Why Did Nicholas Kristof Believe Somaly Mam’s Lies?

Last week, Somaly Mam resigned from the
foundation she co-founded seven years ago. Mam,
dubbed “the James Frey of anti–sex trafficking activism” by my
colleage Elizabeth Nolan Brown, achieved her fame by telling the
world that she had been forced to work in a Cambodian brothel as a
child and that her group rescued girls who had suffered a similar
fate. For several years, journalists have been questioning
many of Mam’s claims. Those investigations culminated last month in
a devastating Newsweek
piece that showed Mam had lied repeatedly both about her
own life and about the experiences of the people she says she
rescued. One of the latter, Newsweek reports, “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.” In
March, the Somaly Mam Foundation launched an investigation of its
own, which ended with Mam stepping down. Her carefully cultivated
image as a victim-turned-savior had fallen apart.

Yesterday a second shoe started to drop. Mam’s greatest champion
in the American press has been Nicholas Kristof of The New York
Times, who has praised the woman in incandescent terms and
even went for a
ride-along on one of her brothel raids. In a brief
blog post published Monday, Kristof says he doesn’t “know
quite what to think” about the controversy, and that he’s
“reluctant to be an arbiter of her back story when I just don’t
know what is true and false.” He offers some reasons one might
doubt a few (hardly all) of the accusations against Mam, and he
promises to “poke around” for the facts. All in all a rather weak
response, given that some of these charges have been out there
for
years now. This surely isn’t the first time Kristof has heard
any of them, though it may be the first time he’s had to think
about taking them seriously.

While Kristof cautiously pokes around, the rest of us should
probe more deeply. As I
never tire of saying, a legend that catches on tells us
something about the worldview of the people who believe it, even if
the story itself is largely or entirely false. So why do people
like Kristof swallow deceptions like Mam’s? Where do these tales
get their power, and what are their consequences?

Mam was in the business of producing captivity narratives, and
the captivity narrative is a primal storyline in American culture.
As early as 1682, settlers were publishing accounts of being held
prisoner by Indians, establishing a formula that has manifested
itself in tales ranging from cowboy novels to Vietnam movies.

In
Regeneration Through Violence, the literary historian
Richard Slotkin described the archetypal captivity scenario:

a single individual, usually a
woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue
by the grace of God….In the Indian’s devilish clutches, the
captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage
and/or the Indian’s “cannibal” Eucharist. To partake of the
Indian’s love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to
un-English the very soul.

This is by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. (Before
anybody was producing captivity narratives in the New World,
Englishmen were printing memoirs of their alleged experiences in
the hands of the Barbary pirates.) But the story is well ingrained
in our culture, and it is tied up—as Slotkin’s reference to “the
Indian’s love” implies—with a bunch of sexual anxieties. One
particularly lurid branch of the captivity-story family tree is the
series of white
slavery narratives that flourished in the early 20th
century. These books, films, and articles offered sensationalist
accounts of women coerced into prostitution, often by the agents of
a vast trafficking conspiracy.

Those stories offered a deeply
distorted view of prostitution as it was actually practiced,
but they were widely believed, and they had a lasting impact not
just on American culture but on American law. As Thaddeus Russell
recently
wrote in Reason, the moral panic that fed and was fed
by the white slavery narratives

helped create, expand, and strengthen the police powers of an
array of government agencies. Since the onset of the panic, those
agencies have imprisoned and sterilized hundreds of thousands of
women who worked as prostitutes, taken their children from them,
forced them onto the streets and into dependent relationships with
male criminals, and made their jobs among the most dangerous in the
world.

Those same government agencies also prosecuted black, Jewish,
Latino, and Asian men for simply having intimate relations with
white women; tightened restrictions on immigration; established
precedents for some of the worst government violations of privacy
and civil liberties in American history; and formed the basis of
the modern surveillance state.

Needles to say, none of this history in itself means that Mam
made up her tales. Captivity itself is obviously real. Many Indian
captivity tales were written by people who really had been held
prisoner by native tribes, and coerced prostitution certainly does
exist. We know Mam is a fabulist because of the detailed reporting
exposing her lies, not because those lies took a familiar form.

The point is that the captivity narrative is a genre. If you
do invent a story, it provides a resonant formula for your
deceptions. And that formula is going to be especially resonant for
someone like Kristof, a man who seems especially
susceptible to the white-savior fantasies that tales like this
tend to foster.

In his blog post, Kristof worries that
“the debate about Somaly’s back story will overtake the imperative
of ending the trafficking of young teenagers into brothels”; he
stresses that “this is about more than one woman.” He does not
ponder the question of whether any of those additional women have
been injured by the lies he helped to spread. Stopping sexual
slavery is obviously a worthy goal, but the single-minded focus on
ending traffic “into brothels” has diverted resources from
preventing
much more common forms of coerced labor—especially since the
crackdown has frequently fallen on sex workers who were not in fact
being trafficked. “Some of the ‘victims’ whom Ms. Mam said she
saved then attempted to escape from her shelters,” Melissa Gira
Grant
notes in a New York Times op-ed, “only to
have her claim to the press that they had been ‘kidnapped.'” (Here
too we see echoes of earlier captivity legends. Books like Maria
Monk’s
Awful Disclosures, a 19th-century hoax by an alleged
ex-nun who claimed that convents were sexual prisons, sometimes led
Protestants to raid nunneries to “free” the women who lived
there.)

As Grant points out, the

International Labor Organization estimates
that more than three times as many people are trafficked into work
like domestic, garment and agricultural labor than those trafficked
for sex. I’ve interviewed human-rights advocates in Phnom Penh
since 2007, and they raised concerns about Ms. Mam’s distortion of
this reality. Her portrayal of all sex workers as victims in need
of saving encouraged raids and rescue operations that only hurt the
sex workers themselves.

In 2008, Cambodia enacted new prohibitions on commercial sex, after
the country was placed on a watch list by the State Department. In
brutal raids on brothels and in parks, as reported by the Asia
Pacific Network of Sex Workers in a 2008 documentary, women were
chased down, detained and assaulted. The State Department commended
Cambodia for its law and removed the country from the watch
list.

Human Rights Watch later conducted interviews with 94 sex workers
in Cambodia for a
2010 report. “Two days after my arrival, I was caught when I
tried to escape,” one woman said. “Five guards beat me up. When I
used my arms to shield my face and head from their blows, they beat
my arms. The guard threatened to slit our throats if we tried to
escape a second time, and said our bodies would be cremated
there.”

She was describing a “rescue” and detention at the Prey Speu Social
Affairs center near Phnom Penh.

Like I said, some captivity stories are true. They just aren’t
always the ones you’ve been hearing. In trying to expose one form
of abuse, Nicholas Kristof enabled another.