Almost a month ago, I featured the story of yet another “rescue” scam shut down. But as sometimes happens in such cases, the con artist behind it refused to cut her losses and move on; instead, she’s decided to fight to keep the gravy train coming in. And it appears that her motivation is not solely monetary, though given her hefty salary that’s obviously a large part of it; no, it seems that a large portion of what’s driving this is a sick need to control other people without their consent. The unsinkable Liz Brown tells it like this:
Once girls arrived at the house, they were expected to hand over their cellphones. Internet access was also strictly limited—Jenny’s rules. For “her girls” to stay in good graces, they were expected to do as she said, go where she told them to, and be available when she wanted to show them off in photos or at events. It’s the kind of controlling, exploitative situation police warn us that runaway teens are likely to end up in at the hands of…traffickers. But in this case, control came via the people ostensibly helping…under the auspices of an organization called Courage Worldwide…founded in 2011 by Jenny T. Williamson (on direct orders from God, or so she claims)…the girls were supposed to be able to heal in comfort and privacy. Instead, they found themselves cut off from the outside world, with services and staff lacking (one former employee said she was told there was only money for two of the six girls per month to see a psychiatrist), while being subjected to the invasive publicity demands of Williamson…”who micromanaged her trained staff and…frequently…fired [staff] for raising questions about ‘the vision’“…Williamson acted more like the proverbial controlling pimp or madam than someone truly dedicated to helping exploited teenagers…the people who “rescued” them are employing the same sort of isolating and controlling techniques they [supposedly] escaped, treating them more like Courage Worldwide products than people, and publicizing their images and past horror stories to the whole community. DeAnne Brining, a licensed therapist who had contracted with Courage House, described the situation as “abusive” and said Williamson routinely “paraded the girls around” for marketing purposes…
It seems like Williamson’s greed may have been more an extension of her narcissism and control-freakishness than a specimen of garden-variety avarice:
…For her work as CEO of the nonprofit, Williamson paid herself $115,000 in 2015…The group reported net assets of $1.4 million that year. In addition to accepting donations from numerous local businesses, it received about $9,100 in government support per month per girl it took in……[yet] services and staff [were] lacking (one former employee said she was told there was only money for two of the six girls per month to see a psychiatrist)…”state inspections that found numerous violations, including inadequate staffing levels and no current administrator“…Courage Worldwide’s website still touts the organization’s expansion plan, which includes opening 10 new cottages for underage [girls labeled as] sex-trafficking victims…
In keeping with her usual thoroughness, Liz doesn’t merely quote and comment upon the original Sacramento Bee expose as I did last month; instead, she also links another commentary on the item from Broadly, quotes Dr. Laura Agustín, reminds readers about arch-fraudsters Somaly Mam and Chong Kim, and calls attention both to Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking, and to her report in Truthout on the incredible amount of money taken in by US anti-prostitution organizations. As I mentioned last Friday, I’m incredibly grateful for Liz’s hard work; she and other journalists like Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post have relieved me of the burden of debunking “that up until recently I was conducting almost solo, and have brought…anti-whore bullshit to the attention of far more people than this blog ever could.” But apparently, some other writers on this topic are more concerned with something other than winning the war authoritarians have relentlessly waged against us for over a decade now; how else can one explain a tweet from a fairly well-known journalist (who was a sex worker herself years ago) in which she appears to accuse Liz of near-plagiarism (from Broadly), or at least laziness? Part of this may be due to the fact as one of the (former) sex workers who has a weird and inexplicable attraction to socialism (despite that ideology’s consistent attacks on whores and whoring), the critic I speak of has issues with Reason (despite the fact that she herself has been published there). However, given that Reason has consistently supported sex worker rights for years (and in theory, for its entire existence), while Vice (Broadly‘s parent publication) has been happy to enrich itself by frequently publishing anti-whore propaganda, this makes even less sense than the idea that said critic is simply envious that Brown is doing a better and more consistent job of reporting on sex worker rights than she’s ever done. If we’re going to win this war, we’re going to have to set aside petty jealousies and foolish devotion to pie-in-the-sky ideologies; the only important thing is demolishing criminalization and the edifice of lies that’s been constructed to further it, and absurd criticisms of our strongest warriors only work against that goal.
