Sex workers and The Black Response seek nuance without assumption of trafficking in ‘brothel’ case

Sex workers are asking the public to stop making assumptions about the Cambridge “brothel” case.

“We caution the public and the press against making assumptions about the women who worked in these brothels and their circumstances based on the limited information,” said the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective in a Thursday email. Before assuming there has been trafficking and exploitation of women,“we need to hear testimony from the women themselves.”

Similarly, the Cambridge group The Black Response emailed a statement Wednesday with concerns that the public was not looking at the case with nuance. Though there were “deeply concerning mentions that the individuals involved may have been victims of human trafficking,” the group wanted to “urge the public to resist the urge to conflate consensual sex work with trafficking.”

Inspired by inquiries on its position as names of brothel customers began to be heard, The Black Response said that because its view of the situation is “not rooted in moral panic” or in punishment as a solution, it wants to “humanize” everyone involved. 

A person paying for sex “is not in and of itself a reflection of their character, morality or their capacity to care for their family or community,” the group said. In addition, “we reject the stigmatization of people who engage in sex work.”

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“Federal prosecutors, the media, lawmakers and even advocacy groups often conflate trafficking with consensual sex work, making it difficult for the public to understand the differences,” the BSWAC email said. “Sex workers are often charged with sex trafficking when they attempt to work together for safety.”

With the release of more than two dozen names of customers of the organization, which drew in some 2,800 customers over more than than three years operating in Cambridge, Watertown and Virginia, the name that has stood out locally was of city councillor Paul Toner. Some residents and officials have called for him to resign, many of them citing a role in “sexual violence” and the “exploitation of women.” Patty Nolan and other city councillors noted Friday that “illegal prostitution is inherently exploitative” and they stood with “those hurt by exploitation.”

Citing the case, community groups and organizations addressing related issues and proposed state legislation such as “An Act to Prevent Human Trafficking and Improve the Health and Safety of Sex Workers,” Nolan now has an item on the City Council agenda Monday to have a committee “discuss sex work and sex trafficking.”

Even state Rep. Mike Connolly, a co-sponsor of the legislation to legalize consensual sex work and empower sex workers, agreed on Sunday that Toner should resign, as he was under the impression the operators had pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and “we must reject all forms of sexual coercion and sexual violence, including sex trafficking.”

Others have acknowledged that the way the ring’s operators were prosecuted, though it ended in guilty pleas, leaves them with “more questions than answers.”

The “trafficking” label

The government labeled its initial Nov. 8, 2023, press release about breaking up the ring under only one topic – “human trafficking” – and continued to describe the case under those terms. The media latched onto the term.

Further obscuring the issue is that prosecution of the operators, including Han Lee of Cambridge, included no statements from the women Han and her fellow defendants employed, and instead employed generalizations about sex work. A March 15 sentencing memo by U.S. attorney Leah Foley urging the judge to be tough – and give Han an “above-guideline sentence” – was based on Han’s success in running the ring (“the staggering amount of profits,” as prosecutors put it) while admitting in a footnote that “the evidence gathered during the investigation did not support charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion.” That would have brought a minimum 15-year sentence; Han got four.

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Foley was on staff at the time the office pursued online-rights activist Aaron Swartz for downloading publicly funded articles from scientific journals, ending in Swartz’s suicide in 2013. Prosecutors wanted Swartz to serve 35 years in prison for downloading faster than an academic journal allowed at the time.

Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective, formed in 2023 by sex workers, sex trafficking survivors and allies, agreed there were issues of concern to them in the brothel case suggestive of exploitative conditions, such as the women not being allowed to negotiate their services and prices directly with clients and the availability of services without a condom.

“Other details that have been used to suggest trafficking are more dubious,” it said, noting that the charges Han pleaded to “are not equivalent to sex trafficking.”

“People all over the world choose sex work in order to improve their standard of living, and some migrate across borders to do so. Sex work typically pays better than other forms of work available to immigrants, enabling them to send remittances home to their families or save up to start a better life. Criminalizing either party – worker or client – involved in commercial sex makes everyone less safe,” the group said. Han recruited her workers, largely from Korea.

A “good boss”

The memo from Foley says Han, a sex worker herself before and during the running of the brothels, “was largely motivated by greed, and not life circumstance” and notes that she lived in luxury and ran the business because “she saw how lucrative” commercial sex work could be – yet the memo also criticizes her for running the business while being “well aware of the harms of commercial sex work from her own personal experience working in it.”

Han, the prosector said:

had a reputation among sex workers as being one of the “better” bosses. Indeed, this case did not involve the types of force, fraud or coercion often seen in sex-trafficking cases brought by the government. The victims working for Han were free to leave the brothels. They chose when they would travel to which brothel location and negotiated the length of time that they would remain in either Boston or Virginia. The evidence also showed that Han paid the women a considerable portion of the profits, likely in the realm of 50 percent to 60 percent of the proceeds.

The government, though, suggests “this was not because she cared about their personal well-being, but because she wanted them to return to work for her or encourage the women in the sex worker network to work for Han. Han paid the women at least half of the proceeds earned not because she cared about their livelihood and financial success, but because she wanted the women to tell their friends that Han ‘paid well,’ which, in turn, would generate more women working for Han’s business.” In fact, some women did return to work for Han, and one women in Massachusetts brought a friend to join the ring, Foley said.

“Han’s decision to be a ‘good boss’ was a strategic business decision, not a personal decision,” Foley said, comparing her to fentanyl traffickers who do not physically assault their workers.

The locked door

Despite describing Han as a good employer, Foley’s memo returns to a detail from the November 2023 affidavit that served as the foundation of the case. It was written by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security special agent expert in investigating human trafficking.

The detail, repeated in a February 1, 2024, indictment, was that Han once locked the door of a rented apartment behind her with workers inside awaiting customers. It seems to be the protection’s sole detail supporting the common understanding of trafficking, and Foley’s footnote even describes it as an “exception” to the fact that workers were allowed to leave the apartments where they worked – that “‘investigators observed on video surveillance inside one of the common hallways of the apartment buildings that Han locked the unit door from the outside after the women entered the unit.”

“It does not indicate that the women could not simply unlock the door from the inside,” the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective noted, “as is the case in most apartments.”

An employee of the Atmark, the building where the door-locking took place, said Thursday that all its apartment doors can be unlocked from the inside, and that renters are not allowed to replace locks – currently high-tech devices controlled by smartphone – with their own fixtures.

Perhaps a surprising aspect to the locked door making it into the indictment and sentencing document was how the act was described in the special agent’s affidavit: “I believe Han utilized this tactic so that the commercial sex providers felt that they had to stay in the unit to perform sex acts for cash on behalf of the prostitution network.” This part wasn’t repeated in the documents that followed.

That a door had been locked went on to be used by media such as USA Today and The Boston Globe. The Globe cited the locked door twice in an article in which advocates described sex work as exploitative, with reporters using it as an example of “coercive tactics” that also included “preparing the apartment before the women arrived.”

Humanizing jailing and justice system 

Even in the best case, “we want to acknowledge the serious harm caused by human trafficking and exploitation,” The Black Response said. “If this is an instance of human trafficking, what is being done to support the survivors? … The salacious headlines and individualization of the problem does not allow us as a community to address the deeper systemic processes that makes trafficking and sexual coercion possible.”

The group said it took exception to past statements by Toner that stigmatized and marginalized people who had been in jail or prison, but “we will not take a public position on whether councillor Toner should resign,” it said in the email. “This is a moment for reflection, humility and accountability – not for punishment or political spectacle.”

“We ask him to publicly apologize not only for his actions, but for his past rhetoric,” and for Toner to educate himself on people involved in the justice system – as he now has been – and learn more about the criminal legal system, human trafficking, and the realities of sex work.

“We urge him to listen deeply,” the group said, and work toward its vision “for a world in which no one is criminalized for surviving, where no one is trafficked, and where everyone has the support and freedom they need to live in safety and dignity.”

This story was updated to remove a reference to city councillors calling on Paul Toner to resign. Only councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler has done so.

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