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Doubting LandesmanI'm not the only one questioning the Times Magazine's sex-slave story.

By Jack ShaferPosted Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2004, at 7:19 PM ET

Click here for links to all of Slate's pieces about Landesman's sex-slave article, New York Times Magazine Editor Gerald Marzorati's defense of the article, and Daniel Radosh's blog entry.

Upon rereading Peter Landesman's New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Girls Next Door," viewing the transcripts of his appearances on NPR's Fresh Air and CNN's American Morning, and corresponding with readers, I've got several new observations and questions to add to yesterday's "Press Box" column ("Sex Slaves of West 43^rd Street"). For those who've joined the parade late, yesterday's column rained a shower of doubt on Landesman's descriptions of the American sex-slave trade and his view that it is pervasive, with perhaps tens of thousands enslaved.

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Although the larger focus of Landesman's story is the importation of sex slaves into the United States from Eastern Europe and Mexico, he hangs a good chunk—1,200 words—of his 8,500-word story on the testimony of a woman who does not fit that profile. The woman answers to "Andrea," the name she says traffickers and clients gave her. In his Fresh Air interview, Landesman says Andrea is light-skinned. In the article, Andrea claims not to know her real name and doesn't know how old she is, but she believes she was born in America and was sold or abandoned at about 4 years old by her mother or another woman. Other than that, she seems to have total recall of almost everything that's happened to her since.

While Andrea might be telling the truth about her confinement, some of her anecdotes carry the whiff of urban legend. For instance, she says the traffickers would sometimes transfer her into the custody of clients at Disneyland, as if an amusement park with all its swarming children would offer protective coloration for the sex traffickers. In the article, Andrea tells Landesman she would be dressed in a specific color so that clients would recognize her. This is but a variation on the urban legend cataloged on Snopes.com, in which children are kidnapped from amusement centers.

Furthermore, Andrea claims she spent 12 years in captivity, during which she was trafficked back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border many times by a sex trafficking ring that worked in both countries. Many of my readers asked why traffickers would take such risks and not just leave Andrea in Mexico or the United States.

On Fresh Air, Landesman damages Andrea's status as a source when he mentions that she "suffers from multiple personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder," facts not contained in his Magazine piece. If this is the case, how much of Andrea's story should we believe? Were his editors aware of the mental condition of one of his primary sources? Has Landesman corroborated any of her testimony or is he taking it all at face value?

In his piece, Landesman vaguely alludes to the locations of operating "stash houses" that hold sex slaves, and on American Morning he broadcast the location of yet another, saying:

And let me throw you one more address that I couldn't get into the story for legal reasons. But try the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the East 80s, a brownstone nine blocks from where my parents live, actually.

Why on Earth he's giving vague directions to a slave den to CNN viewers instead of phoning them to police, he doesn't explain. And if it's such a hot tip, why didn't the Times publish it?

Paul Zieke of the Los Angeles Times notes another screwy aspect to the cover story about American sex slaves. He writes:

The cover's main headline says: "Sex Slaves on Main Street," with a subhed that reads, "For tens of thousands of women and girls forced into prostitution around the world, the hell they're living is in the cities and towns of America." The cover photo is of a young girl pictured from the neck down sitting on a bed. She is wearing a school uniform complete with plaid skirt.
But the photo was not taken in America. It was taken in Mexico City, as explained several pages later on the table of contents page. Indeed, all the photos in the article save one were taken in Mexico. There are no photos of anyone connected with the sex trade in America, not even a law enforcement official.

My old pal Neal Matthews, a journalist who has lived in the San Diego area for 30 years, doubts Landesman's reporting that boats transport sex slaves from Baja California to San Diego or points north. Matthews, a former Navy diver who knows his way around the Mexico/California coast, writes:

The more I think about it, the more unlikely it is that these girls are landed by boat. Getting into a boat on the beach on the Mexican side would be tricky, unless you were pretty far south of the border, at a little cove called Popotla, near Fox Studios, about 10 miles south of the line. And unless you landed at Imperial Beach, just north of the border, which is crawling with La Migra [immigration police], you'd have to drive the boat north past Coronado, which is mostly Navy-controlled beaches, and patrolled (it's where the SEALS train). The closest beaches then are in raucous Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, or Pacific Beach, where coming in even at 3 a.m. would be difficult unwitnessed. Beyond that is La Jolla, mostly rocky, and then you'd be getting low on fuel. It's just so unlikely.

In an addendum, Matthews writes:

One other obstacle to getting ashore is the kelp beds and drifting kelp that would require the small craft to travel well offshore, where it's rougher. Of course, you couldn't have any lights on the boats, and the skipper couldn't see unless he had night vision gear. Very dangerous. Somebody would have capsized and bodies would be washing up on the beaches by now. Hasn't happened.

Landesman writes that many sex slaves are regularly murdered by their pimps, prompting this sensible question from Nation columnist Katha Pollitt:

If there are that many sex slaves and if after 2-4 years many are routinely murdered in the brothel, where are all those bodies? It's not that easy to hide a body (or is it? it's not as if I've tried). You would just think that given that sexual slavery has been going on, according to Landesman, for some time, by now there'd be hundreds of unclaimed and unidentified bodies of women and children stacked up in the morgue.

None of this is to dispute the existence of sex slaves in the United States. Women, girls, and boys are transported into the country and pressed into sexual service. In the Plainfield, N.J., case, which Landesman features in his lede, two people got 17-year sentences for enslaving four Mexican girls. (Oddly, Landesman doesn't mention their confession and August 2003 sentencing in his piece. As I noted yesterday, this is a Landesman tick: He repeatedly introduces some dramatic scene like a bust or an open-air brothel and then abandons it, making the reader go whaaa?) But Landesman's story fails on every level to convince me—and 95 percent of Press Box readers who sent me e-mail, I might add—that "perhaps tens of thousands" of women and children are spending the night as sexual chattel. I await real evidence.

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If you're joining the story late, see yesterday's column, "Sex Slaves of West 43rd Street." Send your observation about the Landesman piece to . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Follow him on Twitter.

COMMENTS

Notes From the Fray:

New York Times Magazine Editor Gerald Marzorati responds (to reply click here):

I can understand why Jack Shafer may have found Peter Landesman's story in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "The Girls Next Door," to be almost unbelievable. The nature of human trafficking for the purpose of sex is harrowing, and the notion that there are sex slaves here, among us, in the United States in particularly unsettling. But months of Landesman's reporting and weeks of intensive fact-checking resulted in an article that details a scourge that is real and sizable. Shafer read an 8,600-word article stuffed with quotation, description, and documentation, and dismisses it as unsubstantiated; yet he offers almost nothing in the way of substantiation for his doubts. Content with what amounts to ontological questioning ("I can't DISPROVE the claim…but I seriously doubt its veracity"), he also seems to have no idea—or to have forgotten from his old print days—how difficult it is to report and write about a shadowy, dangerous world, a world that does not lend itself to seamless narratives, numerous on-the-record corroborators, and hard, precise numbers. I will not parse all the attacks on Landesman and the magazine bolstered by little more than blog-esque ad hominem rhetorical flourishes ("whiff", "slippery" and on). But allow me to respond to some of Shafer's specific allegations.

Let me start with his second posting. Shafer seems to doubt the existence of Andrea, or her stories, or both. Landesman contacted her through one of a number of so-called rescue organizations for trafficking victims. He met her several times face-to-face in a location in the United States that she requested not to be disclosed. He and the magazine's researchers also spoke at length to Andrea's therapist, who confirmed the accounts—she has heard them for nearly years—and firmly believes them. Also, the Mexican sex-slave trade, like the drug trade, operates on both sides of the border, and slaves like Andrea can be made to work on both sides of the border.

Shafer thinks the cover image is "screwy", but the girl on the cover, as is noted on page 6 of the magazine, is Montserrat, who is a significant character in the story. As is stated clearly in the piece, she spent time as a sex slave in America and is now back in Mexico under the care and protection of a rescue organization. This fact has been carefully sourced and fact-checked.

Shafer's old pal Neal Matthews thinks it is "unlikely" that girls landed by boat. According to Daniel Saunders, as assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, the six Ukrainian women written about in the story were transported to San Diego by boat on July 4. We also have in our possession an FBI affidavit on trafficking that details various instances of boats transporting undocumented aliens to the marina in San Diego by boat.

As for Katha Pollitt's "sensible" question: The story never says "many" sex slaves are killed. It says sex slaves are "often beaten and sometimes killed" if they try to escape. This is something Landesman was told by a number of girls, and a former madam, and this point was confirmed to our fact-checkers by a number of experts.

Now, as for Shafer's original posting: I am not sure whether he is questioning the estimates Landesman quotes as to the number of sex slaves that might be in America, or the very use of any such numbers in a magazine story of this nature. I'll take up the latter first: Can Shafer think of one form of sex crime (child sexual abuse, ethnic-cleansing rapes) for which numbers are not best-guess estimates? Moreover, can he think of any type of international trafficking done by crime groups (of cocaine, of weapons), the extent of which is not presented as an estimate by reporters and publications in stories about such trafficking? And: does he happen to have information that the estimate we published—and the numbers Landesman printed were clearly described in the story as estimated—was wildly inflated? And: Should journalists simply not write about issues until hard numbers ARE established? And: If we shouldn't have printed an estimate from the president of a leading trafficking advocacy group in America, who should we have gotten an estimate from? And: If the State Department point-man on trafficking says that the advocate's estimate "could be low," how does the estimate, and the state department response, come to confirm, for you: "we do know whose interests are served by any inflation of the numbers." I give up: WHOSE?

It seems unbelievable to Shafer that there could be dozens of active stash houses without the police busting them all. Substitute "crack houses" or "whore houses": still unbelievable? As Landesman writes, the police often can't tell slaves from everyday hookers, and so are not looking for them. This same point is made by a named state department official in the piece. Shafer finds particularly "preposterous" the existence of the sex-slave site among thick reeds in San Diego. The police did raid the site in December of 2001—you can look it up in the Los Angeles Times of December 7, 2001—and found at least 10 slaves. This site and others nearby are also reported on in a three-part series published last year in the Mexican paper El Universal. (Obviously the site, or sites, keep re-opening.) The police did tell Landesman they were planning another raid, which he agreed to keep secret. They also told Landesman, as other cops told him, that building a case against slavery in such instances is very difficult , as the girls are young, frightened of the police AND of their traffickers, and also beholden to the traffickers. They also are well aware they are in the United States illegally, and do not relish a court appearance. It is true that Landesman did not wander in and talk to the girls there—really, I cannot believe how easy Shafer imagines this kind of reporting to be—but he did visit a house in Mexico where girls bound for America were "broken in". All of this reporting in San Diego and in Mexico was carefully sourced and fact-checked.

The web site where the slave appeared to be auctioned: It exists, I know the name of the site, and we decided not to print the name on the grounds of taste and ethics. Was it real? The special Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent thought it looked real. Landesman wrote "supposedly". Many times throughout the article Landesman carefully hedged his statements with qualifiers, but you seem to understand that the use of qualifiers is not to show care but rather to create vagueness.

Finally, yes, Montserrat could not have seen Scary Movie II in Portland, despite having said so both to Landesman and a researcher. She said yesterday that she is no longer sure where she saw it, but that it is one of her favorites. We will be running a correction about that. Thank you for raising doubts about it.

Gerald Marzorati
Editor, New York Times Magazine.

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