a truth bomb that’s not very comforting: not all sex trafficking is violent. There. I said it. A lot of traffickers do not actually use violence to get their victims to do what they want them to do.

A lot of them, including myself at the start, were tricked, pressured, or drugged into it. It was when we stepped out of line when we were way too deep in, that violence could have been used.

And then, we’d thank them for the privilege of being beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and occasionally waterboarded. We thought if they beat us, they care enough about us to hit us.

Most of the time, the sheer pressure, gaslighting, drugging, and mindfuckery left us slaves brainwashed into thinking this was normal. We thought it was fine, that we were loved.

Sure, we were sold at auctions, had blood vials drawn, people vanished, and I was sent to buy 40-packs of condoms every two days when I was there, but I believed that my traffickers were my friends.

For a while, I thought this was normal. I thought that this was a sign I was cool. I’ve said this before, but if my traffickers told us slaves the sky was green, we would have all marveled that the sky suddenly turned green.