Sex Trafficking, Lies & Money: Lessons From the Somaly Mam Scandal

[madokie]

Why exactly did the telegenic Cambodian campaigner use fake trafficking victims to raise philanthropic cash from Westerners? And when will Nicholas Kristof ever learn?

First Greg Mortenson, the world-famous author of Three Cups of Tea, raised millions of dollars for schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan that turned out not to exist. Now Somaly Mam, the world-famous Cambodian campaigner against sex trafficking, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, has stepped down from her eponymous foundation in the wake of charges that she fabricated her harrowing autobiography of having been sold into sex slavery as a child. According to an exposé in Newsweek, Mam had a normal childhood and adolescence and is remembered by neighbors as “a happy, pretty girl with pigtails.” Not only did Mam apparently invent her past, she allegedly coached others in her organization, AFESIP, to tell similarly lurid false tales. Long Pross, who has just stepped down as a spokeswoman for the Somaly Mam Foundation, claimed a pimp gouged out her eye; actually, her eye was removed in surgery for a tumor when she was 13. She was never in a brothel. Meas Rotha says Mam auditioned girls for public appearances and told her she had to lie to help other women.

I hope by the time you read these words, Nicholas Kristof will have written more about this than the short blog post available as we go to press, in which he said he is withholding judgment and promised to “poke around” more. Kristof heavily promoted Mam in his New York Times column as “one of my heroes,” accompanied her on “rescues” of girls being held in brothels and pretty much swallowed whole everything she told him—for example, that her 14-year-old daughter had been kidnapped and raped by traffickers in revenge for Mam’s work (according to Mam’s ex-husband, the girl ran off with a boyfriend). Until the other day, she was featured on the PBS website for his documentary Half the Sky, in which she appeared. I’m not holding my breath, though: Kristof promoted Mortenson, too, and when the bad news came down, chalked his malfeasance up to “disorganization.”

What is the old adage? Fool me once…

I will gladly grant that it isn’t easy to figure out what really goes on in NGOs far away, or even near at hand. Every year I worry that a group I feature in my holiday donations column will turn out to be less than meets the eye. But Kristof was not, like me, sitting at a desk in Manhattan. He is a world-traveling, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who spent plenty of time in Cambodia and had all the resources of the Times at his command. Moreover, suspicion about Mam had been building for some time. The English-language Cambodia Daily has been publishing investigative reports on her for the past two years. Is it asking too much of a newspaperman that he should read the papers?

http://www.thenation.com/article/180132/sex-trafficking-lies-money-lessons-somaly-mam-scandal

[oberliner]

1. Sad story

What is your take on it all?