In 2012 filmmaker Megan Griffiths
debuted Eden, the tale of “underage women
conscripted into sexual slavery by a criminal enterprise from which
there is seemingly no escape,” as
The New York Times review described
it.
“You may call me naïve,” wrote reviewer Stephen Johnson, “but it
is deeply upsetting that Eden is set in the United States
and that the organization’s boss, Bob Gault (Beau Bridges), is
a law-and-order-preaching United States marshal. We imagine this
kind of crime flourishing in the shadows of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union. But in the United States, with a backslapping
good old boy running the operation? Could it be?”
No. And it wasn’t supposed to be, not exactly—Griffiths’
film was not a documentary. But it did advertise itself as
being based on a true story, that of Chong Kim, a
Korean-American trafficked into sex slavery in the
mid-1990s.
When the film came out, the real Kim made the media circuit
telling her story: handcuffed to a doorknob for
months by a man she thought was her boyfriend; held in a
Vegas warehouse full of other teens; forced to work as a prostitute
around the country; rising to madam; and escaping on her own two
years later.
As a public speaker, and activist, Kim had already
told this story many times—here’s her
being interviewed for the 2011 book Not in My
Town: Exposing and Ending Human Trafficking and Sex
Slavery. She describes how she was kidnapped and
trafficked as so:
I had a gun to my head. The head person that does the
trafficking was a consultant with the FBI in Las Vegas. So it was
very corrupt.
Though she was 18, Kim says she was forced to pretend to be 13
to appeal to an array of unsuspecting pedophiles.
Um, it was an international criminal organization, but the
majority of customers were white Americans. And the customers were
anywhere between CEOs, lawyers, police officers, we’ve even had
really high-echelon pastors, different types of men. They were high
status; there were even political figures that were there that
bought me.
Eden, the film based on Chong’s story, premiered
at the South by Southwest festival in 2012, nabbing
the audience
choice award for best narrative feature. Outside the
festival, the film was heralded as “powerful,” a
“masterpiece,”
and “a sobering
thriller that puts many human faces on an international
crisis.”
Women in Hollywood interviewed
Griffiths at the time, leading in with
this:
We all think the sex trafficking occurs over there in countries
far, far away. But it happens here ALL THE TIME. … The
thing about trafficking is that it happens in plain sight and many
people in the culture perpetuate it – even guys with
daughters.
It’s a pretty good summary of the standard narrative on
sex-trafficking these days: it’s everywhere, all the time, and we
don’t even know it; the only way to combat it is to keep throwing
cops and money and laws at it; and anyone who questions any of this
is only aiding the evildoers. It’s almost impossible to argue
with people who buy this narrative, because the more
evidence you present
challenging sex trafficking’s pervasiveness, the more they
see proof that sex trafficking is so under the radar we need to
throw more cops and money and laws at it.
As we’ve seen time and again, however, these tactics tend
to under-produce on the stopping sex
trafficking front and overcompensate by targeting
consenting adult sex workers—either by arresting them
or labeling them victims and sending them to things like
“prostitution diversion therapy”—and
their clients. The majority of genuine sex trafficking cases
that are uncovered tend to be
older teenagers—still
terrible, but far from the horror stories we
hear from anti-trafficking advocates, who insist throngs
of young girls are being sold as sex slaves.
And now we are seeing so many of these horror stories fall
apart. First it was Somaly Mam, the activist whose
own sex trafficking story, as well as those of some of her star
“rescues,” turned
out to be false. After years of international support and
acclaim, Mam—a
favorite of The New York Times’ Nicolas
Kristof—was exposed
by Newsweek as a fraud.
Now Kim’s story, too, may be coming apart. Last week Breaking
Out, a nonprofit organization that fights human trafficking of
all forms, posted the following message on
Facebook:
We regretfully want to inform everyone the results of a year
long investigation by our highly experienced investigative unit,
that Chong Kim whom has claimed to be a survivor of human
trafficking is not what she claims to be.After thorough investigation into her story, people, records and
places, as well as, many interviews with producers, publishers and
people from organizations, we found no truth to her story. In fact,
we found a lot of fraud, lies, and most horrifically capitalizing
and making money on an issue where so many people are suffering
from.
According to Breaking Out’s founder, James Barnes, it and
several other organizations were defrauded by Chong, who was
collecting money in their names without actually passing any of it
on. “We are ready with others supporting us to take full legal
action against Chong Kim,” Barnes’ statement said.
Kim responded to
Breaking Out in a Facebook post:
I don’t appreciate you spreading lies about me …
Whatever you claim to have I have the right to see it
otherwise I will send you and your organization a formal
complaint.
In subsequent Facebook updates, Breaking Out elaborated
on its allegations and said it was “working with a
reporter to get an interview” with Kim. (For the record, I reached
out to Kim, with no response.) In an
interview with Christina Parreira, Barnes—a private
investigator for 15 years—explained that Kim approached him about
working together. He agreed, but found parts of her story
suspicious and began poking around.
Earlier this week, Noah Berlatsky wrote at Salon about
“Hollywood’s
dangerous obsession with sex trafficking.” Bertlatsky watched
Eden and did not see the same poignantly realistic drama
so many movie critics had.
The familiarity here is the familiarity of exploitation tropes,
which are clustered about so densely and insistently that it’s hard
to believe anyone missed them. (…) The film isn’t badly made, as
these things go—Jamie Chung as the lead Hyun Jae in particular is
more talented than the script deserves. But that anyone took this
clearly fanciful, clearly derivative fiction for fact is, in
retrospect, somewhat shocking. Even at the time, some folks
saw through it; sex worker Mistress Matisse tried to
convince David Schmader at The Stranger that the whole
thing was bunkum.
Matisse, who
has apparently been patiently poking holes in Chong’s story for a
while, is the one who pointed me to this story. “In the wake of the
Somaly Mam scandal, people are suddenly examining the stories told
by professional anti-trafficking activists more closely,” wrote
Matisse in an email. “Chong Kim’s story was never fact-checked or
substantiated in any way, it has varied quite widely in the
numerous tellings over the years, and it is falling
apart.”
Back to Berlatsky on Eden:
To just point out the most obvious issue, the movie details a
copious number of murders, several of them committed by the main
character herself. This is standard issue for a Hollywood film, but
in real life, this amounts to mass murder, including the killing of
multiple law-enforcement personnel. That’s a major story—if this
happened in anything like the way Kim said, where’s the massive
investigation? Why is this being covered in an entertainment
review, rather than on the front page?
The absense of any attempt at verification—from the authors who
repeated Kim’s story, the journalists who interviewed her, the
organizations that brought her on as a speaker, or any of the
myriad people behind the “based on a true story”
Eden—makes it pretty clear that nobody wanted to find
holes in Kim’s story. We want victim narratives so badly that we
refuse to listen to sex workers when they say they’re not victims
and leap at the chance to tell the stories, no matter how
apocryphal, of those whose tales conform with our expectations.
“Moral panic deployed to appeal to outraged empathy, or
sexploitation deployed to appeal to giggling prurience; they both
function in much the same way,” wrote Berlatsky. And with sex
trafficking tales, we get a two for one. It’s almost too good to
resist. But let’s try.
Here’s Kim on CNN in October 2013:
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