3/19/2023 0 Comments Order touch detective 3![]() The demands to make money were so severe she developed a kidney infection. He decided what I ate and drank,” Pearl wrote in protection order documents. He raped me when I didn’t come home on time. “He has choked me to the point of passing out. The abuse she said she experienced had been ongoing for 18 months, since Simone first paid for her to come to Seattle, Pearl told Guyer in interviews and written testimony. But he only opened the pod door to silence her screaming, she said. While inside the container, she heard Simone and other men come and go. Simone confined her in a pod for three days that spring after she begged him to let her stop stripping and prostituting in Las Vegas, she told Guyer and later described in interviews with reporters. In another video, Pearl sits inside a pod, her blue-gray eyes puffy from crying, and her temple and cheek cut with self-inflicted red gashes. One video pans over four white plastic sleeping pods, stacked two by two, roughly 6 by 3 feet in size. Handheld videos show Pearl’s alleged confinement in the Black Umbrella office - its Airport Way South location just two blocks from the police station where Guyer would later interview Campbell. Their handwritten allegations asked that Seattle police provide them protection from him. KUOW and The Seattle Times also reviewed hundreds of additional images, screen shots, emails, text messages, and medical records, obtained in public disclosure requests and from Simone’s accusers.Īttached to the emails were copies of the protective orders Pearl and another woman, then 23, had filed against Simone in Las Vegas. Pearl sent Guyer emails and text messages containing photographs and videos that supported her allegations, which are also referenced in court filings. Pearl asked to be referred to by her stage name. KUOW is not using the names of several women in this story because of safety and privacy concerns. “We are afraid for our lives,” she wrote. For more than a year, she and at least two other women were forced into sex work in the lucrative clubs of Las Vegas, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, by Simone, she told Guyer in an email. N August 2017, Pearl, a 27-year-old living in Las Vegas, called and emailed Seattle Police, asking for help. In a short interview outside his home in September, he said, “My career goal was always, ‘Fight the bad, protect the good, help the hurting.’” Guyer, who left Seattle Police over the city’s vaccine mandate, declined to answer questions for this story, citing a new job with the Kent Police Department. In September, they added the Seattle Police Department as a defendant for negligent investigation of their claims. Prosecutions involving adult victims also have a higher burden of proof than for minors, and must show evidence of force, fraud, or coercion.Įven as the MeToo movement has taken hold nationwide, Angelica Campbell and other women, who spoke with KUOW and The Seattle Times, said their hours of police interviews felt like screaming into a void.Īnd so, their complaints languishing with police, five women, including Campbell, filed a civil lawsuit in 2021 against Simone and his recording label, Black Umbrella, alleging that Simone conspired to “ensnare, imprison, and exploit” them for profit. But law enforcement across the state, including Seattle, has struggled to use these statutes effectively and train officers to recognize and help trafficking victims. Washington was the first state to criminalize trafficking nearly 20 years ago. Eattle’s handling of the allegations against Simone illustrates the complexity and consequences of failing to police sex trafficking.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |