Adam LaRoche is a 36-year-old who played Major League baseball for 12 seasons before causing a ruckus by retiring earlier this year after his team, the Chicago White Sox, reportedly told him to stop bringing his semi-home-schooled 14-year-old son to the clubhouse so often. On Wednesday, ESPN published a long feature on LaRoche’s worldview, which opens by revealing that the first baseman, a conservative Christian, “spent 10 days in November in Southeast Asian brothels, wearing a hidden camera and doing undercover work to help rescue underage sex slaves.”
The piece goes on to explain that LaRoche went on the trip with a Milwaukee Brewers pitcher named Blaine Boyer:
Working through a nonprofit called the Exodus Road, LaRoche and Boyer conducted surveillance in brothels and tried to determine the age of the girls—known only by numbers pinned to bikinis—and identify their bosses.
Boyer’s description of the trip:
“If you make a wrong move, you’re getting tossed off a building. We were in deep, man, but that’s the way it needed to be done. Adam and I truly believe God brought us there and said, ‘This is what I have for you boys.’”
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Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote about the evangelical Christian movement’s increasing—and sometimes controversial—involvement in sex-trafficking activism in March 2015.
