© The Times-Picayune
Amid the parties and fun of
Super Bowl 2013, authorities say, there is a dark underworld of girls and women being forced into the sex trade. Sitting in the festive lobby of a New Orleans hotel, festooned with San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens decorations, Clemmie Greenlee, a former victim of sex trafficking from Nashville, recalled being brought to cities around the South to prostitute for those attending such large-scale events.
For Greenlee's pimps, the influx of people provided a massive money-making opportunity.
"When they come to these kinds of events, the first thing you're told is how many you're gonna perform a day," she said Friday. "You've got to go through 25 men a day, or you're going through 50 of them. When they give you that number, you better make that number."
Having been abducted and gang-raped by her captors at age 12, Greenlee said, she was one of about eight girls controlled by a ring of pimps, men who injected them with heroin and, at times, kept them handcuffed to beds. For trying to run away, she was once stabbed in the back.
Now 53, Greenlee works at Eden House in Uptown New Orleans, the first shelter for sex-trafficking victims in Louisiana; the center opened in October 2012.
"If you don't make that number (of sex customers), you're going to dearly, dearly, severely pay for it," Greenlee said. "I mean with beatings, I mean with over and over rapings. With just straight torture. The worst torture they put on you is when they make you watch the other girl get tortured because of your mistake."
Comment: Read the following forum thread to learn more about other recent cases of train accidents.