Ending Human Trafficking Podcast

Dr. Douglas Gilmer joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore how 30 years of carrying the memory of arresting a child who needed help, not handcuffs, drove his commitment to building true collaboration in anti-trafficking work. DR. DOUGLAS GILMER Dr. Douglas Gilmer is a 35-year law enforcement veteran and proud military veteran who retired from the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations in August 2024 after 25 years of federal service. In his final role, he served as Senior Law Enforcement Advisor at the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking in Washington, DC. His journey in this field began in 1993 when, as a Charlotte police officer, he encountered a 14-year-old girl being sold for sex. Throughout his federal career, Doug worked and supervised numerous human trafficking cases involving both sex and labor trafficking, domestic and international victims, and adults and minors. He also served as Chief of the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center. After retiring, Doug founded Resolved Strategies LLC, a global justice solutions group dedicated to building collaborations and developing solutions to counter human trafficking. He holds a PhD in Organizational Leadership, with research focused on multidisciplinary collaboration in anti-trafficking work. In January 2025, Doug received the William Wilberforce Lifetime Achievement Award. KEY POINTS * Dr. Gilmer’s research on multidisciplinary teams revealed that the MDT construct is being widely adopted because the old ways of responding to trafficking simply didn’t work, and both law enforcement and service providers report more positive attitudes toward each other than commonly assumed. * Many social workers are taught in school and by veteran colleagues not to trust law enforcement, creating initial skepticism that dissolves once they experience collaborative work and realize officers genuinely care about victims and wouldn’t stay in this demanding field otherwise. * The distinction between cooperation and collaboration is critical: cooperation involves helping someone achieve their goal with selfish motivation (“I” or “me”), while true collaboration means working together toward shared goals where your mission becomes mine and mine becomes yours (“we”). * Law enforcement agencies are shifting their metrics of success, with HSI agents now receiving the same recognition for identifying and recovering a victim as they do for making an arrest, reflecting a genuinely victim-centered approach. * Human trafficking should be approached as a “crime of crimes” with multiple prosecution pathways including money laundering, child sexual abuse material, and other charges that can achieve justice while protecting victims from the retraumatization of testifying. * After 30 years of carrying guilt over arresting a 14-year-old trafficking victim in 1993, Dr. Gilmer found closure when a survivor told him at a conference: “You have to learn to forgive yourself for the things you did before you knew better.” * The current funding and grant process for anti-trafficking work fosters competition between organizations rather than collaboration, creating a system where groups work against each other instead of for each other despite shared goals. * Years later, a 16-year-old victim told Dr. Gilmer that after being trafficked since age 13, his response was “the first time law enforcement has ever tried to help me,” illustrating how far the field has progressed in adopting trauma-informed, victim-centered approaches. RESOURCES * Resolve Strategies [https://www.resolvedstrategies.com/] TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Douglas Gilmer: I can remember handcuffing her, putting her in the back of my patrol car, thinking to myself, if this is the best we can do, why are we doing this? [00:00:15] Sandie Morgan: Our guest today was driven by 30 years of carrying the memory of arresting a child who needed help, not handcuffs. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan with Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice, and our guest today is Dr. Doug Gilmer. He’s a 35 year law enforcement veteran, recently retired from Homeland Security Investigations and now leads Resolved Strategies. [00:00:51] His focus is on building true collaboration in anti-trafficking work. Now, here’s our conversation. [00:01:06] Alright, Dr. Doug Gilmer, thank you so much for joining us on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. [00:01:15] Douglas Gilmer: Thank you so much. [00:01:17] Sandie Morgan: I’m excited because when I first met you, you were in HSI, but you wanted to have side conversations, and we started talking about the research you wanted to do as you were pursuing your PhD. And so let’s start there. Why did you wanna interview me? [00:01:41] Douglas Gilmer: Well, I had, I had long been a fan [00:01:47] Sandie Morgan: Okay. I can have fans. [00:01:50] Douglas Gilmer: of Dr. Morgan and was very aware of the work that you had done, and I knew that collaboration was very important to you. It was, it was evident in your work and it was evident in the work that the task force did, you know, that you helped to lead. And so you were, you were really kind of a natural fit for this project. I figured if, considering your experience and really your tenure in this field, I just knew that you would be a great, a great resource and really an expert. [00:02:25] Sandie Morgan: I’m gonna borrow that language instead of presenting myself as old an old timer in this field. I now have tenure in this field. That’s much better. So just really quickly, the highlights of your findings in that research. Can you give us a synopsis? [00:02:47] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, so really the research focused, it was qualitative research, focused on the outcomes of multidisciplinary collaboration between law enforcement and service providers encountering human trafficking. What we learned through the research is that the multidisciplinary team construct, the MDT construct, works, that people were adopting the MDT construct because the old way of doing things didn’t work, and it was proving to be more effective. We learned that contrary to what we sometimes hear, law enforcement generally has a very positive attitude towards service providers, and that service providers actually have a positive attitude or a positive opinion of law enforcement. [00:03:42] Sandie Morgan: Well hold up there because I wanna know why the myths still exists, that they’re opposing forces sometimes. [00:03:53] Douglas Gilmer: Well, I think law enforcement comes from a slightly different mindset. We’re very skeptical [00:04:02] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm. [00:04:02] Douglas Gilmer: early on until we get to know somebody, until we learn to trust people. And then there was a theme that developed when talking to service providers, especially those who had degrees in social work that were, you know, licensed clinical social work workers, LMSW, that kind of thing. And what they shared was that they were really kind of taught from the beginning not to trust law enforcement when they were in school. They were told, don’t trust law enforcement. You can’t trust law enforcement. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your clients. All they care about is making a case. And then when they got out and they went to work and they were being trained, the veterans were telling them, you can’t trust law enforcement. Don’t trust law enforcement. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your clients. They only care about making a case. So they said, we went into this with perceptions based upon what we had been taught and what we had been told we couldn’t trust law enforcement. And they said, but you know, once we, so we were very skeptical when we became part of this MDT or this collaboration. But what we actually found was that law enforcement really did care [00:05:27] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. [00:05:27] Douglas Gilmer: that they wouldn’t be there doing this work if they didn’t care. You typically don’t choose this line of work. This line of work sometimes I think chooses you. It’s a passion, it’s a calling [00:05:38] Sandie Morgan: Yeah. [00:05:39] Douglas Gilmer: right? And so the people that are there and the people that stick with it, I think are truly committed. [00:05:47] Sandie Morgan: That really reflects my experience because when I first started working with law enforcement at the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, my boss was Derek Marsh. And as the law enforcement co-chair of our task force, he trained me. And the words you used, from the get go trust was a big part of how he trained me. He made sure that I understood his job was to make sure everybody at the scene was safe. And I knew it was dangerous. I knew the traffickers had guns. I knew that I did not have the situational awareness to manage that. Now, I was a nurse. I still am a nurse, and I knew how to provide victim care, and he trusted my expertise. And so we developed a very strong collaboration. So I think trust is definitely part of that, and we are erasing that myth and finding out that we have common goals that are survivor-centered and justice focused. So let’s talk a little bit more about how your career was shaped by encountering human trafficking. I always remember my first case, we didn’t even have the language of human trafficking. I admitted a 14-year-old boy at two o’clock in the morning and his family members had been selling him. My brain could not wrap itself around that. What was your moment of clarity? And maybe we can use your word calling. [00:07:54] Douglas Gilmer: I think for me it began there, there were a couple of events. The first one was in 1993. And so this was before we had the TVPA, before we had really modern human trafficking legislation. This was before really we had CACs across the country. [00:08:19] Sandie Morgan: Define C. A. C for my listeners. [00:08:22] Douglas Gilmer: Child advocacy center. [00:08:24] Sandie Morgan: Okay. [00:08:24] Douglas Gilmer: And I encountered a 14-year-old girl on a street in Charlotte, North Carolina who had propositioned an undercover vice detective [00:08:41] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. [00:08:42] Douglas Gilmer: and I was there to support their operation. And this is actually a very difficult story for me to tell. I had to arrest that 14-year-old girl and charge her with prostitution, and I can remember handcuffing her, putting her in the back of my patrol car, thinking to myself, if this is the best we can do, why are we doing this? And to be honest, Dr. Morgan, I have dealt with so much guilt and shame since 1993 over that incident. But you know, I did what I was told to do. I did what the law told me to do. I did what I knew to do in 1993. And actually it wasn’t until just recently, a few months ago, I actually, I had to tell this story in front of a room of a couple of hundred survivors and it was very, very difficult for me to tell this story. And I had no idea what the reaction was gonna be. But afterwards, someone came up to me and gave me a hug and said, it’s okay. You have to learn to forgive yourself for the things you did before you knew better. And that was a, that was kind of like a big closing chapter for me in that story. But then even more recently, you know, back, I guess about eight years ago now, there was another girl who was 16, who had been trafficked. Just a horrible, a horrible story. The things that had happened to her. And I just remember at the end of that, end of that evening, you know, getting her to a safe space, really looking out for her needs. And as I was getting ready to leave, she turned to me and she said, Mr. Doug. And I said yes, and she said, I want you to know that this has been happening to me since I was 13 years old, and this is the first time law enforcement has ever tried to help me. [00:11:44] Sandie Morgan: It’s a new day and what that survivor advocate said to you. Until you knew better. I think that until you knew better is now in the field of law enforcement. And that’s a great segue for us to talk about your new organization. What’s the name of it? [00:12:12] Douglas Gilmer: Resolved Strategies [00:12:13] Sandie Morgan: Oh, it’s, it’s on your shirt. I love that we’re doing this video, Resolved Strategies. So tell us how that is going to change the landscape. [00:12:25] Douglas Gilmer: So, you know, the term, I think we all pretty much know what strategies are, but the term resolved according to the dictionary means to be firmly determined to do something. [00:12:36] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. [00:12:37] Douglas Gilmer: That’s the tech, that’s, [00:12:38] Sandie Morgan: My mother said that was stubborn. [00:12:41] Douglas Gilmer: It could be that too. And but what I have found now over 30 years in this field is that there are a lot of people, there are a lot of organizations, there are a lot of agencies that all say, we are firmly determined to do something about this issue, but they don’t know what they’re doing. And when I talk to some of these organizations, sometimes they can’t even tell you why. They can, they can tell you big picture. They can say, well, we are, we are determined to end the scourge of human trafficking globally. And my answer is generally great. So is everybody, [00:13:34] Sandie Morgan: Me too. [00:13:35] Douglas Gilmer: Why are you doing this? [00:13:36] Yeah, right. Why are, but why are you doing this? And they can’t identify a mission. They can’t identify their purpose. They can’t identify their core values as an organization. And a lot of them don’t understand how to truly collaborate. And if you can’t do those things, if you can’t, if you can’t identify who you are, why you’re doing what you’re doing, what those things are that mean most to you and you can’t effectively work with other people, collaborate, not cooperate, collaborate with other people. The best you’re going to do is move in circles. You’re never gonna, you’re never gonna move forward. You’re gonna be like a ship without a rudder, or a rudder stuck in one direction, and you’re just gonna keep going around and around. And I don’t, I don’t want that, I want organizations to succeed in what they’re doing. [00:14:27] Sandie Morgan: Help us understand why you’re delineating between cooperation and collaboration. [00:14:36] Douglas Gilmer: So cooperation at its core has a selfish motivation, not necessarily selfish in a negative term, right? The example I often use, if my cows get out of my fence on my farm and I call down the road to my neighbor who doesn’t own my cows, but I say, Hey, can you come down here and help me get my cows back in the fence? That’s cooperation. He’s coming to help me achieve my goal or my purpose, which is getting my cows in the fence. Right? He doesn’t have a stake in my cows, but I do. And so there’s kind of a selfish motivation that goes along with cooperation. When I ask, when we talk about cooperation, we’re really talking about I or me. Collaboration on the other hand is about we. It’s about working with others to achieve a shared goal or shared purpose where your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals, or working together in shared purpose. [00:15:48] Sandie Morgan: I like that. Okay, so resolved strategies, we’re determined and collaboration is a key piece of the strategy. What kind of reach do you have with Resolved Strategies? [00:16:08] Douglas Gilmer: Well, define reach. [00:16:10] Sandie Morgan: Well, I just, I’m like kind of inching towards the international aspect of your approach because one of the problems that I’ve identified is when, for instance, I think in one report early on when I was task force administrator, we identified victims from 29 countries in one county. So having cultural knowledge, cultural humility, linguistic resources, that international component, we have jurisdictional boundaries. The traffickers do not. [00:16:56] Douglas Gilmer: Correct. [00:16:57] Sandie Morgan: So how are we building international collaboration? [00:17:04] Douglas Gilmer: So I think well, and that’s, that’s an important aspect of working collaboratively and working in an MDT environment because you bring that cultural relevancy, you know, into that environment, hopefully, you’re, you know, you’re doing that. Granted most of my work, not all of it, but most of my work is domestic, you know, working, you know, working here in the United States. But I know we are, you know, just putting my DHS hat back on my HSI hat and having retired out of the center for countering human trafficking in DC, I know that we have been pushing collaboration at the international level as well, and doing vast amounts of training overseas to train our foreign partners. And also working, you know, because HSI has 80 plus international offices around the world, and so, you know, trying to get, you know, those offices on board with their foreign partners as well, you know, to work collaboratively on these cases that might involve, you know, international, you know, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and that kind of thing. And really continuing to push, you know, being victim centered and trauma informed, which is a policy of HSI. [00:18:42] Sandie Morgan: Well, and it’s, that policy comes with language that helps us understand, that helps us understand our common goals. And in my experience with law enforcement training overseas, I think we need to figure out how to adjust how we label it, because we don’t want to come across as, oh, we know how to do this, and we’re gonna teach you [00:19:12] What I’ve discovered in my international work with law enforcement that if we want to be better collaborators, we have to figure out how to have common language. So that takes a two-way street. [00:19:31] So they’re training us on their language, they may, they won’t call it necessarily human trafficking. They may call it THB, trafficking of a human being. Depends on what country you’re in. And when we’re talking about victim centered, it may sound differently in a different context. So our collaboration in convening a training may actually be a cultural exchange of one agency with another, so that we can communicate well and understand each other for better collaboration. [00:20:19] Douglas Gilmer: Absolutely, and I think that would benefit everybody if we did maybe more cultural exchange. So for instance, I always thought it would’ve been really cool to go spend a month over in the UK for instance, working with the Met Police in London or, you know, Scotland or somewhere working with authorities there investigating human trafficking because not only their laws are different, but their authorities are also different. So there are things that we are allowed to do in the United States that they’re not allowed to do there, vice versa. And I think that, I think that you can learn something, you know, by working in different cultures and different areas where they have different laws. Because I think it really kind of forces you to come back and think outside the box. [00:21:27] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. Oh, that’s helpful. So when I was prepping for this interview, I looked at the title of your workshop that you did at the Attorney General’s Conference in Arlington, Virginia recently, and the title of the workshop really inspired my conversation with you today, and I’m gonna read it here. Your workshop was titled Shared Mission, [00:21:58] Shared Measures, Collaborating for Survivor Stability, Accountability, and Dignity. So the part that caught my attention was shared measures. One of the things people have said to me with my fascination with collaboration is how do you measure collaboration? And I’ve probably done a podcast on that, so I’m not gonna use your time, but I want to know how you see shared measures and their role in the trust building we started off this conversation with. [00:22:40] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, I think it goes back to, you know, when you’re truly collaborating, your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals. We may have different objectives. We may have different, different roles within that environment, within that MDT, that task force. But we’re all working toward the same, the same end goal. It was interesting in my research that when I asked about how, how do you measure success? How do you measure outcomes, law enforcement overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly said, success is measured by victim stability, which I thought, wow, that’s interesting. ‘Cause I would’ve [00:23:39] Sandie Morgan: That sounds like the social worker. [00:23:42] Douglas Gilmer: The social workers, although their number one answer was still victim stability. A very close second was the number of cases and prosecutions, far outseeding, exceeding the law enforcement response. So, which I thought was interesting, but it also goes back to if you’re truly collaborative and you truly have shared purpose as an organization, as a task force, then your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals. And I think we recognize that if we’re doing our job effectively as law enforcement, then we’re going to, we’re gonna help provide victim stability. If the victim services folks, the advocates, the social workers, whomever, if they’re doing their job right, and we’re truly collaborative, then it’s gonna help us ultimately make, you know, better prosecutions. [00:24:49] Sandie Morgan: So I’m gonna kind of play devil’s advocate here. I, under the Enhanced Collaborative Model here in the US, did evaluation for three different task forces all in California. I regularly interviewed law enforcement and as I did, I tried to find the ways where our goals overlapped, and they did, and there were those [00:25:23] who made a way forward that didn’t necessarily fit their paradigm for reporting, because if you are in the police department and you go out and you spend all these hours and then you don’t have any charges, you don’t have anything that will stick, your paperwork doesn’t support a more law enforcement heavy criminal justice [00:25:53] output, which outputs and outcomes are different. So our outcomes can be shared. But promotions and rotations, all of this, is often based on outputs for a particular officer and I think one of the areas of weakness from a collaborative perspective is when the rest of the team doesn’t understand the requirements of being a [00:26:29] police officer. You have to track if you’re gonna give tickets for people running stop signs or red lights. How many did you cite? And if you are picking up people who are breaking the law, and now we’re talking a lot about forced criminality in human trafficking, but now you don’t charge them. [00:26:55] Now you get victim services. How are we going to change the way that we measure an officer’s success through output? I think that’s the next big question. [00:27:11] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, so I think that, I think that there is a growing shift. So for instance, within, within HSI, an agent gets essentially the same credit or the same recognition for identifying and recovering a victim and getting that victim into services as they do if they make an arrest. [00:27:40] Sandie Morgan: Okay. [00:27:41] Douglas Gilmer: So, and that’s part, that’s part of being of that victim-centered, trauma-informed approach. You’re not always going to make a human trafficking case. And there’s been a shift in some of the more progressive agencies around the country where they’re also starting to recognize that success just isn’t on charging human trafficking, right, or Mann Act or whatever. [00:28:13] We’re not doing ourselves any good if we’re, if we’re disregarding the needs of the victim or the survivor and forsaking, forsaking them for the case or for the purpose of making a case. And so I think that there’s a little bit of a, there’s a little bit of a growing shift. It’s also why I’ve always been very passionate about teaching law enforcement around the country that human trafficking is a crime of crimes. It’s, it could be in theory, it’s possible, it could be a single scheme crime, but it never is. Right. If, [00:28:52] Sandie Morgan: Yeah. [00:28:53] Douglas Gilmer: if typically there are going to be, there’s gonna be drugs involved, there may be guns involved, there may be child sexual abuse material involved, especially if we’re talking about minor victims. There could be money laundering charges. There could be tax charges. Inevitably, if it’s a commercial enterprise, they’re not paying, they’re not paying taxes. [00:29:20] Douglas Gilmer: And so there are, and then of course, then there are things like the, you know, the Mann Act and use of a communication device in interstate commerce. [00:29:30] There are all of these different ways that we can potentially prosecute a case, and still get, still get an outcome, in which we, maybe we don’t have to put that victim on the stand. That survivor maybe, maybe they’re just not healthy enough yet. Maybe they’re not in the right place and we don’t want to, we don’t want to put them up there and risk retraumatization. [00:29:58] Sandie Morgan: Yeah, that’s right. [00:30:00] Douglas Gilmer: But we can make a money laundering case. We can make a CSAM case. Because, you know, it’s a, it’s a minor victim and he had, you know, 30 images and, you know, 10 videos that he was using to post on sites. And now suddenly just based on that, we have a, we have a life sentence. [00:30:20] Sandie Morgan: Wow. [00:30:21] Douglas Gilmer: I think that there are, there are other ways that we can, we can show outcomes, you [00:30:31] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm. [00:30:31] Douglas Gilmer: you know, for these cases. [00:30:33] Sandie Morgan: Doug, 30 years. Wow. So what gives you hope for the next 10? [00:30:41] Douglas Gilmer: I think the fact that there is, there is growing interest. I mean, there was a, there was a time where law enforcement didn’t want to do this work. We just didn’t, or we did it poorly. We weren’t working human trafficking. We were just working prostitution. And I think that there’s a, there’s a growing movement nationwide. I think when you look at law enforcement agencies, especially larger departments nationwide, medium sized departments that have the resources, they’re dedicating, you know, human trafficking units or they’re dedicating folks to task forces. So I think, I think that’s good. I think that there, there’s a growing amount of training across sectors, to include, you know, victim advocates, and especially healthcare, right? I mean, that’s a, there’s a huge need in healthcare for, you know, for better training and recognition, and we’re starting to see that. So I think the fact that we’re seeing a growing, a growing interest gives me hope. What gives me pause is the fact that there are so many people out there trying to do this work, they’re not working with one another, they’re not, they’re not truly collaborating and, you know, one of the, one of the biggest conflicts or challenges [00:32:58] that was identified, there were two big ones that were identified in the research. One was the application of roles. So people knowing their job, you know, law enforcement doing what they do and service providers doing what they do and service providers not encroaching into the lane of law enforcement and vice versa. But the other big challenge was funding. [00:32:58] Sandie Morgan: Yeah. [00:32:59] Douglas Gilmer: It wasn’t, it, it wasn’t so much that we don’t have funding. People said, we’re, we’re gonna find a way. I mean, even if our bank balance is zero, we’re gonna call around, we’re gonna dip into our personal saving, we’re gonna do what we have to do to help a victim. But it’s, it’s the grant process. It’s the funding process itself. We, we have created an environment in which we’re not fostering collaboration between organizations. We’re fostering competition. And that is driving a wedge, I think, in this field because it’s become so competitive to get funding that people are working against each other instead of working for each other. [00:33:48] Sandie Morgan: Well, now you’ve moved into a new topic that is going to have to be a follow up episode, but, wow. Yes. Collaboration gives you hope. Competition is something to pause and consider. [00:34:08] Doug, thank you so much for being with us today. [00:34:11] Douglas Gilmer: Oh, thank you, Dr. Morgan. It was, it’s, it’s an honor. It truly is. [00:34:16] Sandie Morgan: All right. [00:34:17] Thank you, Dr. Doug Gilmer. [00:34:20] This conversation about collaboration really emphasizes our shared goals where your mission becomes mine, and mine becomes yours. It changes everything about how we work together. [00:34:36] Listeners, if this conversation was meaningful for you, please check out our website, endinghhumantrafficking.org. There are tons of resources there. You can look at old episodes. You can share the episode with someone else. Help us grow our community. Connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. [00:35:03] Thanks for listening.

Carissa Phelps joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discuss an unprecedented opportunity for trafficking survivors to access $215 million in remission funds from the Backpage settlement, with a critical February 2026 deadline that could finally put survivors ahead of their traffickers for the first time in movement history. CARISSA PHELPS Carissa Phelps is a licensed attorney, author, and survivor advocate who founded Runaway Girl, Inc., a social purpose corporation providing survivor-led experiential trainings nationwide. She earned both a Juris Doctor and MBA from UCLA in 2007 and holds a B.A. in Mathematics from California State University, Fresno. As a pioneer in survivor-led advocacy, Carissa has spent nearly two decades empowering communities and amplifying survivor voices through innovative strategies. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir “Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time” and co-producer of the award-winning documentary “Carissa,” both powerful tools used worldwide for education and training on child exploitation and trafficking. KEY POINTS * The Backpage remission fund represents $215 million available to trafficking survivors who were exploited on Backpage.com (2004-2018) and CityXGuide.com (2018-2020), marking the largest victim compensation fund in trafficking history. * Unlike previous restitution processes that required court appearances, this remission process uses a third-party administrator, removing the traumatic requirement for survivors to face their traffickers in court. * The February 2, 2026 deadline creates urgency for outreach, as many survivors remain unaware of this opportunity and the application process requires documentation of trafficking and economic losses. * Survivors First community was formed as a working group under Love Never Fails Us to conduct weekly webinars, provide step-by-step guidance, and connect survivors with pro bono legal assistance and medical providers. * The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has partnered with over 15 major law firms to provide free, trauma-informed legal representation to help survivors navigate the application process. * Economic losses are calculated at federal minimum wage for a 40-hour work week during the trafficking period, though survivors can request higher amounts with proper documentation of different wages or hours. * This funding opportunity represents a chance for the anti-trafficking movement to get ahead of traffickers for the first time, particularly as new technologies like Web3 and blockchain create new frontiers for both exploitation and prevention. RESOURCES * 19 – Runaway Girl [https://endinghumantrafficking.org/19/] * Survivor’s First Community [https://www.survivorsfirst.community/] * Backpage Survivor Remission Network [https://www.backpageremissionnetwork.org/] TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Carissa Phelps: For the first time, for the first time in the history of this movement, we have an opportunity to get ahead of traffickers. [00:00:08] Sandie Morgan: Right now, $215 million is waiting for trafficking survivors. This is money that most survivors don’t even know exists. The deadline is February 2nd, 2026. The legal system is finally learned from mistakes. There’s no court required here. Victims don’t have to face their traffickers to apply for this funding. It’s a pathway to justice. [00:00:45] I am Dr. Sandie Morgan from the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University. And my guest is Carissa Phelps. [00:00:57] She’s an attorney, a survivor advocate, founder of Runaway Girl Inc. And she is leading the charge to connect survivors with the Backpage remission fund. Let’s join our conversation. [00:01:16] [00:01:22] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so Carissa Phelps, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. I have looked back at our history, and the last time you were here was 14 years ago. [00:01:37] Carissa Phelps: Oh my goodness. [00:01:38] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Listeners, if you wanna hear that interview, it’s number 19. So welcome Carissa. [00:01:46] Carissa Phelps: Thank you. Thank you, Sandie. Thanks for [00:01:48] Sandie Morgan: having me on. [00:01:49] So what have you been doing since we talked last? [00:01:53] Carissa Phelps: So, catching up, I guess. I mean that’s over a decade of work, but we built Runaway Girl as a flexible purpose corporation, so a social purpose corporation. We went out with full force. We had. Prop 35 in that timeframe to come out with a historic support for, more penalties for trafficking that saw increased prosecutions for sex trafficking, especially of minors. [00:02:18] And we’ve been in a uphill battle in terms of getting survivors into leadership positions. But that’s happening now more and more. It’s expected for survivors to not just be at the table or in the room or subject of the conversation, but to be part of the conversation in developing services and reaching victims where they’re at, and survivors where they’re at. [00:02:43] And so this has been, it’s been an exciting decade and a half. [00:02:47] Sandie Morgan: Wow. And I just am happy to report to you that the very first human trafficking victim rescued in Orange County, Shyima Hall, who was an Egyptian child, made in an upscale neighborhood, is now serving on the Global Center for Women in Justice Advisory Board. [00:03:11] Yeah, so we’re trying to practice what you are teaching us as a leading survivor advocate. So I got really excited a couple weeks ago when I saw your post about NCMEC remission, and when we’re talking about survivor-centered justice, why is that important? And for listeners just joining this conversation, NCMEC is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. [00:03:45] Carissa Phelps: So I did, I posted, my friends at NCMEC National Center for Missing Exploited Children are doing something similar to what we’ll talk about with survivors first, but we are all trying to respond to this Backpage remission, which is an historic amount of funds [00:04:01] available for survivors of trafficking that were trafficked over 20 years ago, some of them, from 2004 when Backpage was prominent, to 2018, 2004 to 2018, when backpage.com existed and served traffickers really and served buyers and. [00:04:22] Was a means of exploiting victims, rampantly all over our country, all over the world, really all over the globe. And so there were so many victims out of that website. It was finally shut down, with the help of Maggie Krell, who was at the Attorney General’s office in California and others in US Attorney in Arizona, Kevin Rapp, and like there, there were so many people that stepped up to the plate to say this was wrong. [00:04:46] this went even beyond maybe what Craigslist was doing in terms of, just, uh, catering to traffickers in, in what they were posting. So they were, assets were seized in that effort and those assets are now available to victims of trafficking. There was a settlement reached in 2024 with the company, and so some of the funds did go back to the company owners and so that that can be resolved in civil suits and other ways. [00:05:15] But this 215 million has been made available in a victim restitution fund. For victims to come forward to show that they have losses, economic losses, so lost wages, lost time that they could have been working or doing something else when they were being trafficked. And also medical costs and other costs that they would’ve incurred while being trafficked. [00:05:37] Sandie Morgan: So, Carissa, one of the things that was so inspiring when I first met you is you did a double grad program so that you have an MBA and you’re an attorney. So break this down for us. What are you talking about with remission and, asset forfeiture? Tell me about that. [00:06:01] Carissa Phelps: So anytime somebody uses their assets to commit a crime or takes or steals things from people fraudulently, their money or their assets, that those assets could be seized and forfeited to the government. [00:06:19] And if they’re prosecuted, criminally prosecuted, they first be seized and then they would be forfeited. So that happened. It happened with City X Guide in 2021. There was actually a restitution process for victims in 2021 and a $15 million fund, and nobody really learned about it. It was not as well advertised potentially, or people didn’t get the word out, and maybe because it wasn’t as large of a fund, but that $15 million, if it’s not accessed by victims, it doesn’t it, it didn’t disappear. [00:06:55] Fortunately, it’s coming into this fund. But it’s now a remission process, which is different than a restitution process. A victim restitution process is sort of during the criminal trial and before sentencing, somebody could come in and put in a restitution form and say, I’m due this money because I was a victim of this crime. [00:07:14] And the Texas, the US attorney in Texas did make that process available with the City X Guide person being prosecuted. Martono was his name. He was prosecuted. He ended up being sentenced and victims had a chance to go and to give a victim impact statement and to also apply for these funds as a restitution. [00:07:35] But what happened is that the word probably didn’t get out wide enough. There weren’t enough. There wasn’t enough support maybe for victims to get this fund in. It’s a scary thing to go to court. And ask for anything, especially if you’ve been victimized more recently. Mm-hmm. And the victimization with that was between 2018 and 2020. [00:07:54] And so you’re asking in 2021 really early stage people who are coming out of victimization to come and try to get funds. It wasn’t happening and it didn’t happen. So now when the back page settlement was reached in 2024 after a criminal conviction of one of the, one of the founders, one of the CEOs of, of that organization, there was this $215 million settlement. [00:08:20] And so these funds have now been combined by the DOJ and their money laundering department to create a process that looks similar to the one in 2021. But is run by a program, called Epic. They’re epic global, so they’re the administrator. And so now we’re not going to court to get this money. We’re basically going to a middle person between the victim and survivor and the DOJ and submitting documentation that would be proof of the trafficking, that it happened during the time period, that there’s a remission time period of 2004 to 2018. [00:08:59] 2008 for back page 2018 to 2020 for City X Guide. And so you’d have to show some sort of proof that there was some trafficking that happened during that period with those websites, sex trafficking particularly, and then also claim lost the lost wages for that time. Much like the Cal, the California has a crime victims’ compensation fund. [00:09:25] Yeah. Claim lost wages. And it would be calculated at minimum wage, federal minimum wage at that time, unless there could be a way of showing that there was a different wage amount, unless there could be a way of showing that there were different hours worked. It would be 40 hour work week. One of the things that we’re doing, we could talk about, you know, whether there’s really truly a work week when somebody’s being trafficked, right? [00:09:47] Yeah, yeah. Um, [00:09:49] Sandie Morgan: over time. But [00:09:50] Carissa Phelps: there’s, there’s this process now set up that we don’t have to go to court. We’re going to a third party administrator with documentation proving the trafficking and a lawyer doing that with a, with a survivor, with a, with a victim of, of this, which we’ll call a claimant. Now, a claimant on this form is important. [00:10:12] I think it really is important. it’s not a complicated process where you have to peer in front of court, but it’s still a lengthy application and it requires some proof, [00:10:21] Sandie Morgan: So, when we talk about being survivor centered justice, the first time there was restitution funding available, not many applied, and it’s a scary process. [00:10:38] So this particular model now. Means that the survivor doesn’t have to go back to court. That’s a big deal that recognizes it’s more trauma informed. So as I look at the information on this, the deadline is coming up February, 2026. Yeah. So what are the practical steps that survivors and our communities need to take? [00:11:08] So this doesn’t get left on the table. [00:11:11] Carissa Phelps: Thank you so much for asking that. And February 2nd, 2026. So I’m only thinking, oh my goodness. Deadline as January. January, [00:11:18] Sandie Morgan: okay. January is our [00:11:19] Carissa Phelps: deadline if you really think about it. And then you have the holidays in between. So it is a very tight deadline. it’s one of my first requests. [00:11:26] As soon as I get a meeting with the DOJ, which I anticipate we will, survivors first will be meeting with them. Is, can we get some equitable relief, some fairness here about, you know, we were looking at populations that are inaccessible. They’re in jail, they’re in hospitals, potentially they’re not, they’re incapacitated. [00:11:43] We have deceased survivors and victims. Their families have to get a state set up to make the claim. So we do have some, some fairness here about getting an extension. We don’t anticipate it. We’re not going to plan for it. We’re gonna plan for no extension and do the best we can with every application that. [00:12:02] In my case, I’m trying to do about 500 applications myself. I know other lawyers who have hundreds or thousands of them, so we’re anticipating, you know, tens of thousands potentially applications going in. this means that the funds that will be received per person may be pro rata down from what they’re requesting. [00:12:25] So we’re really encouraging everybody to request the full amount that they can legitimately request because we do anticipate if we exhaust the fund, it will be, it will be pro rata down. so yes, it, it is a lot to set up, the groups that we really need to have at the table, like you mentioned, NCMEC, NCMECS, backpage remission network.org got launched. [00:12:48] Yoda Sous, who’s over there, has been in this fight for a very long time, and I’m very happy that she’s at the table doing this. I hope you have her on a, as a guest as well, because [00:12:57] Sandie Morgan: I’ll make a note for sure. About [00:12:58] Carissa Phelps: enough, right? Mm-hmm. Um, me and Melissa Snow and others at at NCMEC are making this a priority. [00:13:04] They already work with law firms, so they have a, you know, over a dozen law firms who have committed pro bono to assist in this application process. To assist survivors and just very, very narrowly assist with the application process. And then also they have connection and relationship with people they trust in the therapy field, in the medical field. [00:13:29] And so they’re, they’re connecting those two groups up to help streamline the process of getting the applications done. Survivors First is doing it a little bit differently. And we’re doing it differently because we wanna see when survivors come in the door that they have the option to maybe even start their services. [00:13:47] Sandie Morgan: Let’s stop for a second here. Yeah. And tell me what is Survivors first and what is the agenda there? [00:13:56] Carissa Phelps: Yeah. So Survivors First is it. It is a working group that was formed other, it’s under Love Never Fails us. Love Never Fails Us, is a nonprofit. That helps to empower survivor voice. [00:14:10] So Vanessa Russell, who founded Love Never Fails us reached out to me when she heard of the deadline. I was actually on an international flight when it came out on July 31st. And she reached out to me and I just immediately went into action. I had a, me a meeting with 25 of very close friends, allies in the survivor space, um, attorneys, doctors, people who would talk to me right away. Um, from Spain [00:14:34] I had this meeting. I said, let’s, we have, we have to get this done. And so we began meeting, we planned a weekly webinar where every week, Wednesday at 1:00 PM PST, we’re getting people on air talking about. what’s going on with the application process? What’s going on with the remission process, how we can give, um, sort of step-by-step guide to victims and survivors and those who are supporting them, because not every claimant is gonna have an attorney. [00:15:02] So we know that human trafficking advocates are also gonna be helping walk survivors through this form, that some people will not have legal assistance, even though there is the pro bono legal assistance through NCMEC. We hope that everyone has legal assistance, but we don’t think everyone will end up with legal assistance. [00:15:20] So to give people sort of a guide of what to expect, even what if, what to expect even before they go and see a lawyer, if they’d like to think it through. Some people are not sure if they want to do this right? They want more information first. So we’re speaking to survivors, we’re speaking to experts. [00:15:35] We’re speaking to the providers to try to get together and share resources. And as quickly as possible, cut through the red tape and really empower all the allies and attorneys and medical providers who are out there so that we have strong claims built for this, for the claimants, for those survivors. [00:15:56] Sandie Morgan: So time is of the essence. Time, right? Time is of the essence. So if you’re listening to this conversation with Carissa, you need to share this podcast with your survivor network. Even with your anti-trafficking network and engage more survivors, because there are people that we haven’t been able to reach with this message. [00:16:23] And the internet is a common denominator for many of us. Let’s use it for good here. [00:16:31] Carissa Phelps: Yes. And that is one of our key reasons for forming, was just raising the awareness, raising the awareness. Hosting these weekly talks with survivors and then also with the providers, all about getting the information out there, lowering the barriers that exist. [00:16:46] Because some people don’t have computers. They don’t have the ability even to apply. It’s a difficult application. You can’t do it on your phone in one sitting. I’m not saying don’t do that. If that’s your only way to do it and get it done, then get it done, get it done by the deadline for certain. but I just, I really, I believe that there’s, there’s this [00:17:05] gap in understanding that this is for you. A lot of victims will think, well, I didn’t have a prosecution. I didn’t testify against the trafficker When the prosecutor asked me to, maybe I don’t have a claim. No, you still have a claim. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a claim. You can still have a claim, a valid claim if you were trafficked on this site, didn’t have to be proven in court. [00:17:27] It didn’t have to be something that you had to cooperate with law enforcement. This is not court. You’re not going to court. I do suggest trying to get attorney and attorney representation. There are some attorneys that are signing up cases for a contingency fee and even those attorneys we’re working with them. [00:17:43] I understand that model. I work under that model. So we’re working with them to help try to lower the costs that would go to survivors. It would come out of their portion. So we wanna make sure providers are available for those survivors through grant funds, through other means to come up with help for those applications to make them the strongest that they can be without incurring costs to a survivor. [00:18:06] Sandie Morgan: So how do people contact Survivors First? [00:18:11] Carissa Phelps: So SurvivorsFirst.community is our website. We’re also on Love Never fails.com. Love never fails us.com. Under their events tab, we have a webinar link there. at Survivors First dot Community, you’ll find information about the remission process, our webinar links and our resource form so that providers can sign up and share their information, tell us how they wanna be involved, tell us where they wanna be involved. [00:18:40] Tell us their background and experience. We are asking that people have at least one year, 12 months of experience when they sign up. if they’re a provider with something that is trafficking directly related to trafficking, human trafficking and training in that area. We do have some time to train people and some experts who are out there will support. [00:19:00] Specialists because we do need some specialists at times that maybe don’t have training in trafficking might be a dental issue, it might be an, an ocular or ophthalmology issue, could be a skin or dermatology issue. And we, and we, we need those experts too. Those people. To help with treatment plans, but we’d want them working alongside of somebody who has that experience. [00:19:21] Sandie Morgan: So getting this message out is important not just to the survivors, but also to our legal community. Yes. And I started thinking when you first started talking about all the survivors in my world. And how I’m going to share this with them. And now where I am starting to make my next list is all the attorneys and judges and, advocates in the legal system that will be critical for us to meet that 2nd of February deadline. [00:19:56] I’m with you. I’m gonna just say January 31st. Yeah, [00:20:00] Carissa Phelps: yeah, [00:20:00] We will also have a toolkit we’re building for survivors. So I’m working alongside Felicia Rosario, and maybe you have us both on it sometime, but, or she’s. She’s a medically trained, doctor, so she’s medically trained. [00:20:12] She has a md, she’s Dr. Rosario. She’s amazing, and she’s not able to issue the treatment plans necessarily, but she’ll work right alongside of doctors and helping them understand medical codes and right alongside survivors to help them understand how to care for themselves, what to ask for, how to advocate to get their treatment that they need, and they deserve. [00:20:33] A lot of survivors don’t, don’t necessarily understand the connection between something like an autoimmune disorder later in life and the stress that they, that they had, strangulation has come up. Things that dental issues have come up that could have been caused by trafficking or excessive drug use that was, that was forced upon them during the trafficking. [00:20:53] So all these things are things that we can address. tattoo removal, those types of. Scars, tattoos, skin infections, things like that, that would require dermatology. There’s, a [00:21:04] wonderful app that I’ll share with you as one of the links that, Dr. Shadi Kourosh has come up with that links providers who have training and trafficking and also skin related trafficking issues that are available because of her work at Harvard. [00:21:19] So there’s there. These resources are out there. That’s the exciting thing, Sandy, I don’t think 14 years ago we could have said this. No, we would’ve been scrambling in the dark for something, and I know these resources are out there. I hope that these listeners, the listeners that you have that are so faithful, the listeners that you have. [00:21:34] Will sign up on the form both on Backpage, remission network.org, and then also with Survivors First Community. This is a global message, but we really are trying to activate people locally because we know survivors if they hear this message in their own community. That it’ll be more real. We want this to be real. [00:21:54] We want it not just this to be a headline in the news they see, but something that is real and actionable. [00:21:59] Sandie Morgan: I am so excited that as the ending human trafficking podcast community, we get to be front and center to watch. As you lead this survivor-centered initiative, um, what I’d really also like to ask, just because I know we’re gonna have more conversations, but as we lead up to that after February 2nd, what are you looking for in initiatives like Survivor First and shaping the future of our anti-trafficking efforts? [00:22:39] Carissa Phelps: Well, you can, I mean, you can just give me chills right now because I mean the work that we need to do to get ahead of traffickers, like for the first time, for the first time in the history of this movement, we have an opportunity to get ahead of traffickers. If we don’t take it, it is on us. So Web3 is here, Web3 is coming. [00:23:00] It’s here. Blockchain. All this new technology is available, and it is a new frontier, a new world that if we don’t learn and become a part of, then we will have handed it over to traffickers. Once again, like we did with Web 2.0, we will have handed it over and we cannot do that. We can’t stand by while it’s done. [00:23:21] We cannot allow it to happen. We need to get educated and out in front of it. That doesn’t mean by shutting down innovation, that means by being the greatest innovators. That means by being the best innovators, let’s not wait. For people to harm our children before we create tools like Bark or tools that help to regulate their use online, their usage online, and who accesses them, right? [00:23:42] Let’s do this ahead of time. So that’s what I’m calling out to everybody, and that will be my sort of battle cry as I go forward after February 2nd. [00:23:51] Sandie Morgan: Oh my goodness. I am so inspired. I can’t wait to join your team. Before I sign off, I want you to tell me about the books in the background of your screen. [00:24:02] Carissa Phelps: Okay. So, um, in human trafficking, so I worked some of that time during our, during from 2019, I filed my first case against, 15 defendants, a whole host of hotels, motels, and then also, Craigslist. So my client was this amazing, very brave client who had been trafficked as a minor, and she stood up and to, to those individuals, to those hotels, and to the. [00:24:30] One of them being Motel six, G six, one of them being, Craigslist. And she, we fought, we fought all the way to the Ninth Circuit. And unfortunately, I’ll tell you my new book that I’m working on that’s gonna take up the next base over here is gonna be called Bad Law because I don’t think that the ninth Circuit got it right when they reviewed our case. [00:24:49] Um, there are other cases who were argued alongside of me that continue to fight. My client was, was sort of done and reached a, a resolution, that was agreeable for both parties and so I was just so proud of her for fighting. I worked for, um. Mike Papantonio and Levin Papantonio Rafferty when I was doing that, and he was writing his book in human trafficking at that time and became a huge ally and friend to the world of, of anti-trafficking. [00:25:15] He supported my work in filing multiple lawsuits, creating a whole department at Levin Papantonio Rafferty, and at his conference or their conference, really Mass Torts Made Perfect. That is in Las Vegas that reaches so many attorneys, thousands of attorneys around the world. Really. And so this has been, a fight that Levin Papantonio has been in, and I’m in their studio and this is his book. [00:25:38] Oh. So that’s what’s, what’s Behind Me. Oh, I love that. And then Michael Book, runaway Girl. And, one of my colleagues from here, from the office had a copy and brought it in. So my book that, I am so proud of, but came out in 2012, so not, not long after we had met, it was coming out. it’s due for not just an update, but also, like I said, I have a whole nother book, not just another chapter that I’ve lived in the last decade and a half. [00:26:02] So that will be the next book that will be, that’ll be the next book that I come out with, and I’m excited about. [00:26:08] Sandie Morgan: Carissa, you are an inspiring survivor leader, and I wanna be an ally and bring a community of allies to sign on. Go to your website. We’ll put all the links in our show notes for everybody. [00:26:27] Thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you. [00:26:30] Carissa Phelps: Thank you. Thank you. [00:26:32] Speaker 6: Thank you to Carissa Phelps. This episode, this conversation really showed survivor-centered justice and it’s happening right now. We can’t let that $215 million sit there unclaimed share this episode, the deadline. February 2nd, 2026. This is a wake up call for a movement beyond the deadline. How are we going to promote survivor centered justice? [00:27:07] If this is your first episode of the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, go to our website, endinghumantrafficking.org. You’ll find show notes, tons of resources [00:27:22] and of course you can listen to past episodes, for instance, Carissa Phelps was on the podcast in our first year, episode number 19, and if you’d like to help us grow the podcast, please connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. [00:27:44] Thank you for listening. [00:27:46]

Erin West joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they uncover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation targeting vulnerable people through sophisticated romance and investment scams known as pig butchering. ERIN WEST Erin West is a globally recognized expert in transnational organized crime and the founder and president of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit uniting law enforcement, industry, and everyday citizens to disrupt pig butchering scams—the world’s fastest-growing form of transnational organized crime. After 26 years as a prosecutor, including eight years on the REACT High-Tech Task Force where she became known for her relentless pursuit of cryptocurrency-enabled criminals, Erin retired to launch this cross-border fight to expose the scam economy and protect both victims and the trafficked workers forced to run these schemes. She is also the host of “Stolen,” a podcast that takes listeners inside the darkest corners of the scamdemic, where love is weaponized and billions are laundered. As a sought-after international speaker and educator, Erin continues to equip audiences worldwide to use their skills and platforms to fight back against these sophisticated criminal enterprises. KEY POINTS * Pig butchering scams are long cons that can last up to four months, involving four hours of daily texting to build the relationship victims have always wanted before stealing their life savings. * Chinese organized criminals created this crime model by repurposing casino towers in Southeast Asia during COVID, literally translating “pig butchering” as fattening up victims with love bombing before cutting their throats financially. * The scams begin with seemingly innocent outreach through wrong number texts, LinkedIn connections, or social media befriending, then quickly move to encrypted platforms like WhatsApp to conduct criminal activity without oversight. * Hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are being trafficked to Southeast Asia under false job promises, then forced to work 16 hours a day running these scams under threat of violence. * Victims of forced criminality face arrest and detention when compounds are raided because they’re treated as criminals rather than trafficking victims, creating a massive repatriation crisis. * The scale of this crime is unprecedented, with victims reporting losses of $4.9 billion in 2024 alone, representing a generation’s worth of stolen wealth from retirement and college savings accounts. * End-to-end encryption, while protective for legitimate users, is weaponized by criminals to conduct relationships and transactions away from law enforcement visibility. * Effective response requires unprecedented cross-sector collaboration between banking, law enforcement, cryptocurrency platforms, diplomacy, victim assistance, and NGOs working together rather than in silos. RESOURCES * 351 – Hidden Crimes: Fraud and its Impact on Vulnerable Communities [https://endinghumantrafficking.org/351-hidden-crimes-fraud-and-its-impact-on-vulnerable-communities/] * Operation Shamrock [https://operationshamrock.org/] * Stolen Podcast [https://operationshamrock.org/library/podcast-stolen-erin-west] TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issue, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. [00:00:23] Today, we’ll discover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation [00:00:36] I’m joined today by Erin West, founder and president of Operation Shamrock, and former prosecutor who spent 26 and a half years. Fighting high tech crimes. And now here’s our interview. [00:00:53] [00:00:54] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the podcast Erin West. I am so delighted to meet you. [00:01:02] Erin West: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m delighted to be here. [00:01:05] Sandie Morgan: It was really interesting. [00:01:07] Debbie Deem, who was on episode 351, mentioned you and she mentioned you in her context talking about pig butchering, and she had my full attention right away. And then she talked about your nonprofit. So, at the top of this interview, I wanna frame everything with what you are doing with Operation Shamrock. [00:01:37] Somehow my imagination took me to Ireland, so, tell us what that is. [00:01:44] Erin West: Sure. So I was a prosecutor for 26 and a half years, and the last three years of my career I was deluged with victims of a certain type of crime known as pig butchering. It’s a long con, it is a romance slash investment scam. And what I was seeing was that we had never seen anything like this before, we’d never seen a scale like this, and ultimately, my passion for trying to do something about it made me realize that I needed to leave my career, retire from being a prosecutor and open a nonprofit. [00:02:26] At Operation Shamrock, our mission is to educate about, mobilize against and disrupt transnational organized crime. The, the Chinese organized criminals that are, that are running this horrible crime. And so that’s what we do. [00:02:41] Sandie Morgan: So what is a long con? [00:02:44] Erin West: Yeah. You know, I think that, and a good example of a short con would be those calls that you get where you are led to believe that, your, your grandchild is in custody somewhere and you need to go put money in an ATM real quick. That’s a, that’s a deceptive trick. [00:03:01] Sandie Morgan: oh, I got a text, I got a text yesterday that said, mom, I lost my phone. Text me at this number. [00:03:12] Erin West: Yeah, [00:03:13] Sandie Morgan: like, ah, [00:03:15] Erin West: Ugh. That’s, and the fact that that happened to you yesterday shows how ubiquitous these crimes are. So, so when you ask about a long con, a long con is something where, oh my gosh. And I just got a text right now. That says hello. I’m Sophia from the Indeed Human Resources Team. We recently came across your outstanding resume. [00:03:39] That’s a job scam and it’s happening. That’s, that’s how frequently this is happening. So the long con is, is when you get one of those texts that says, Hey, I’m making ribs tonight. Can you come over and you say, oh, I think you have the wrong number. And then you start a, what can be up to four months of a relationship with someone that you met in a very random way on the internet. [00:04:03] These bad actors have tried and true techniques that they use to lure you into believing that you are in a legitimate relationship and it’s the kind of relationship that you’ve always wanted. [00:04:16] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. So I’ve done so much work in the youth prevention field, and we always call that like the Romeo Pimp, the Romance Con, those kinds of things. [00:04:31] And so those kids don’t have any big money. So why is this happening? [00:04:37] Erin West: I’ll say that the enemy is so sophisticated that they are attacking every, every demographic. And so they have, we’ve recently found out that sextortion is coming out of the very same compounds that are doing these long cons, and the enemy is willing to do anything to make, to make money. So the short amount of time it takes to get some money out of, out of younger victims, they’ll do that, but they’ll invest a longer amount of time when they know that you have a retirement account or you have funded college accounts for your kids, they will know that it’s worth the amount of time to do that [00:05:23] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so how long would a long con go? Like weeks, four months. Okay. So we’re talking regular communication. [00:05:33] Erin West: We’re talking four hours a day of texting. We are talking, we are talking that they become the relationship that that victim has always wanted. That they are the, the happy, the happily ever after. They’re selling a dream, and it takes a minute to sell a dream like that. [00:05:50] Sandie Morgan: Mm. So Debbie first mentioned pig butchering in our episode 351 when we were talking about online scams, particularly targeting senior citizens. And I think the stat she shared with us was $4.9 billion in 2024. Can you really break down what a pig butchering scam looks like, the steps, how do I begin to recognize when that’s what’s happening? [00:06:27] And how did it get a name like that? [00:06:29] Erin West: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so you’re asking all the right questions. So let, let’s start with that part first. So, I’m gonna take you back to what was happening in Southeast Asia. That’s where this is coming from, in, in COVID Times and Chinese organized criminals. And when I say that, I mean legitimate Chinese organized criminals. [00:06:48] Members of the triad, thought it would be great to build a bunch of casinos in Cambodia and lure Chinese gamblers down there and make money from gambling. And when, COVID hit and people weren’t moving, they said, well, let’s figure out another way to fill these large buildings that we have and let’s figure out another way to make money. [00:07:09] So they thought, Sha Zhu Pan, that is the Chinese term for it. It literally translates to pig butchering. And the idea is, let’s fill those towers with, with workers and have them fatten up the pig, build these love bomb relationships with victims, and then once the victims are in, let’s cut their throats and let’s take everything they have. [00:07:35] Sandie Morgan: Oh my gosh. That’s brutal. [00:07:37] Erin West: And so that’s what pig butchering really means. And it is, it is vile in so many ways. For a long time, there was a whole movement to not call it pig butchering because that was, that was cruel to victims. [00:07:50] But I think that the reason why we need to call it pig butchering is that’s what they call it, and it gets attention and it gets attention to what is a crime, the unknown crime that is killing a whole strata of our society. [00:08:07] And these people aren’t talking about it because they feel shame and embarrassment. So when we think about how a pig butchering scam works, it begins with an initial reach out. It could be one of those texts we’ve talked about, or it could be someone friending you on LinkedIn connecting with you and saying, I see that you’ve recently moved to Southern California. [00:08:30] My niece is thinking of moving there. Can you tell me what a good neighborhood is for a young woman? or something like that, that gets your attention and, and feels not at all nefarious. And you, you might think, oh, I’d like to be helpful. It could be someone befriending you in your over fifties women’s travel group on Facebook, which happened to me. [00:08:52] It could be someone on a dating app. And so what it is, is there’s this initial reach out. There’s an initial. Connection. And from there they move that connection to wherever it started, to WhatsApp or to Signal or to Telegram. Somewhere that’s end to end encrypted and over time they [00:09:11] Sandie Morgan: Wait stop that for just a second [00:09:12] Erin West: You stop me whenever you want. [00:09:14] Sandie Morgan: Okay. Because I’m like listening to this as a first timer and I’m thinking, oh, wait a minute my tech guy told me, end-to-end encryption will protect me. And now you are telling me they choose end-to-end encryption. Go back. [00:09:31] Erin West: I am so glad that you stopped me because this is important to me. I think a lot of people in this industry use a lot of buzzwords terms. They talk through stuff and, and it makes it difficult to say, wait, wait, wait. Stop. Let me, let me make sure I understand that piece. So I’m glad you stopped me. So let’s talk about end-to-end encryption. [00:09:49] End-to-end encryption is great, if you want to keep a secret. It is great if you want to send information to someone else that you don’t want anyone looking at, and that’s what these bad guys want. They want to be able to communicate you with you in a space where there’s no one looking. So, I just saw an example on Airbnb this morning where somebody was talking on Airbnb. [00:10:16] The guy wanted them to, to speak in WhatsApp. They went to WhatsApp and he started suggesting that they go on a date. So the, the point is WhatsApp is where things happen that people want to conceal. So it can be good for you. If you want to talk to your son and have him send you his checking account number in a, in a concealed way, it can be not good for you when you are getting lured into a fictitious relationship over a four month period. [00:10:48] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So pick up again from the encrypted. [00:10:54] Erin West: So then, uh, these texts come in and these texts are, always good morning. How are you? Good. Uh, have a good night. Sleep well, always, and just absolutely checking in on every aspect of your day with a genuine interest. I spoke with a victim last week who said, you know, I, lost $75,000, but I, would almost pay that for the relationship that I had. [00:11:19] We are, yeah, I see you reacting to that because it’s, it’s a lot right. [00:11:23] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm. [00:11:25] Erin West: We are living in a society where people are so desperate for a human connection, that they’re, they’re willing to trade quite a bit for that human connection. What I’ve heard other victims say is, I never felt so heard, understood, listened to. [00:11:41] The enemy is masterful in creating a very human connection that feels very, very real. [00:11:50] Sandie Morgan: So, one of the things that, in my conversation with Debbie Deem and with others is the link to human trafficking is really nebulous sometimes with this, because we’re, we’re talking about some of the same fraud techniques, but then they’re not selling the person, they’re scamming the person or fraud. Ah, wait a minute, Debbie told me not to use the word scam because it’s shame-based. Yeah, right. So I’m still [00:12:24] Erin West: We’re we’re learning [00:12:25] We’re all learning, [00:12:26] Sandie Morgan: but the idea of those casinos that were built also created a venue where forced criminality became an issue, and what I understand is luring. So it’s like this is a multi-level crime where they’re luring workers to come to a job where then it isn’t what they thought it would be, which is very typical in trafficking, and now they are forced to do the scams. And what does that forced criminality look like? [00:13:10] Erin West: It is horrifying and the worst part of this entire business in that if I take you back to Chinese organized crime building, these casino towers in Cambodia COVID hits, people aren’t moving. They decide to go to pig butchering. Well, that requires a lot of human workers. And so to do that, they started flooding Meta, with advertisements for, for jobs. [00:13:39] And at that period of time, and still today, there’s a large unemployment rate in Southeast Asia. Particularly in Africa, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But what’s happening is, they are luring people with the idea of getting a real job. And so the advertisements are very official looking. [00:14:00] They are interviewing people, they’re making them take a typing test. They have every reason to believe that they are coming to Bangkok to have a legitimate job in a live work environment where they will be able to send money home, and the level of deception is outrageous. When you think of luring a human being to leave their home and come to [00:14:24] a country that is foreign to them. When they arrive at the airport, they’re met, their passports are taken, their phones are taken, and they are driven hours on end. Some are put in boats and moved across rivers. They’re, they’re moved against their will and then they are put into a facility where they go through a guard gate with guards with AK 40 sevens, and now they’re told, no, you’re not here to do data entry [00:14:49] You are here to scam your fellow humans. You are here to make people fall in love with you and then steal all of their money and you’ll be doing this 16 hours a day and if you don’t do it, we’ll beat you and we’ll make you beat your peers and we will. I mean, the level of the level of criminality involved in making people do such a horrific task is war crimes level. [00:15:15] It’s, it’s beyond. It’s hard to stomach what I’ve heard about how they motivate people to do this to their fellow humans. It’s horrific, and the scale of it is. Unbelievable. We have never seen this level of forced criminality. And if I could go to Africa for a second, that’s where they’re really recruiting hard right now because Africans speak English. [00:15:42] They’re recruiting hard in Kenya, in Uganda, and they, and now we’ve got a whole sociological issue when you traffic hundreds of thousands of people to a different area of the globe and, and keep them in custody and make them do this work. [00:15:58] Sandie Morgan: So are they moving them from Africa to like Cambodia? [00:16:02] Erin West: That’s exactly what’s happening. And so what we know is I’m in contact with a Ugandan who’s inside a, uh, in Cambodia, and he tells me the nationalities of the people around him and their Kenyans, Ugandans, their Bangladeshi, they’re Pakistanis, they’re coming from, from countries where that country is not going to stand up and fight for them. [00:16:24] Those countries have enough on their plate without fighting to get to repatriate, people that have been stolen from them. And so it’s very intentional. It’s very, it’s very well thought out. It’s sophisticated and it’s, and most importantly it’s working and it’s working at a scale that we could not even contemplate. [00:16:44] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Wow. Okay. So the forced criminality part, when we’re talking about human trafficking, we’ve covered that in this podcast when, particularly juveniles have been engaged in delivering drugs or recruiting for the gang that’s controlling them. And now when someone is found in a facility that is doing the the scamming. [00:17:24] And creating this pig butchering scenario, instead of being rescued, they have been reportedly arrested. Talk about that. [00:17:37] Erin West: So what happens is, is these victims are lured recruited into doing this dirty business. They don’t know this. They, my Ugandan colleague said that he was working for a hundred dollars a month in an internet cafe in Uganda. [00:17:54] A fellow Ugandan came in and said, would you like to make $1,000 a month? And he his 23 years old and he thought, yeah, I think I could go abroad for six months and make more money than I’ve ever thought about. Yes, I think I would like to do that. And now he is in a compound in Cambodia, unable to get out. [00:18:13] There’s, I’ve been trying for six weeks to figure out a way to get him out of there, and I’ve, I’ve pulled every thread I can think of, and I do not have a way to get him out of there. But when we think about what happens to them in the rare occasions that they do get released. They are treated as criminals in that country because you don’t have a visa to be in this country. [00:18:39] You came in here illegally and through no fault of their own, right. So, so they came to, they came to Thailand legally because they thought they were getting a job. They get moved to other countries. the best example of this is, is the Philippines. So the Philippines is one of the few countries to actually disrupt some of these scam compounds. [00:19:03] And when they do that, now they’re left with, okay, we’ve disrupted this compound. We have 650 people. That, when you think of, when you think of like, technically about how this is gonna work, okay, so now we’ve, we’ve got 650 people, where are we gonna put them? What are we going to feed them? How are we gonna make sure they have medicine and whatever they need? [00:19:24] And then how are we gonna, how are we gonna sort out who’s a bad guy and who is a human trafficked victim? And then how are we gonna repatriate them? And it’s a massive, massive problem. And so what happens is everyone gets held as though they are a criminal until we, until they can sort stuff out. So another example is in Thailand where there was a crackdown in February of 2025 where, 5,000 people were released from Myanmar compounds. [00:19:55] I think it was 7,000. And immediately China came and got their 5,000 people. They ran seven 30 sevens down to China and down from China into Thailand and picked up their people. Brazil came and got their people other countries came and got their people and they were left with 137 Ethiopians and Ethiopia said, we are not coming to get these people. [00:20:20] We don’t have the money and we’re not doing it. So then you have 137 people who are being held. They, they, they can’t, they’re not legally allowed anywhere right now. Thailand doesn’t want them in their country. Ethiopia won’t come get them. And so what do we do? No matter how we look at this, no matter what happens in the next five years, we’re going to have a huge repatriation problem, and we are going to really see the effects of what happens when you move hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world into Southeast Asia and abuse them for five years or six years or seven. [00:20:55] Like, we don’t know how this ends. We are in the middle of it, but it, it’s not going to be good. [00:21:00] Sandie Morgan: So what is it going to take, and I know you are like, I am a huge proponent of collaboration, but what kind of cross-sector collaboration will it take to address this? [00:21:18] Erin West: Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about this and I, I know that this doesn’t end until the world stands up against this, and this doesn’t end until we bring together banking, law enforcement, crypto diplomacy, victim assistance, and NGOs. And I think what we keep seeing is different parts of those connecting and siloing the information. [00:21:44] This is not a who done it. We know who’s responsible. We know who’s behind all these, and we know that they are for the most part named, named Chinese organized criminals that we’re already familiar with. So in order to do something about that, we need to work together using every tool in our arsenal. So we need American law enforcement to indict these people and work with Interpol to get them extradited into the United States. [00:22:14] We need diplomacy, we need American diplomats on the ground in Southeast Asia really forcing their hand and limiting access to American funds — Cambodia if you continue to allow this dirty business, if you continue to allow your country to be the scam economy that is stealing a generation’s worth of wealth from the United States, we are going to make your life very difficult. [00:22:40] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so, you also mentioned banks and crypto. [00:22:45] And these are not cross sector collaborators that I’ve worked with. Uh, law enforcement, victim services, State Department, all of that. This is the bread and butter of collaboration and anti-trafficking. How do we engage with banks? And I don’t even know where to begin with crypto. [00:23:09] Erin West: So what I will say is that, banks have been coming to the table with regard to this because banks are the ones who are regulated of this whole industry. And so when I think of where the, where the issues are coming from, to me they are, are social media is, is enabling this. [00:23:30] Our banks need education to help them stop the movement of money and crypto. I think, I think crypto has visibility into where this money is going. Everybody has a piece of this. So with banks, I think it’s super important and I’ve been working to educate credit unions, banking about the gravity of the problem. [00:23:53] I think in a, in banking, everyone from, the person emptying the trash at night to the person in, in the CEO’s office needs to understand the gravity of how big this problem is. And so, it’s important to help educate them because what’s happening with banks and why banks are relevant is that our victims have to, they have to move the money and to move the money. [00:24:17] It’s been the bank’s interest generally in helping you move your money as smoothly and as quickly as you’d like it to be. And we need to help them understand that adding friction to that makes sense and that adding friction to that when we are in a scamdemic makes sense. And so that’s, that’s how our banking fits in. [00:24:40] Sandie Morgan: Okay. And we did a couple of podcasts and, listeners, I’ll find those links and put them in the show notes. [00:24:49] And we interviewed folks from Validate where they do that kind of forensic accounting to find the bad actors when we hosted a round table on the financial implications of human trafficking. Erin, this has been such a challenging conversation. There is so much more we need to learn. How do we follow you? [00:25:16] Erin West: Thank you for asking. So I, I have a website. It’s operationshamrock.org. And because it is such a challenging thing to learn, I started my own podcast and my podcast is called Stolen. It’s on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. Anywhere you get your podcasts go to Stolen with Erin West. And what it does is it breaks this down in a way that [00:25:40] it is understandable to my Aunt Terry. Everybody needs to understand what is happening out there. And so I talk to survivors of this. I talk to, police officers who engage in, in trying to fix it, and I talk to banking, so it’s a great way to stay up to date with what is happening out there. [00:25:58] Sandie Morgan: All right. What a delight to meet you now I understand Debbie Deem’s fascination with what you’re doing and commitment to partner. [00:26:10] And we will too. Thank you so much for coming today. [00:26:13] Erin West: Thank you for having me. [00:26:15] Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Erin. You opened our eyes to pig butchering scams. You made us aware that end-to-end encryption can be weaponized by criminals, not just protective for users. That changes how we think about digital safety completely. Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our website@endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. [00:27:02] And as always, thanks for listening.

Dr. Beth Lorance joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discover how a high school coach gave one of his players expensive gifts, things her mother had refused to buy, with the mom posting online asking what to do, not realizing she was witnessing grooming behavior that creates the same vulnerabilities traffickers exploit in trusted spaces throughout our communities. DR. BETH LORANCE Dr. Beth Lorance is an adjunct professor at Vanguard University, where she teaches Family Violence and has also taught Introduction to Psychology and Psychology of the Family. She earned her PsyD in Clinical Psychology and previously served as the director of Vanguard’s counseling center. In addition to her academic background, Beth is a licensed minister with the Assemblies of God, which allows her to bring both psychological expertise and theological insight into conversations about abuse, trauma, and healing. Her passion is deeply personal, rooted in her own family history of child sexual abuse, and she is committed to equipping others to use their voices to prevent abuse, protect the vulnerable, and walk alongside survivors. Beth also works to bring awareness into the church, encouraging faith communities to reflect Jesus’ response to victims and to take seriously the call to protect those who are most vulnerable. KEY POINTS * Family violence creates deep vulnerabilities by teaching children harmful lessons that love is transactional, they’re not enough, and there’s something wrong with them that they can’t overcome – wounds that become embedded in their brain chemistry when trauma happens at a young age. * Traffickers don’t create vulnerabilities but rather exploit existing wounds from family abuse, stepping into unmet needs and exploiting lessons already learned about intimacy being tied to exploitation. * Statistics reveal that 90% of abusers are known to their victims with only 10% being strangers, and 31% of traffickers are actually family members of the victim, making “stranger danger” education insufficient. * Grooming is a process of control and manipulation that builds trust, chips away boundaries, and creates dependency so victims willingly comply when lines are crossed into inappropriate behavior because they’ve been normalized to the perpetrator’s actions. * Training is essential for leaders, staff, pastors, volunteers, and teachers to recognize grooming signs like expensive gift-giving, requests for secrecy, and isolating language such as “your parents don’t understand you, but I do.” * Clear boundaries and policies are crucial, including no one-on-one supervision between adults and children, with swift consequences when policies aren’t followed to prevent grooming opportunities. * Children need to be empowered to say no even to trusted adults, with parents and leaders respecting their boundaries and teaching them about “tricky people” rather than just strangers. * Trauma-informed communities must stop asking “what’s wrong with you?” and instead listen without judgment, sitting with broken people without requiring them to change or behave in prescribed ways to receive care. * Parents should be vigilant about adults in their children’s lives, knowing what interactions look like and requiring that any adult who wants to be friends with their child must be friends with the parent first. * Breaking the cycle requires communities that believe victims, provide someone to stand up for those who can’t yet stand up for themselves, and create new family structures when biological families fail to protect. RESOURCES * 204 – Is Your Organization Trauma Informed and Why Should It Be? [https://endinghumantrafficking.org/204/] * 124 – Prevention: Trauma Informed and Transformational Schools [https://endinghumantrafficking.org/124/] TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today I’m joined by Dr. [00:00:22] Beth Lorance. She’s an adjunct professor at Vanguard and former director of Vanguard’s Counseling Center. Beth earned her PsyD in clinical psychology and is also a licensed minister. Today we’ll discover how a high school coach gave one of his players expensive gifts, things her mother had refused to buy. [00:00:49] The mom posted online asking what to do, not realizing she was witnessing grooming behavior. This same pattern creates vulnerabilities that traffickers exploit, and it’s happening in trusted spaces throughout your community. Now here’s our interview. [00:01:11] Well, Dr. Beth Lorance, I am so excited to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast today. [00:01:20] Beth Lorance: I am excited to be here. [00:01:21] Sandie Morgan: We were just chatting before I hit the record button, and we have known each other for two decades. [00:01:28] Beth Lorance: It’s been a long time. [00:01:30] Sandie Morgan: and what a deep friendship and collegiality, as I was pursuing my PhD and you were pursuing your PsyD and clinical psychology [00:01:44] and, changing off, I taught family violence. Now you teach family violence and I’m a guest in your class, and [00:01:54] Beth Lorance: I know. It’s wonderful. [00:01:56] Sandie Morgan: love it, the collegiality and just tossing things back and forth as we work together to make things better for our kids. [00:02:07] So we’re gonna talk today about the link between family violence and human trafficking. [00:02:14] And I know in my world that many of the victims of human trafficking that we’ve served right here in Orange County, California started with some kind of childhood trauma, [00:02:31] and that often happened in a family context, [00:02:35] so I would like to start with talking about how you help your students unpack the complex dynamics of abuse and how that might contribute to fostering vulnerabilities that then traffickers exploit. [00:02:59] Beth Lorance: Yeah. really when we look at family violence, what we see is that it creates all of these vulnerabilities in a person’s life. And if they don’t find healing from those vulnerabilities, if they don’t come to recognize them, if they don’t come to get over them, get over is not the right terminology, but to, um, move beyond them, [00:03:21] then they can be exploited later on in life. And we do that in my class as we talk about what family violence does for an individual. And we look at things like, the lessons that abuse teaches a person. And when a person faces trauma or abuse at a young age, they learn these lessons that they’re not enough, [00:03:42] that love is transactional, that there’s something wrong with them that they can’t overcome. And, no matter what the type of abuse is, if it’s sexual abuse or emotional abuse, neglect or physical abuse, they begin to learn these lessons. And it’s more than just a, like a lesson you would learn in school. [00:04:03] If the trauma happens at a young age, it begins to rewire your brain chemistry and it really becomes embedded in how you see the world and how you, interact with people around you. How you experience, love. You begin to confuse danger with love or attention. it will impair a person’s decision making. [00:04:25] It will increase their fear response. And all of that is because of this trauma that they experienced in their family at a young age or even at a middle age, like a adolescent, that kind of thing. And so that’s what we do in my classes. We unpack that and we look at how, that impacts a person and how we can prevent and intervene and bring healing to people that have experienced that in their lives. [00:04:52] Sandie Morgan: So let’s go and look at this from the perspective of a victim of human trafficking. [00:05:00] We often credit the traffickers at being master manipulators. They start grooming someone and three weeks later they are turning them out in a prostituted situation, [00:05:14] but that grooming seems to have started at a much younger age. Can you connect the dots for me? [00:05:24] Beth Lorance: Yeah. So there’s a couple of ways to look at that. The first is, if we look at example of a person that maybe was neglected at a young age, and so they have, they weren’t given their basic needs of life. And so they, come to see themselves as an invisible and unwanted, they don’t have their, any affection that they, needs being met. [00:05:48] those kinds of things. And they begin, they, that they begin to believe that they are not, they do not deserve to be cared for at all. and that leaves them vulnerable. So a trafficker can step right into that vulnerability and say, I can provide these unmet needs for you, but this is just what you need to do for me so that I can provide those unmet needs for you. [00:06:13] Or somebody that has experienced sexual abuse, they are taught and they learn lessons about and lies really about intimacy and relationships, and they come to believe that love is tied to exploitation. They, learn that their value is only what they can give someone else. [00:06:32] And these are wounds that are deep that a trafficker can just step right into and exploit for their own purposes. And so, when we talk about grooming, we’re not talking about a trafficker coming in and grooming somebody that comes from a family where they’ve learned they have value or they learned that they can be, [00:06:54] stand up for themselves, or they’ve learned that they have a voice. They already have these deep wounds and these lessons that they’ve learned that allow the trafficker to exploit those things. [00:07:06] Sandie Morgan: So when I am looking at this grooming process. That starts from a base of lessons learned and. Honestly, when you first started talking about lessons learned, I’m an educator and I love learning, and so hearing lessons learned in a negative context is like fingernails on a chalkboard [00:07:34] for me. Why? Our students, why are my kiddos learning lessons that are wrong? And those lessons are then deeply ingrained from the time they’re a child. [00:07:48] Whether it’s the, the violence is the first response, whether it’s the neglect. And one thing I used to teach the family violence class. I wanted to see my students’ faces when they began to understand that neglect is often the number one [00:08:12] prevalent form of abuse. [00:08:15] There are no marks. It’s all internal, but it creates a very fertile field for the kind of manipulation and coercion that traffickers use. So. [00:08:30] Thinking about, how they introduce coercion into that grooming process. What does that look like? [00:08:41] Beth Lorance: So, when we talk about grooming, we have to really, for some people, we have to define what do we mean by grooming? And it’s this idea that, um, it’s a really a process of control and manipulation that. Begins to build trust in a person. it chips away their boundaries. [00:09:00] It creates dependency so that when the line is crossed to inappropriate behavior or wanting the person to do something that’s, that’s inappropriate to trafficking somebody, They are already well willing to do that because they trust this person, they love this person, this person is meeting their needs. And they, it may confuse them, like, why is this person that loves me or that I trust wants me to do these things? But they’ve been normalized into how this person behaves. So I think of a person who, a, a groomer who is very charismatic, very gregarious, very friendly, very loving, and starts to show affection to somebody, puts their arm around them, gives them a hug, and wears down this idea that physical touch is inappropriate with a, with somebody of this age, and when they then cross the line into something. [00:09:58] inappropriate, the victim is like, oh, this is normal. This person loves me. This person is just this way with me. And because of that, they’re able to, they’re able to do what they need, what they want to do with the, with the victim. [00:10:14] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So what you’re describing feels natural [00:10:20] for, for this child or this, young person and just in the last week, we both live here in Orange County, a high school coach and a church staff member were arrested for child abuse. [00:10:36] They were entrusted communities where giving a kiddo a hug or something is, it feels okay. Right? [00:10:46] So talk to me about our fixation on Stranger Danger and not understanding how we protect our kids in, in our trusted communities. [00:11:01] And I’m using air quotes. [00:11:03] Beth Lorance: Yeah. Well, Perpetrators of abuse can be anywhere. they, they can be coaches, like you mentioned. They can be teachers, they can be, people in your church, your pastors, your lay leaders. They can be a close family friend. Really what we’re finding now, statistics show the CDC has come out with statistics that [00:11:23] say the 90% of abusers are known to their victims, and only 10% are actually strangers. and then when we look at trafficking specifically, the US State Department came out with a statistic that said 31% of tracker traffickers are actually family members of the victim. And when we, when we look at that, we’re looking at people that you are in your everyday life, that know your family, that know your parents, and we’re not warning our children how, or teaching our children how to stay safe from them. [00:12:00] And we’re not. being vigilant when we look at interactions between these quote unquote trusted individuals versus strangers out there, and I like to say, you know, when I was a kid, we were taught stranger danger in school, you see a stranger and you run away, you yell, you do all these things. What I teach my kids is we need to be worried about tricky people. [00:12:26] And tricky people are people that try to trick you into doing something that is wrong or that you don’t wanna do. And, it can look like a variety of things. It can look like saying, let’s keep this a secret from your mom. You know, we’re gonna have this special moment that we keep a secret from her. [00:12:45] Here’s, here’s a lot of gifts, giving gifts to the child or the young adult and saying, oh, but don’t tell anybody about that I’m giving you this gift. They won’t understand or saying to a child, your, or a teenager, your mom doesn’t understand you, your dad doesn’t understand you, but I understand you. So you can tell me your secrets and I will understand what you’re going through and be here for you. And when we’re more vigilant about adults in our children’s lives that are doing those kinds of things, we can begin to protect them from groomers and things like this. [00:13:20] Sandie Morgan: So when I was teaching that class, you were my guest [00:13:26] and, I remember talking to you about one of my students who wasn’t able to rejoin her family for Christmas because her abuser was a relative who would be at the holiday table. Talk about what happens when this strikes a family unit. [00:13:53] Beth Lorance: Well, this really, [00:13:54] Hits into my personal story and I come from a family that has a history of family violence. This is why I am passionate about this topic and I so enjoy teaching the class family violence that I teach. And I came from a family that, from the outside it looked very perfect. [00:14:15] It looked like, you know, it’s the kind of family you wanna be a part of. We were large. We got along well from the outside. We were very close. We spent a lot of time together. I was raised in the church. My parents were missionaries. So my dad was a minister. All of my growing up years. My grandparents were very faithful church attenders. [00:14:37] They were, they taught Sunday school, they were on the board. They did everything you can to volunteer at a church. But what nobody knew was that my family had a very dark secret, and that was that my grandfather was a child molester. [00:14:55] And he, had been molesting children in our family, children outside of our family, people that saw him as a trusted adult, people that saw him as their church leader, as their educator. [00:15:10] and, for many years, and this did not come out until I was an adult, until I was in college. And while I was never a direct victim of my. Grandfather. Many of the people in my family, many of my siblings and my cousins, and my aunts and uncles were victims of my grandfather. And so when we talk about how do you then live with an abuser, it becomes very difficult because especially when you’re disclosing for the first time and you’re having to work through all of your feelings about that. [00:15:48] And when that. That abuser is protected by other family members and you’re not allowed to talk about it or you’re not believed, that this could be happening. And I was very lucky in my family. We were very lucky that the victims were believed from the beginning, and that when my grandfather was finally confronted, he confessed and he ended up going to prison. [00:16:12] where he has since passed away in prison and that was, he passed away about 15 years ago. but my story is unusual in that most victims are not believed by their families. And so then to go and be a part of that family unit is a very difficult thing and it takes a lot of, um, strength of mind and of. [00:16:32] Of will to say this isn’t right and I’m gonna stand up against what happened to me. And so there’s really no good answer except for having somebody that can walk alongside the victim and say, until you have the strength to stand up for yourself, I will stand up for you. And I will be your voice and I will listen to the ways in which your family hurt you. [00:16:56] And I believe you. And if you need a new family, we will, we will be family so that you don’t have to subject yourself to that. And, it’s a long process to get to a point where, they feel that they can stand up for themselves, then [00:17:14] Sandie Morgan: So breaking that silence [00:17:17] and then being believed, and particularly thinking through how a community can be more trauma informed, [00:17:27] that’s going to support the, the healing process. [00:17:31] So. [00:17:32] Beth Lorance: Yes. [00:17:33] Sandie Morgan: What does trauma informed look like? Okay, so your family situation [00:17:38] was in the church and Oh my gosh. In the church there is so much shame. [00:17:43] some families just quit going to church. What do you say to church leaders to make sure their team is trauma informed? [00:17:57] Beth Lorance: We need to stop asking the question, What’s wrong with you? You know, I think that’s so much what people do is they’re saying, what’s, what’s wrong? why are you acting this way? Why are you, why is that happening to you? And just listening and listening and being supportive and being nonjudgmental. [00:18:19] And so for me, it’s, when I talk, speak to church leaders, I talk about how, Jesus calls us to get down in the broken places with broken people and listen to them. and not to try to change them, not to be judgmental, not to try to tell them how they’re supposed to be responding, but to just be with them. [00:18:43] and that’s, that’s really what I encourage is in part of being trauma informed, is just listening and, sitting with people. And not judging them for their, for what they do and what they say. [00:18:57] Sandie Morgan: And. For me personally, in my experience, that not judging piece is the hardest thing for those who want to come alongside. They want to see progress and they might say things like, well, I’ve been praying for you, so you should [00:19:16] feel better. You should be coming to, this extra opportunity for a Bible study or a women’s group, or a youth group. How do we in a trauma informed perspective, adjust people’s expectations of the healing process? [00:19:37] Beth Lorance: Yeah. Part of it is realizing that sometimes it’s really hard to share your story, and it’s really hard to be seen by people ,to truly be seen. And if we require a person to, if we require an understanding of somebody’s story to be able to love them, then we’re not really loving them. We’re doing exactly what the people that abuse them to do. [00:20:03] We say our love is transactional. You have to tell me your story. You have to behave the way that I behave, that I want you to behave in order to receive the care and the love that, I wanna, I wanna give you. And, if people begin to realize that their actions are not that much different than that of the abuser, if we make. [00:20:27] If we prescribe to a victim how they should act, then maybe they, we would start to see a change and maybe we would start to see people be less judgmental. But just to reframe, when I say to somebody, I’m praying for you, why aren’t you getting better? Or, why aren’t you coming to church? Or, why don’t I see you at Bible study? [00:20:48] What I’m saying is, I’m only praying for you so that I’ll see a change in your life. And if I don’t see what I deem quote unquote as change, then maybe I’m not gonna pray for you anymore, or maybe I’m not gonna support you anymore, or maybe I’m not gonna listen. And that does a disservice. [00:21:06] And that’s not what we’re called to do. We’re called to listen to people and sit with people in, in spite of how they act, even because of how they act. And maybe the fact that they can’t come to the Bible study or they can’t come to the prayer meeting, that’s really a sign of them saying, this is where I’m hurting. [00:21:25] That’s a symptom of their healing process and we need to respect that. [00:21:32] Sandie Morgan: Wow. [00:21:32] Beth Lorance: it is hard. It’s hard to be non-judgmental. I have to say to myself all the time, we listen and we don’t judge, and I mean it’s hard, but that’s what, that’s what we’re called to do. [00:21:44] Sandie Morgan: wow. I’m gonna write that one down because Yeah, that’s good. Okay, so we understand. The process for trauma informed and we’ll put links to some previous episodes where we’ve spent some time drilling down on trauma informed. But I wanna go [00:22:03] back to grooming because I’d like to make sure that those of us who are in communities where. It’s a community of trust, a school, a faith organization. How can we protect and recognize grooming behaviors early before they can be, weaponized? [00:22:28] Beth Lorance: This is really important and really, it’s about training leaders, staff members, pastors, volunteers, teachers, what the signs of grooming are, And so that they know when they see it, they can recognize it and they can respond to it. I was watching a video just this week of a woman telling a story about how her daughter came home with a really expensive gift from her coach, and the woman was like, I don’t know what to do about this. [00:23:01] I it was a really expensive gift. I don’t think my daughter should accept it, but what should I do? And then the next day she had posted another video saying My daughter came home with another really expensive gift. And this gift I had actually told my daughter I wasn’t going to buy for her. And the woman was like, I don’t know what’s going on. [00:23:23] And that is a basic sign of grooming. The fact that this coach is giving expensive gifts to one girl on the team and their, their gifts that the mother would not buy for the girl on her own. And if people don’t realize that, that’s a sign of grooming, they don’t know what’s going on and they. They think it’s innocent. [00:23:45] They think it’s no big deal, and they just allow it to happen. So we need to train clearly our, and equip our educators, our pastors, our volunteers, parents with what it looks like, what grooming looks like, and then once they see grooming and do they respond to it? What do they do? I think the second thing we need is clear boundaries. [00:24:08] We need to create policies that limit the ability for an adult to groom a child. So this might mean that there’s no, your policy says there’s no one-on-one supervision between adults and children. And, youth pastors always get upset about that ’cause they’re, they say things like, well, how can I mentor, this youth member, how can I help them know they’re cared about? [00:24:36] And I always say, well do it with two. You know, like it, the more the merrier. You don’t need to individually mentor somebody for them to be changed by a relationship with you. You can do that in a way that keeps the child safe and keeps you safe. And so you have to have clear boundaries, very specific boundaries, and people that, respond and follow policy correctly. [00:25:07] And that when policy isn’t followed, that those people receive the consequence of that very swiftly. You have to be very clear on those things. And then the other thing I think is so important in preventing grooming is we have to empower our kids. We have to teach our kids about tricky people. We have to explain to them what unsafe behavior it looks like, and we have to give them the ability to say no even to trusted adults. [00:25:39] You know, I, it’s so often you go and somebody wants to hug my daughter. I have a, a very cute daughter. She’s very lovable and people want to hug her all the time. And sometimes she doesn’t want to hug them, and I have to give her the right to say no to that. And that when the adult insists on the hug, I have to stand up for her and say, she said no, so you don’t need to hug her. [00:26:08] and that’s something that’s important that we empower our kids to say no, and we respect it when they say no. So that they learn that their, that their boundaries matter and their words matter. [00:26:21] Sandie Morgan: So if a child comes from a situation where there is family violence, so we know there’re going to be more vulnerable to grooming and [00:26:32] to just plain inappropriate adult, uh, tension. how do we teach that child about tricky people? because in many situations we have as leaders deferred to, oh, it’s a parental supervision issue, I’ll tell the parents. But, if the parents aren’t listening, if the parents have not been involved in this particular aspect, how does like a youth leader or a coach begin to integrate that kind of resilience in their. Their leadership with kids so that those kids know they can say no. [00:27:23] Beth Lorance: I think it’s respecting the words a kid says. So when a kid speaks, it’s really listening to them and believing them and encouraging them to talk about how they feel about things. So I think that’s something a leader could do, a teacher could do. Also I think it’s important to remember that grooming happens to, to the victims but [00:27:46] often parents are groomed also and somebody that wants to, hurt a child, victimize a child. They will often also groom the parents and they will ingratiate themselves with the parents and, Make it so that the parents have no qualms when the child wants to go off with that adult, have no concerns when the child is spending a lot of time with that adult. [00:28:13] And so for me, I like to tell parents that you need to know what your child is doing with a [00:28:21] adult, even if it’s an adult you trust, as much as possible. So I want parents to just be aware of the adults in their kids’ lives and know them, but know them, know what the interactions with that, that adult and their child are like also. [00:28:40] And so that when their kid comes and says things about that adult, you understand what is going on in that relationship. I’m very careful that, in my own family life that I watch, the inner action that my child has with these adults so that my child doesn’t spend time alone with any adults that I haven’t watched how they interact with each other. [00:29:02] for a significant amount of time with that adult until, so I can see how that adult responds to my children. And if I don’t like how they respond to my children, I don’t allow my child to be alone with that adult. And it might not just be a fear of them being groomed or sexually abused, but maybe I fear of them not being treated nicely or being talked down to because. [00:29:23] or being made jokes about that kind of thing. I also am really big on if my, if a, if an adult wants to be friends with one of my child, they need to be friends with me first. And, don’t come into a space where I’m with one of my children and talk only to my children without talking to me. Oftentimes, especially, with younger children, you’ll have other adults that wanted to interact with them. And I’m like, that’s fine. As long as I know you and you’re friends with me, then you can talk with my child. But otherwise. You know, greet me first. Talk to me first. This is the relationship you should be worried about. [00:30:05] Not a relationship with my five-year-old. So that’s another thing. I think we need to teach leaders that, they can help impact families. ’cause they can pass that information onto to parents as the, and they can pass that information on to kids and so that would be something else that I think would be important. [00:30:23] Sandie Morgan: Wow. This gives us some deeper concerns about understanding grooming, and I encourage listeners to go back and review some of our past episodes as well. So, Dr. Beth Lorenz, what gives you hope for the next generation of leaders and advocates to prevent family violence and possible grooming for human trafficking? [00:30:57] Beth Lorance: Really, there’s two things that give me hope, and one of them is my students. And when I, we just started this semester and I’ve taught one class, and, I am so excited about the students that are in my class this semester. They’re engaged with the topic. They wanna learn, they wanna understand. They wanna say, you know, violence is not, should not be in our homes, violence should not be in our churches. [00:31:23] It should not be in our schools. And they’re excited about learning to use their voice to stand up for those that don’t have a voice. And that’s often what violence does. Abuse does. Trauma does, is it steals a person’s voice. And, um, so that, that gives me hope that there’s young people that care about this, that wanna use their voice, that wanna learn how they can impact [00:31:52] the vulnerable, how they can sit with a broken, and that’s always exciting for me. I also get excited when churches, I work a lot with churches and training pastors and I get really excited when churches get it. They begin to understand what Jesus’ view on victimhood is. And they understand what they need to do to help a person find healing. [00:32:19] And it’s always exciting to me when I talk to a church leader and they’re able to. Express something to me that I’ve always known, you know, or that’s part of what I teach, and they’re able to, and they agree, they agree with what the current research is saying, or they agree with how we need to be responding to victims, or they agree with, um, [00:32:43] what it looks like to walk with a person that’s a victim. [00:32:48] They agree with this idea that it’s our job to protect the vulnerable, and that always makes me excited and gives me hope for the future. [00:32:58] Sandie Morgan: I love it. I love it. And what a great opportunity to take this podcast back to your community and find out if they agree and you can be a voice and make a difference in reducing vulnerability for kids that may be more [00:33:21] susceptible to grooming. Thank you for listening. [00:33:25] Thank you Dr. Beth for being with us today. It’s been great. [00:33:30] Beth Lorance: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me. [00:33:33] Thank you, Dr. Beth Lorance for sharing your expertise and personal story with us today. Your insight about teaching children to watch for tricky people rather than just strangers, completely reframes how we protect kids in trusted environments. [00:33:52] Sandie Morgan: Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our website@endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. [00:34:05] If you’d love to help us grow the podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And as always, thanks for listening.

Patrick McDonough joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss his groundbreaking $40 million jury verdict against a hotel for enabling child sex trafficking and how this landmark case is changing accountability standards across the hospitality industry. PATRICK MCDONOUGH Patrick J. McDonough is a nationally recognized attorney and advocate who leads the Sex Trafficking Division at Andersen, Tate & Carr. With a legal career marked by justice-driven leadership and deep community engagement, Pat has dedicated his life to representing survivors of sex trafficking and fighting systemic injustice. Before joining Andersen, Tate & Carr, Pat made history as the youngest District Attorney in the state of Georgia, where he pioneered the development of child advocacy centers, providing trauma-informed care and legal support to child victims of sexual abuse. In his legal practice, Pat has built a comprehensive, survivor-centered approach to litigation, assembling a national network of professionals to support clients from first contact through final judgment. His efforts have earned widespread recognition, being featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Outside the courtroom, Pat has raised over $1 million to support unhoused individuals and founded HomeFirst Gwinnett and the Gwinnett Reentry Intervention Program (GRIP). KEY POINTS * McDonough won a historic $40 million jury verdict in July 2025 against United Inn & Suites in Decatur, Georgia, marking one of the first TVPRA cases against a hotel to reach trial and verdict. * The case involved a 16-year-old victim who was trafficked over 200 times in just 40 days, with hotel staff selling her condoms and ignoring obvious signs of trafficking. * The verdict included $10 million in compensatory damages to make the victim whole and $30 million in punitive damages designed to send a message to the entire hospitality industry. * Hotels cannot claim ignorance when red flags are obvious—if staff see what appears to be prostitution, they should call law enforcement regardless of whether they can definitively identify it as trafficking. * Clear warning signs include high foot traffic with men going in and out of rooms every 20-30 minutes, scantily clad young women, large numbers of used condoms found during cleaning, and luxury cars visiting budget hotels. * Hotel staff empowerment comes from the top—management must train employees and create a culture where staff are encouraged to report suspicious activity rather than just “rent rooms and make money.” * Simple staff training on recognizing red flags and proper reporting procedures can prevent hotels from becoming trafficking hotspots and protect them from legal liability. * McDonough has settled over 80 similar cases, but this verdict was particularly significant because the hotel refused reasonable settlement offers and chose to go to trial. * Community members play a vital role in prevention by reporting unusual traffic patterns and suspicious activity to law enforcement, as it truly “takes a village” to combat trafficking. RESOURCES * Patrick McDonough at Andersen, Tate & Carr [https://www.atclawfirm.com/people/patrick-mcdonough] * EHT187 – Why Is Labor Trafficking So Hard To Find? [https://endinghumantrafficking.org/187/] TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today I’m joined by attorney Patrick McDonough, partner at Anderson, Tate and Carr, and he leads their sex trafficking division. [00:00:35] Pat just won a $40 million jury verdict that sending shockwaves through the hotel industry. His 16-year-old client had been trafficked over 200 times in just 40 days while staff sold her condoms and ignored obvious signs. This case changes the rules for every hotel in America and reveals red flags that could be happening in your own community. And now here’s our interview. [00:01:13] Sandie Morgan: Patrick McDonough, I am thrilled to have you on the ending Human Trafficking Podcast. Welcome. [00:01:20] Patrick McDonough: Thank you so much. I’m, I’m thrilled to be here. [00:01:23] Sandie Morgan: I was so excited when I saw the headline that there was a $40 million judgment in a trafficking case. Tell me how you ended up in the courtroom where you were able to achieve that kind of result for a victim of human trafficking. [00:01:50] Patrick McDonough: Well, I met our survivor, probably five years ago, so it’s been a long journey, on a road to getting into trial, and I’ve probably settled a little north of 80 cases, and typically when you get really close to trial, that’s when they finally decide that they’re going to provide some type of compensation and you often are able to, to resolve the case. [00:02:13] But for whatever reason, this, hotel and kind of insurance company decided that they wanted to take us to task and, and, and really never offered anything that we would’ve even considered. So it gave us a great opportunity. There wasn’t a hard decision to make, like, you know, should we take the money or should we go to trial? [00:02:30] So we were able to just really go forward and try the case. And really, the most profound thing for me, I’ve been doing these cases now for six years, is, you know, we believe how to prove these cases and we believe our survivors and, and we believe we know how to prove the case. And, and obviously we’ve convinced a number of people to settle, but it, it’s really meaningful when we were able to talk to the jurors after the case, and like all the things that we had kind of believed over these years, they, they validated, and in fact, the defense attorneys would ask questions and things I think that they might’ve even believed. [00:03:04] They, you know, they, they did not believe, the jury didn’t believe. So it was very, very validating. [00:03:09] Sandie Morgan: Give me a couple of examples of, of what the jurors believed. [00:03:15] Patrick McDonough: So one of the big, kind of themes on the defense approach is they try to make it like a legal class, and they try to argue that one of the elements in this federal lawsuit is what they call participation in a venture. And so they would try to explain that as well to have. The trafficker participate in a venture with the hotel. [00:03:33] They almost make it sound like it has to be a party to a crime. Like the trafficker walks into the front of the hotel and like says, Hey, I’m gonna be in this back room trafficking somebody. And that’s not really what the law says. The law really says if the hotel knows this is going on or should know this is going on then and they’re taking money on it, they should be held liable or, or responsible. [00:03:54] But it’s been a constant fight with multiple defense attorneys really throughout the country. And it was just very nice when they, the defense attorney asked the jurors like, you know, what was it that proved participation in a venture? And all the jurors said, you know, it wasn’t one thing, it, it was the whole case. [00:04:09] It was the three different victims that we put up. It was the two police officers that said they had a bad reputation. It was the expert in how she explained it. So it, it was just one of those things that was very heart heartwarming that the case we put together, you know, the jury really understood it and, and validated it. [00:04:26] Sandie Morgan: And how many attorneys were on the team with you? [00:04:31] Patrick McDonough: So three of us tried the case. I had co-counsel, really good co-counsel in this case, uh,David Bouchard and Otto Echo. the three of us tried the case, but there’s other people on my team, John Toge and Rory and, and Jennifer Webster that have, helped throughout different parts of the process. But it was three of us that tried it. [00:04:52] Sandie Morgan: And in the news article that I read, it talked about one victim who was identified with initials who had been trafficked there at age 16, but you just mentioned three victims that testified. [00:05:09] Patrick McDonough: That’s right. And so this case was about one victim and she, it was one victim against the hotel. But one of the most powerful things that we have been able to do successfully is we have other victims that maybe they had different cases. So these two other people that tell, well, lemme take that back. One person had a different case ’cause her trafficking was worse at a different hotel. [00:05:31] But she still was willing to come testify because she had been at this hotel. So even though she didn’t sue it, she’s a witness, she was another victim. There was another victim that you might not consider classically trafficking, and I’m not sure we would’ve been able to get it across the finish line by herself, but she, she was trafficked. [00:05:49] In fact, had to, had to see, basically a trafficker made her have a date in a car so they would get the room. She didn’t see anybody else after that. But it, it tied into our theme because J.G our victim had to also see multiple or dates in the cars and not just in the rooms, which again, is a bigger indicator that hotels should have known what was going on and it corroborated what they said. [00:06:11] So having multiple victims testify, even if they’re not plaintiffs, can really support your case. And, and that’s been kind of a, something we’ve done from the beginning. I tried a case last year in federal court for three weeks and we had 11 victims in that case, against Red Roof in it settled the day before it went to the jury, so we didn’t get it all the way to verdict, but it’s a very powerful tool when you’re trying cases. [00:06:35] Sandie Morgan: So you, won 10 million in damages, compensatory damages, and 30 million in punitive damages. Will you break that down for our listeners to understand why it’s broken up like that? [00:06:52] Patrick McDonough: Sure. The first part is really the entire case is all about compensating the victim. So what is the value of someone who’s been essentially statutory, raped and sold 200 times at a hotel? Because a hotel is, profiting off that and what, what would make her whole, like what are things that they can do financially to compensate her for all the trauma that she has experienced and will experience for a lifetime? [00:07:17] And so that was the $10 million verdict, if you get a compensatory verdict at that point, you go to a second phase. And the second phase is a punitive damages phase. And punitive damages are more about punishing the hotel. And one of the things that’s so powerful about punitive damages and really [00:07:37] kind of means so much to us in the trenches is it’s not just punishing this hotel. It’s not just saying you’re getting punished because of what you did, but it is saying we’re sending a message to the industry. So if you’re in the hospitality industry, be aware that if you turn a blind eye to this type of conduct, you could be punished and that, and it ratchets up the money. [00:07:58] So it’s a second. It’s a second type of damage. [00:08:01] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so over 200 times in a 40 day period at the same property. Is that correct? [00:08:23]Patrick McDonough: That’s right. [00:08:24] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So you presented testimony that the motel staff ignored clear red flags. [00:08:25] Patrick McDonough: Well, let, let me answer this in, in two parts because a lot of times people think, oh, I need to take this class in sex trafficking and I need to really understand this to ever be able to spot it. And like the hotels will often say things like, well, I might’ve seen adult prostitution, but you know, I’ve never, I would never put up with or see sex trafficking. [00:08:43] And so one of the things I tell people, and what we hope people learn or even take through your podcasts and that are trained is. If you’re a business at this, in this case a hotel, but any business and you see what you think might be prostitution, ’cause most people say they can identify that fairly easily. [00:09:02] High foot traffic man going in and out of a room every 20, 30 minutes, right? Maybe a, a young woman or, or an older woman that is scantily clad. Like those two signs alone is enough. We believe for you to call law enforcement and then let them do the investigation, you don’t have to do anymore. Now in hotels, they have kind of an additional thing when they send cleaning people in and there happens to be 10 to 15 used condoms every day, and there’s a young person staying there with doesn’t appear to be apparent. [00:09:29] You know, that’s even more corroboration. So there there’s a number of things that can put people onto that sex trafficking could be going on. The other fundamental I think a lot of people don’t understand is if you’re under 18 years old and you’re engaged in commercial sex. The buyer, in fact, is a sex trafficker. [00:09:47] So you don’t even have to have a pimp or a scary guy around the corner. And so we try to let people know if they’re training hotels or businesses. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to check off 10 different things. If you see something that looks like prostitution, call police and the police, they might set up a sting. [00:10:04] They might do more surveillance. They might go knock on the door. But that’s ultimately how you slow this down because here’s what traffickers don’t want. They do not want to go to a hotel where they get arrested. Their property, which is the children they’re selling get arrested or their buyers get arrested. [00:10:19] And if they go to a property where someone’s calling the police every time they suspect, even prostitution, they’re not gonna go there. So, so I would just say in general common sense, if you see something that looks like, you don’t even have to figure out if it’s sex trafficking. She might be 17, she might be 19, might be sex trafficking, might be prostitution. [00:10:37] Just do the right thing and call law enforcement. so that’s generally what we like to talk about. In this case in particular, I mean, as I said, a hundred of the 200 date, I’m calling them dates, but dates that she had to see, were done in cars, much more visible to, a hotel that had cameras and they allegedly had security that were walking the property. [00:10:57] I mean, they certainly should have seen that. You know, there’s high foot traffic coming in and out. In this particular case, there was testimony about a night. a night front desk person that actually would call the traffickers and warn them if the police were on the property. So there was a, you know, there was multiple layers of, of what they knew or should have known. [00:11:15] Sandie Morgan: Well, and in one of the articles that I read about this case, there were condoms sold to the minor and by motel staff. Explain that. [00:11:28] Patrick McDonough: This is a perfect example of, like they, they should know. So one of the victims that I mentioned, she ended up seeing one date, she didn’t have a case, but she had to see that one date in that car to get the room for everybody else. She testified that her and another girl, and they had a picture of them in the hotel, very scarcely clad. [00:11:47] Look, I think she was even younger She might’ve been 15. But anyway, young girls walking up to the front desk multiple times and buying condoms, and they’re just selling ’em to these girls, these young children. I mean, that, that should clearly be a red flag, right? That’s not, something that, that should happen without there being some follow up. [00:12:06] Sandie Morgan: Yeah. I usually just go ask for extra soap or something. Yeah, I didn’t even think about, that kind of availability. So, so the evidence really clearly demonstrated that the staff ignored those red flags. Then how did the defense, respond to that? [00:12:33] Patrick McDonough: Well, here’s, and I wanna caveat this, there are a ton of wonderful hotel operators that do the right thing. So this is not, you know, a blanket all hotels are terrible. Our economy hotels are terrible. There’s quite a many wonderful people, but here’s the, every case I’ve ever had, they bring the manager in that typically either lives at the hotel or is there full-time. [00:12:54] They have cameras. There’s kind of no question they know what’s going on, but they just deny it. They just flat out say, never saw it. Dunno what you’re talking about. never seen prostitution, never seen sex trafficking, not on my watch. And so they, again, it just, you know, becomes a a he said, and then it’s not just a, she said, that’s why we build the case. [00:13:12] Right. What our victim said, what the two other victims said, how our expert testifies what police officers would come in and say that this is a hot spot. but they just deny it. Basically. The two things they do, they start, or three, they start with denying it from the hotel standpoint. Then the lawyers try to [00:13:30] get the jury to think that the standard is much higher. They try to make it sound like you have to have a criminal conspiracy, which you do not. And, and they just say, sh you know, she might have been sex trafficked and I feel sad for her, but you know, we don’t know about it. How would we know about it? [00:13:44] It’s not our fault. And then the next thing they do is they try to blame. If you’re gonna blame anybody, just put it all on the trafficker. Or they sometimes, in this case, they weren’t as bad. This defense attorney was actually quite, I thought, good to our victim. But I’ve had other defense attorneys where they just, you know, they just victim blame, you know, it’s your fault. [00:14:02] You wanted this, why didn’t you leave? you were at other hotels. Why are you picking on us? So it’s just always, it’s like a little kid getting caught this, handing the cookie jars just everybody else’s fault. You know, they’re just making stuff up. [00:14:13] Sandie Morgan: So you just mentioned the victim and the, we talked about the damages paid. When will that money be available to the victim? I’ve been in this. For a long time, and I think I’ve won. We’ve got restitution ordered and then I find out that the survivor is still waiting. What’s the likelihood of that? [00:14:42] Patrick McDonough: And so, so that is, so here’s the pros and the cons of, of a trial, right? The, the pros are you have an opportunity to really get what is just. And I think this, this verdict was just, and it’s obviously, sends a message. The downside to a trial is they always appeal it. Right? And so, you know, there’s gonna be an appeal. [00:15:01] There’s also, in a case like this, there’s insurance involved and insurance is always trying to get out. So there’s separate appeals on the insurance trying to get out of the case. So there’s no guarantee. I mean, it could be they decide that they’re very nervous and they want to try to settle between that number and, and you know, that could happen in a month or this could drag on for years, that’s the one real risk of going to trial. [00:15:25] And, and just as an example, I had that trial. I’m gonna get my dates wrong, but I wanna say the 21st of July, or maybe it was two weeks, it doesn’t matter. Whatever week we had that trial, it went for an entire week. I had another trial, not that Monday, but the following Monday, and it was separate trial and we felt really good about it. [00:15:43] As good as this case, if not better, but they settled for $6 million and they said it wasn’t confidential and she’s gonna get her money in 30 days. You know, so it was less than 40 obviously, but it was, she felt like it was enough for her to raise her child. She wants to start a nonprofit. She’s gonna be able to give back in her own community. [00:16:02] And so that’s kind of always the rub on trying a case, right? Is, is the money they’re offering upfront enough that it’s a burden in the hand? I’m absolutely getting paid. Verse, “Hey, I’m gonna go to trial and you’re gonna hear my story. But there’s a risk, right?” So there’s still risk that we, you don’t see a penny of it, quite frankly. [00:16:19] I think we will. I think we tried a great case, but there’s always risks. [00:16:23] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So let’s talk about your personal vision for legal reform and making a difference. I went online, I looked you up. You are very involved in your community. Talk about how that motivation came to be and how it informs how you serve as an attorney. [00:16:53] Patrick McDonough: I think everybody really wants to give back in their community and I, I think mine started even earlier than the community I’m in now. I mean, I got outta law school and I was an assistant district attorney and then a district attorney, and one of the big things as a district attorney, we did is we created child advocacy centers because abused kids were always getting re-interviewed all these times and they didn’t have a safe place to go. [00:17:14] This is a long time ago. They have a lot of those now, but it was kind of new back in the day. and so I think there’s just, you know, some pride in being able to work, but also besides work to be able to, to make a difference. when I came up to, you know, I’m in the suburbs of Atlanta and Gwinnett County. [00:17:31] I was fortunate to join a law firm that really cared about community, and that’s one of the things that we kind of instill in our lawyers. And I was involved in United Way and some of the things that we did in United Way, I think they taught me. A lot about how we can do wraparound services. I got real involved kind of in the homeless population and it was, you know, not enough to just get someone off the street. [00:17:51] It was like, how do we help make that person a, a productive person? And so that could be mental health, it could be drug treatment, it could be stable housing, you know, a lot of different things, job training. and so I think that kind of led into this practice, is, you know, kind of led me in to be able to do something that I cared about and was also my day job. [00:18:09] I really feel blessed that I get to do both. [00:18:11] Sandie Morgan: Oh yeah. I, I have that same feeling. I get to do prevention. My background early is pediatric nursing and being able to work with kids like we do here in Orange County is a big part of my passion, and I think more and more, and we’ve had conversations on this podcast about how people take, what drives them, what motivates them, and brings that to the table. [00:18:46] In the anti-human trafficking movement, we are a movement that spans globally. And we need, I saw on your case, as I studied it, that you really had a multidisciplinary team, at the table for this case to support this survivor, to support your case, to teach the jury. And I think I want people to walk away from this and, after listening, to see that there is a place for everybody to do something. [00:19:21] And you brought up United Way here in Orange County. We work a lot with United Way. So all of the nonprofits and the philanthropists, the social workers, the teachers, everybody has an opportunity to be part of this. Another group that has, An opportunity to be part of this are our policy makers and legislators. And I noticed in reading about you and this case that the TVPRA was a big part of the foundation of this. Can you talk about how that legislation contributed to the success of the case? [00:20:15] Patrick McDonough: Yeah, there’s no question. I mean that this was  a TVPRA case that was passed in 2008 and, and it has a, the beauty behind that statute is it has a 10 year statute of limitations and if you are a child that is trafficked, so anyone under 18, they have 10 years. Until they, after 18, so basically until they’re 28. [00:20:35] And, from the legal side, what, what we see often is, you know, when someone gets rescued, the, the first thing they’re not thinking of is, oh, I need to call a lawyer. You know, if you’re in a car accident, you might decide, “Hey, I need to have a lawyer, right?” Or if you have a surgery and something goes wrong. [00:20:51] People think about that, but certainly people that are trafficked don’t think like, Hey, one of my first things in trauma is I should call a lawyer about this hotel is it takes years, right? For them to kind of put their life back together where that would even register. And a lot of laws, the statute of limitations are just gone before they even realize they have a claim. [00:21:11] I mean, it’s, it’s fairly new what we’re doing. I mean, a lot of lawyers don’t even know this is the case. It’s, it’s, it’s getting a little more attention with this verdict. And last year we had a pretty big case. but you know, we’ve been doing this for years and I meet lawyers all the time that don’t know about it. [00:21:23] So certainly a lot of the survivors don’t. But anyway, the TVPRA has been the fundamental. Building block of all of our cases. And it has been a tremendous asset for us. It’s been great. It, it’s not perfect and different circuits view it and interpret it differently. Our 11th circuit where we are is a little more conservative than probably where you are at California. [00:21:44] So it’s not perfect. I think it will end up at the Supreme Court one day and we’ll get more guidance from them. But it certainly allowed us to do things like we did with this, with this verdict. It’s tremendous. [00:21:54] Sandie Morgan: Okay. That’s really helpful. And you mentioned California where we are and I, I went back and looked at a podcast we did quite a while ago for listeners, it’s number 187. [00:22:02]  And our city attorney in Los Angeles on and Rena actually, uh.had a civil case where they based, this on California’s nuisance abatement laws. And the, the focus much like yours is very victim centered and how we support restitution. [00:22:35] And so the, it was, very interesting for me to compare those cases because both approaches, targeted complicity and failure to act. So the hotel involved in the Southern California case, where these kinds of cases were repeat hotspots for trafficking and the city intervened to force changes and to close those circumstances. [00:23:10] And a nuisance abatement loss seems a little vague and unrelated, but whatever brings attention, because this is what I picked up from listening to you just now, hotel staff and the community need to understand the red flags and it may show up. As a red flag that, wow, look at all the cars in and outta here. [00:23:39] This little hotel is right by my neighborhood, and that kind of traffic is, something I’m not happy with. I’m calling the police about it, so how do we educate our community Pat to understand when they see the red flags and how to call and report that if the hotel staff isn’t going to do that. [00:24:04] Patrick McDonough: I mean, again, I sometimes it’s one of those cliches. But I say kind of it takes a village, right? Like, I’m proud, I have my little spot where we get to do these lawsuits and help survivors. But education is a huge part of this, right? And so there are really good organizations that do that. They’ll go into the schools, you know, into the medical community, train, law enforcement, anybody who’s willing to listen it, it’s definitely worthwhile. [00:24:28] Just take your example. the hotel that, that we sued, there was probably a hundred maybe. I dunno. I, I have different hotels. I’ll say that there’s often 50 to 200 cars coming in and out that aren’t staying there. And what they’ll often tell you is there are these budget hotels off of an interstate, but you’re seeing like Jaguars and BMWs coming in and out, right? [00:24:49] So if someone cares about that and they, and they see that and they call law enforcement, it may not be enough for law enforcement to make an arrest, but they can say, okay, we need to do surveillance and then they can surveil that, right? Or they could go interview the, the hotel owner. The people that are best empowered to do this are obviously the people that work at the hotel ’cause they live there or they work there full time and they see it. [00:25:12] But if they’re not gonna do it, certainly getting law enforcement to try to do more things, you know, do more drive-throughs, to get local community to be educated. All of those things are great. And if you have someone who’s great is what you’re talking about in, in Los Angeles, you know civil law, I can only sue someone when a client contacts me and says I was trafficked there. [00:25:32] law enforcement and district attorneys and other agencies can sometimes just target a hotel. ‘Cause they say, that’s so bad. That is a nuisance. Right? And they, they can do that. We can only target where our clients take us. So it it, it really takes, like I said, it takes a village, it takes everybody, but everybody can, can certainly, do their part. [00:25:51] Sandie Morgan: So Pat, what kind of advice do you have for the hospitality industry as these kinds of cases are becoming more routine? You mentioned your case and then the next one that settled for 6 million a week later. What’s your advice? [00:26:12] Patrick McDonough: Well, the hotels, what they need to know is if they’re gonna turn a blind eye, they can be held accountable. And I, and I’m hoping that that message is now getting across it is not really hard what they need to do. All they need to do is train their staff, right? Fairly easy. I mean, these brands certainly can set things up in their portals and they can do basic training and this is what you look for. [00:26:34] And when you do that, you should notify, law enforcement. And again, the training’s not that difficult, but ultimately what it always comes from the top I’ve, I’ve talked to multiple front desk people and they say, “Hey, I’m working at this hotel”, and they tell me, I don’t care what it is. It could be a drug dealer or sex trafficker. [00:26:51] Just rent the rooms, make the money. Same person making $12 an hour, goes down the road and works for a different hotel. And they say, if you see anything, you let me know immediately. And call law enforcement. So they just really have to make sure they want to do the right thing, that they aren’t trying to profit off this. [00:27:08] Because it’s really not that hard to clean up. I mean, all you gotta do is really open your eyes, look at the cameras, occasionally walk around a bit,  50 men coming in and out, you know, in a couple hours. Cars coming that aren’t staying there at some point. It, it becomes obvious, right? So they just really wanting to do the right thing. [00:27:24] But as far as like practical steps, I think training is the most important thing. They just to make sure that all their people, the cleaning staff, the maintenance people, the front desk people are all trained and empowered to do the right thing. [00:27:38] Sandie Morgan: Wow. I love that. “Empowered to do the right thing” and it is top down Pat. [00:27:45] I am really excited about the work that you’re doing there. I think the impact is going to be phenomenal as more and more we see more, cases and from my perspective, working with victims, that restitution is life changing and it validates the community’s value for an individual and their life that has been totally disrupted. [00:28:17] So thank you so much for your time. [00:28:20] I’m grateful for your leadership and your passion, and we will look for more success in the coming years. Thanks so much, Pat. [00:28:31] Patrick McDonough: All right. Thanks so much. [00:28:32] Sandie Morgan: Thanks to Patrick McDonough for sharing his groundbreaking case in changing Survivor Justice. His key insight really stuck with me. Hotels can’t hide behind, “we didn’t know”, when signs are obvious. Simple staff training can prevent trafficking hotspots. Watch for a future episode on how that is already happening. [00:28:59] What gives me hope is Pat’s reminder. It truly takes a village whether you’re spotting unusual traffic patterns, supporting stronger laws like the TVPRA, or empowering hotel staff to do the right thing. Everyone has a role in prevention. Listeners, if you love this conversation, make sure you check out our website @endinghumantrafficking.org [http://@endinghumantrafficking.org]for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. [00:29:34] If you’d love to help us grow the podcast, you can start just by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back.