Activist Somaly Mam earned international acclaim
and a spot on Oprah’s book list by brandishing tales of horrific
sexual slavery and abuse—many of which she seems to have made up.
Now the Somaly Mam Foundation has
announced that it has accepted its founder’s
resignation.
In March, the Foundation hired an independent law firm to look
into Mam’s personal history. “As a result of Goodwin Procter’s
efforts, we have accepted Somaly’s resignation effective
immediately,” it said yesterday.
Last week,
Newsweek profiled Mam, who is also the co-founder of
Cambodia-based anti-sex trafficking organization Agir Pour Les
Femmes en Situation Précaire (AFESIP):
Mam is one of the world’s most compelling activists, brave and
beautiful, and her list of supporters is long and formidable.
Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and actresses Meg
Ryan, Susan Sarandon and Shay Mitchell, as well as New
York Times Pulitzer-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof,
have all toured AFESIP centers in Cambodia. Queen Sofia of Spain
has for years promoted Mam’s cause and even visited her in the
hospital last year when she fell ill.[…] Mam has raised millions with a hectic schedule of meetings
all over the globe with the good, the great and the super-rich—from
the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon to the pope. One day she will be speaking at
the White House, and the next day she’ll be enthralling
schoolchildren in a remote corner of Cambodia.
So, she’s kind of a big deal. And she claims to have rescued
thousands of girls and women from sexual slavery, inspired by her
own experience being sold first to a violent husband and then to a
brothel by her grandfather when she was a teenager. The 10 years of
abuse Mam suffered in that brothel are detailed in her
internationally bestselling autobiography, The Road of
Lost Innocence.
But Newsweek’s Simon Marks began digging around after
noting some inconsistencies in Mam’s story and those being told by
women AFESIP “rescued.” He found that Long Pross—a girl whose
terrible story of sexual slavery and torture has been told
in The New York Times and
on Oprah—was making her story up.
Another of Mam’s biggest “stars” was Meas Ratha, who as a
teenager gave a chilling performance on French television in 1998,
describing how she had been sold to a brothel and held against her
will as a sex slave.Late last year, Ratha finally confessed that her story was
fabricated and carefully rehearsed for the cameras under Mam’s
instruction, and only after she was chosen from a group of girls
who had been put through an audition. Now in her early 30s and
living a modest life on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Ratha says she
reluctantly allowed herself to be depicted as a child prostitute:
“Somaly said that…if I want to help another woman I have to do [the
interview] very well.”
Mam’s own story has holes as well: Marks’ interviews with Mam’s
childhood acquaintances, teachers, and neighbors turned up no one
who had met or even saw Mam’s grandfather or the man she was
allegedly forced to marry. They say she lived with her parents and
was a happy, well-liked kid.
And “Mam’s confusion isn’t limited to her book, or the backstory
for some of ‘her girls,'” Marks points out. In 2012, she
admitted to making false claims in a speech to the United Nations
General Assembly about an alleged Cambodian army attack on one of
her shelters that killed eight girls.
Countless acquaintances, colleagues, and former employees offer
up horror stories about Mam, who comes across as utterly
sociopathic in the article. Many of them offer some variation on
the same sentiment: People want to believe Mam is good and honest
because of the work she’s doing, so they do. Most people simply
won’t question the motives of alleged do-gooders—why would
someone lie about child rape?
But people lie about tragedy for the same reasons they lie about
anything: money, attention, some perceived greater good, etc. Maybe
Mam thought the ends justified the means; maybe she just wanted to
party with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Perhaps the story is indicative of nothing more than how
motivated, mentally ill manipulators can really thrive if they find
the right angle. But some say it highlights the downside of
nonprofits using tragedy porn to raise funds. “If your goal is
fundraising, you actually have an incentive to pull out the most
gory story,” one activist told Marks, “and so we get completely
false realities of the world.”
These false realities are then used not just to tug at the heart
and purse strings of potential donors but to launch initiatives and
make lawmakers weepy-eyed at Congressional hearings. They inspire
policy. And that’s scary. Boogeymen make for bad legislative
analysts.
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