Rebecca Bender: Tale of a sex trafficking survivor

In Pursuit of Love: One Woman's Journey from Trafficked to Triumphant, is a harrowing story about an honour-roll Oregon State University architectural student. Lured from studying and coyly trafficked to the desert of Las Vegas, Nevada. She was brainwashed from impeding danger, seduced into believing in an opulent life and coerced into prostitution.

Her face was broken in four different places. She was almost chocked to death by one of her buyers and two of her traffickers tattooed their names on her back, like a slave.

Rebecca Bender never dreamt of a life in prostitution. Her new boyfriend Bryan, who she met in campus, feigned a career as a record producer and music manager, fascinating her. They had dated briefly and he had flown her on lavish weekend trips to Las Vegas. Bryan convinced Rebecca to move with her infant daughter Deshae Wise, to Vegas. She accepted without noticing a preliminary process of mind contamination had commenced.

Booking agency

Bryan, was a master manipulator. When they arrived in Vegas, on January 2001, he left Deshae in a secluded location and drove Rebecca to the Eiffel tower shaped Paris Hotel car park. He asked her to exit and directed her to walk and register in an escort agency called, Girls to You. When she protested, he slapped her, and affirmed that he had to recoup the money he had spent on her. She tearfully obliged, fearing for the security of her daughter Deshae. She was provided with a pseudonym, Kelby.

She felt stupid for not having understood the cost. Since prostitution is illegal in Vegas, escort agencies disguised prostitutes as dancers, when sending them to high-end hotel rooms. This permitted the booking agency to legally camouflage the prostitute they had sent, if she was arrested by cops.

When Rebecca would receive calls from the agency, Bryan would drive her to hotels. The escort service would deduct $150 (Ksh18,600) from each pay leaving the rest for the working girl.

Bryan coached Rebecca to begin each client negotiation at $600(Ksh74,600). The hotels she was sent to were eminent hospitality brands. All located in close proximity to the exalted street, the Vegas Strip, which has over 70 hotels. Traditionally, prostitutes were conscripted by street pimps, who violently hounded them to sleep with buyers.

Modern pimps like Bryan, concealed themselves as boyfriends and exerted a different mental approach. Besides enforcing consistent violence, they extracted all their call-girls’ money, but regularly rewarded them with exorbitant shopping sprees. To increase their addiction to the lifestyle, Rebecca was often taken shopping to designer outlets in the famous Vegas Boulevard. Bryan later handed her a midnight blue Mercedes CLS 500 worth $80,000(Ksh10 million), purchased under his name.

Broken home

He also dangled the carrot of marriage. Bryan knew Rebecca profoundly craved for a family, since she grew up in a broken home. He instigated her daily, to generate excess money for them to invest and retire on. On profitable nights, Rebecca accumulated a minimum net of $1,800 (Ksh22,400). All was handed to Bryan.

She endured hours of sleep deprivation, vicious beatings from Bryan, arrests by undercover cops, and fights with Bryan's other working girls. She unknowingly suffered from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Stockholm syndrome and an addiction to shopping sprees. A mental combination that initially prevented her from escaping. To cope with neurosis, she fell victim to cocaine addiction.

In January 2003, she enrolled into Victory Outreach Centre, in Battle Ground Washington and underwent cocaine detox. After a few days, the addiction cravings lessened. Her Stockholm syndrome led her to call Bryan, after a year in the facility.

"I’d never even heard of human trafficking. I considered myself to be a prostitute with a boyfriend who beat me." Rebecca writes. "I didn’t understand how the complexities of force, fraud, or coercion had played out in my everyday life."

After her return to Las Vegas, Kevin Barker recruited her. A wealthy and violent pimp with an excessive compulsive disorder and a split personality. Kevin exploited his working girls' money to engage in fraud by obtaining bank loans in his call-girls' false names. He diverted the loans and bought real estate and sports cars, while exerting women to work through their menstrual cycle.

In May 2007, he viciously assaulted Rebecca, almost killing her. She fled back to Oregon with her daughter Deshae. Kevin was eventually arrested and sentenced to a meagre 24 months in prison.

Rebecca Bender is currently a social activist who equips professionals and organisations on identification and repudiation of human trafficking. She assists the American homeland security as a detector of trafficking. Rebecca also creates awareness on crimes against women. Her trainings have endowed over 100,000 individuals and institutions.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother