Some of the highest-profile defendants in sexual assault cases in recent years, including R. Kelly, Sean Combs and Jeffrey Epstein, have been charged by federal prosecutors not with rape but with sex trafficking.
The reason is often strategic. The United States has sweeping laws against human trafficking, a crime that involves coercing another person into forced labor or sex.
Lawyers use human-trafficking laws, in both criminal and civil cases, because the statutes are broad and include language that can define a variety of crimes, according to experts. And many human trafficking cases involve sex trafficking, often with girls who are underage. Sexual assault cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute — they often lack reliable physical evidence and hinge on testimony from victims.
So applying sex-trafficking laws in cases where defendants are accused of pattern of repeated sexual assault offers prosecutors an additional tool with which to potentially earn a conviction.
How does the law define sex trafficking?
Sex trafficking is a type of human trafficking. Often defined as a form of modern-day slavery, human trafficking involves using force, fraud or coercion to compel another human being to provide some sort of labor. In cases of sex trafficking, that labor is sex.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, there is no reliable estimate of how many people in the United States are trafficked each year, but human trafficking has been reported in all 50 states.
When prosecutors began their opening arguments in the high-profile trial of Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander last month, they described how the three brothers worked as a team, for nearly two decades, to commit the crime of sexual assault over and over again.
But the millionaire brothers, two of whom were once among the top-earning real estate agents in the United States, are not on trial on rape charges. Together they face 12 combined charges of federal crimes, all of which are related to sex trafficking.
Are sex trafficking charges being used more often?
Yes. The Justice Department said that U.S. attorneys prosecuted 1,782 human trafficking cases in 2023, an increase of 73 percent from 2013.
Because often prosecutors’ “hands are tied with bringing allegations that squarely fit within the witness testimony, they are looking elsewhere for other types of laws that could potentially fit the bill,” said Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, a human trafficking expert who regularly appears as an expert witness in criminal trials, for both prosecution and defense teams. She has not been called to testify in the trial of the Alexander brothers.
What other prominent cases were tied to sex trafficking?
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking, involving minors as young of 14. He never stood trial in that case because he died by suicide in jail. His longtime partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was arrested in July 2020, is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to groom, traffic and sexually exploit minor girls.
The allegations in those cases fit clearly within the parameters of human trafficking. Mr. Epstein, with Ms. Maxwell’s assistance, recruited vulnerable girls and women for more than a decade, enticing them with money, security and other perks, before forcing them to engage in sex acts.
Harvey Weinstein, who is in prison for a 2022 sexual assault conviction, has faced several civil lawsuits in which his accusers have leaned on federal sex trafficking laws in order to sue.
R. Kelly is also serving a 30-year prison sentence after a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted the singer of crimes including sexual exploitation of children and sex trafficking.
In other high-profile cases, however, juries determined that prosectors did not clear the bar to convict someone for sex trafficking.
Mr. Combs, known as Diddy, was charged in 2024 with a conspiracy that included sex trafficking. He was found innocent of most of the charges against him last year, although a federal jury in Manhattan did convict him of two lesser charges of transporting women for the purposes of prostitution. He is serving time for those charges in a New Jersey prison, with an expected release date of May 2028.
Charging a sexual assault case as sex trafficking can be a gamble that also puts survivors of human trafficking at risk, Ms. Mehlman-Orozco said.
“If they’re pleading something that they know is not a modern form of slavery, but they’re using it because it offers a litigation advantage, it can make people more reticent to believe trafficking allegations,” she said. “Even if it’s used in the short term as a tool, in the long term it can do more harm than good.”
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
The post Why Prosecutors in Sex-Crime Cases Often Turn to Trafficking Laws appeared first on New York Times.
