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Shortly after Elizabeth turned seventeen, in the summer of 2018, she began selling sex from a room on the second floor of a Days Inn off the interstate in Marietta, Georgia. Her pimp, a twenty-six-year-old member of the Gangster Disciples, who went by the street name Fresh, had likely chosen this Days Inn for a few reasons. Its location—off of a twelve-lane freeway, past a line of strip malls, in a warren of office parks—had the benefit of being both hidden and easy to get to. The building itself was a drive-up motel, constructed in the eighties, without modern safety features such as interior hallways and elevators secured by key cards. A hotel manager allegedly gave Fresh room discounts in exchange for Ecstasy and pot.
Elizabeth, who asked that I use only her middle name, is petite, with dark hair, big eyes, and a barbed sense of humor. When she was growing up, outside of Atlanta, her mother struggled with mental-health issues and worked multiple jobs to stave off homelessness. Elizabeth has never met her father. “I was the product of a one-night stand,” she said. “Well, my mom said it was three nights, to be specific.” By the age of eleven, she was helping her younger sister get ready for school and preparing her dinner. One of her mother’s ex-boyfriends molested Elizabeth when she was twelve. That same year, she said, she was raped for the first time in an abandoned house where she’d gone to smoke weed with a friend. The next year, she was sent to an inpatient behavioral-health facility because she was cutting herself; while there, she was diagnosed as having A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder.
About a year later, an older friend introduced Elizabeth to her first trafficker. She was already having sex for attention, she said, and the trafficker told her, “You’re doing it anyway. You might as well get paid.” She became the youngest member of a group of teen-agers coerced into prostitution. “He’s teaching us how to do it,” Elizabeth said of the trafficker. “He’s glorifying it. He’s making it seem like it’s the best life.” He also took Elizabeth’s money, often yelled at her, and once pointed a loaded gun at her chest. “He always had a gun in his hands,” she said. “A slight slip of the finger and I could have been gone.”
Elizabeth’s next trafficker was worse. He allowed her only a few hours of sleep a night, and habitually raped her. To keep pace and to help herself dissociate, she started using meth. “He broke my spirit,” Elizabeth said. “He was so unbearable. But then I couldn’t let him go. I think it was because he actually offered me that stability I was looking for. Like, he knew.” After they were both arrested, she found a chance to escape and soon met Fresh’s new protégé, a twenty-two-year-old member of the Rollin’ 90s Crips known as Gunna.
By the time Elizabeth got to the Days Inn in Marietta, she had become accustomed to the idea that grown men made money off of her body. In this particular operation, a woman who went by the name Diamond, whom Fresh had prostituted in the past, assumed the role of “bottom bitch,” which involved posting escort ads online and arranging the “dates.” Elizabeth gave Fresh a forty-per-cent cut of the hundred dollars she earned for each “play” and kept the rest, though Gunna, whom she viewed as her boyfriend, held on to it for her.
About a month into their stay, Gunna found a teen-ager crying in the stairwell leading to the hotel’s second floor. Her name was Savannah; she had chubby cheeks and dirty-blond hair dyed with blue streaks. Gunna asked her if she was O.K. Savannah said that a guy had brought her to the hotel, and then left abruptly. She was trying to figure out what to do next. Gunna asked her if she wanted to make some money and offered her a job in the escort business. She followed him back to Room 211.
From the start, Elizabeth didn’t want Savannah in the room. She admits to feeling territorial, but she also sensed that something about the new girl would bring trouble. For starters, Savannah spoke in a soft, delicate voice. She also didn’t have a driver’s license, and she told Elizabeth that she was in a “messed-up situation.” Within a few hours, Savannah undressed and got into the shower. It was clear to Elizabeth that she was just a child.
When Elizabeth and Savannah were advertised together, the new girl’s young age was so apparent that most of the men responding to the ads left as soon as they saw her naked. In the course of the next three days, only three of them paid the eighty dollars to have sex with her, a fraction of what the pimps expected her to earn. Fresh and Gunna “were being extra rude to her because she wasn’t making money,” Elizabeth said. “I felt for her. I had been the new girl that they just threw into the ocean. I know it’s hard. And I definitely saw in her eyes that she did not want to do this.”
Before daybreak on the morning of August 20th, Savannah got into an argument with Diamond. Elizabeth was sitting on one of the room’s double beds, listening to music with her earbuds in; she was high on a mix of Ecstasy and pot, and she didn’t want to get involved. Then she saw Diamond tilt her head at something Savannah had said. Gunna raised an eyebrow and twisted his face in disbelief. Elizabeth pulled out a headphone. She recalled Gunna saying, “She need to get her stuff. She gone.”
Savannah grabbed a drawstring backpack and left the hotel. She dialled 911 and headed to a Dave & Buster’s next door, where, within minutes, a police officer met her in the parking lot. She said that she had been sexually assaulted at the Days Inn. When the officer ran her name through the system, Savannah came up as a runaway. She was fifteen.
Savannah later said that she hadn’t tried to escape sooner because Gunna had pointed a gun at her and said, “If you leave, I will come looking for you. I will go to jail, but it won’t be for anything less than murder.” Now, as the sun rose behind the Days Inn and a rush of morning commuters roared along the interstate, the local police and a SWAT team surrounded the hotel. Elizabeth watched Gunna and Diamond flush their drugs as she deleted pictures from her phone. Then came a voice over a police bullhorn: “Occupants of 211, come out one by one with your hands above your head.”
Elizabeth was held in Atlanta-area jails for four months. There was evidence that she’d participated in the trafficking operation by posting sex ads online, but the district attorney ultimately declined to bring a case against her. “We made the decision to take into consideration how she had been victimized not only by these defendants but people previously,” Charles Boring, a former Cobb County prosecutor who handled the case, said. Instead, Elizabeth landed in a group home for sexually abused girls. A staffer there told her about a pair of attorneys who were filing lawsuits against hotels on behalf of sex-trafficking victims. Elizabeth initially wanted to meet with them because she was drawn to the possibility of a payout. But, as she came to absorb the extent of her exploitation, and the role that one hotel had played in sustaining it, the prospect of a lawsuit took on a new dimension. She told me, “I wanted somebody to see me and I wanted somebody to hear me because this shit happens all the time.”
Across the country, hotels have become a familiar scene of sex-trafficking crimes. According to the 2018 Polaris Survivor Survey, more than sixty per cent of sex-trafficking victims said that they were forced to sell sex from hotels. Of approximately three thousand criminal sex-trafficking cases that have been prosecuted by the federal government, forty-six per cent included allegations that commercial sex had taken place at a hotel, according to data provided by the Human Trafficking Institute. “We focus not enough on how human trafficking intersects with the legitimate economy,” Louise Shelley, the director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center, told me. “This is one of the key points in the supply chain where it does.”
What we now call human trafficking is as old as historical memory, but the first U.S. law to comprehensively target the crime wasn’t marshalled into existence until 2000. At the time, it was estimated that fifty thousand people were being trafficked into the U.S., in addition to an unknown number of domestic victims, and a bipartisan group of legislators sought to establish the country as a leader in combatting the problem. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which passed with a near-unanimous vote, made it clear that the use of “force, fraud or coercion,” whether physical or psychological, to pressure someone into labor or commercial sex was a crime. Since then, anti-trafficking advocates have pushed for the law to be reauthorized every few years. In 2003, legislators added a provision to allow victims to sue their traffickers in civil court. Five years later, legislators expanded the law to allow victims to sue anyone who benefitted from a trafficking enterprise and knew—or could have known—that exploitation was happening. That meant victims could begin to pursue cases against companies that failed to insure that their businesses weren’t complicit in exploitation. “How do you get at the systemic?” Luis C. deBaca, a former director of the State Department’s anti-trafficking office who, as a congressional staffer, led the drafting of the 2008 expansion, said. The federal law needed to reach beyond the “person holding the stick to the person who profits from the stick being held.”
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