By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
A woman dances at a club in Manhattan. A regular comes in — rich, polished, known to everyone. He tips in folded hundreds and asks for her by name. Managers love him because he spends; the bouncers wave him through without looking up. Then, quietly, the terms begin to change.
At first it is only pressure. Then it hardens into something else. He wants sex after the shift, then a second girl, then drugs in the room, then her phone face-down on the nightstand where she cannot reach it. He mentions, almost casually, that he could tell her family what she does for money. He reminds her that he knows the owner. He tells her that no one will believe a stripper, and he says it with the calm of a man who assumes the world already agrees with him.
Or she is an escort. Or she met him through a sugar-dating site, or she has an OnlyFans, or she has simply taken his money before. However the story begins, it tends to end in the same place: a woman alone with the conviction that whatever happened to her does not count because money changed hands. Abusers cultivate that conviction deliberately, because shame keeps victims silent more reliably than any threat.
The law was written for exactly this situation.
How the Trafficking Victims Protection Act can protect you
The federal law is called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA. Nothing in it strips a person of protection because he or she works in the sex industry. Under the TVPA’s criminal provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1591, sex trafficking includes using force, fraud, or coercion to cause a person to engage in a commercial sex act, and a “commercial sex act” means any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person. Coercion, in turn, sweeps far beyond the fist and the locked door: it includes schemes intended to make a person believe that refusing will bring serious harm, a term courts have read to cover psychological, financial, and reputational injury severe enough to keep someone performing when everything in them wants to stop.
The breadth of that definition reflects something Congress understood and most people still do not: exploitation rarely begins with a kidnapping. It begins with someone finding the pressure point and leaning on it — the rent due on the first, an immigration status that hangs by a thread, a drug habit, a child at home, a client list, a threat to post photos or call the police or make one devastating phone call to a boyfriend, a parent, an employer, a pastor, a judge.
A person under that kind of weight may keep going back. She may text politely, accept the money, smile at the door, and do whatever gets her through the night with the least damage. None of that resolves the legal question. The legal question is what the client knew, and what the manager, promoter, owner, driver, booker, landlord, and security guard knew. Who profited. Who kept the arrangement running after it turned coercive, fraudulent, violent, or abusive.
A new federal case shows how wide the net reaches
Last week, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles unsealed a 65-count indictment against members and associates of a street gang that, according to the government, controlled sex trafficking along a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles for more than five years. The sweep, called Operation Broken Blade, is the first human-trafficking gang racketeering case ever brought in that district. Prosecutors have identified 51 victims so far, including minors, runaways, and young women from the foster care system.
For anyone who works in commercial sex spaces, one allegation in that indictment deserves close attention. Prosecutors did not stop at the alleged pimps. They also charged the manager of a nearby motel, alleging that he banked more than $64,000 in proceeds he knew came from the trafficking of children and adults, and that he broke the deposits into small batches to keep the banks from reporting them to the government. According to law enforcement, he admitted that up to ninety percent of the rooms he rented were used for prostitution, and that when parents came to his front desk looking for their missing daughters, he turned them away and rented the room to the next customer with cash.
The motel manager is not a footnote to the criminal case. He is the blueprint of the civil one.
Exploitation is a group project
People who exploit others through commercial sex almost never do it alone, because exploitation requires logistics. It needs a room, a stage, a private booth, a driver, a promoter, a booker, a house account. It needs a security guard who looks the other way, a manager who keeps the big spender happy, and a business that takes its cut and treats the victim as disposable. Every link in that chain made a choice, and some of those choices carry a price.
The TVPA reaches the chain. Its civil provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1595, allows a trafficking victim to sue — in federal court, for money damages — not only the perpetrator, but anyone who knowingly benefited from participating in a venture that person knew or should have known involved trafficking. In practice that can mean the client, the people who arranged and enabled him, and, in the right case, the business that profited from the abuse. A victim who wins can also recover attorneys’ fees on top of damages.
ZMO Law’s victims’ rights practice is built on that provision. We bring TVPA civil claims in federal court, particularly in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York — the courts that cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, and Westchester — where we have practiced for more than two decades.
Not only women
Most trafficking victims are women and girls, but the TVPA protects men and boys on the same terms, and the biggest recent trafficking prosecution in New York proves the point. In the Eastern District of New York, federal prosecutors charged Mike Jeffries, the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, with running an international sex trafficking operation whose victims were men — many of them aspiring models lured with the promise of career opportunities, flown to events in the Hamptons, New York City, and hotels abroad, and pressured into commercial sex acts they had never agreed to. Wealth, a recruiting middleman, nondisclosure agreements, and a private security firm allegedly kept the operation quiet for years.
A man who was exploited that way has the same civil claim a woman does. If someone used money, career promises, or coercion to push you into commercial sex — whatever your gender, and whatever you were paid — the TVPA may give you a case in federal court.
“But I’m a sex worker”
Abusers target sex workers because they expect shame to finish what they started. They count on silence, and on a victim closing her own case before any lawyer ever hears it: I agreed to meet him. I took the money. I’ve done this before. I did drugs with him. I kept texting. I didn’t leave right away. I never called the police.
A defense lawyer will raise every one of those facts, and none of them automatically defeats a claim. A dancer can be sexually assaulted in a club. An escort can be coerced by a client. A person who sells sexual services can still be trafficked, and someone who agreed to one thing can be abused when another person forces, tricks, or squeezes them into something else. We have written before that pressure to go farther than a woman wants in a strip-club setting may support a civil claim under the TVPA.
Who we are — and who we are not
Be clear about what calling a firm like ZMO Law PLLC means for a TVPA victim: We are not the police. We are not prosecutors, and we do not put people in prison. ZMO Law regularly stands on the other side of these cases, defending people accused of sex trafficking and other sex crimes in state and federal court. What we do for victims is different: we bring civil lawsuits under the TVPA and other laws to recover money — compensation for harm that you suffered — from the people and businesses that hurt you or benefitted from your victimization. Talking to us is not reporting a crime, and a consultation does not obligate you to go to the police, the FBI, or anywhere else.
ZMO Law’s dual role — defending the accused and suing on behalf of the abused — is not a contradiction for us. Because we defend these cases, we know how texts, payments, drug use, delay, prior sex work, immigration status, and old trauma can be turned against a victim to make her feel she is the one on trial, and we build cases that can withstand it. A case is built on proof, not outrage: messages, payment records, club and driver records, camera footage, witnesses, other victims, prior complaints, bank records, travel receipts, screenshots, medical records, and evidence of what the people at the door and behind the desk knew.
Since 2002, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma has represented both people accused of sex crimes and victims of sex crimes in New York. The firm has recovered tens of millions of dollars for clients who were wrongfully convicted or sexually abused. Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes. But experience of that kind can help when the abuser has money to hire good civil defense. Clubs, hotels, and other enablers also have lawyers, and their first move is often the same: make the case about your work instead of what was done to you. We have seen that move. We are not afraid of it.
You do not have to decide alone
You may not know whether what happened to you was sex trafficking, and you do not have to know. You may know only this: someone used money, fear, drugs, threats, shame, debt, immigration status, or your work in the sex industry to make you do something you did not freely choose. Someone profited from it. Someone looked away. Someone decided your job made you easier to take advantage of.
Any one of those is reason enough to talk to a lawyer. Not every bad client is a trafficking case, and not every abusive situation belongs in federal court — we will tell you the truth about how your situation looks, even when the truth is unwelcome. We do not take cases because they are dramatic. We take them because they are real, provable, and worth fighting.
If you were coerced, assaulted, trafficked, or exploited by a client, club, manager, promoter, booker, driver, wealthy regular, or anyone else who benefited from your work, do not assume the money you received canceled the wrong done to you. You may have a TVPA claim or a related cause of action in federal court. You may have claims against more than one person. And you may be able to bring those claims anonymously without paying legal fees upfront.
If all this sounds like what happened to you, contact ZMO Law for a confidential consultation.
Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes. This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.