By Michael Hill
Correspondent
Did it sound at the time that it was too good to be true? “Yes, and I said that, too.”
She was in jail fighting a heroin addiction. Another inmate introduced her to a man later known as the International Pimp of the Year, Matthew “Knowledge” Thompkins.
“He told me he had a lawyer. He could help me get my son back. He could get me a nice job.”
Once out, the woman NJTV News has agreed to identify only as MS, began prostituting for Thompkins in Atlantic City, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Miami and Las Vegas making hundreds of dollars a night. The more she worked for “Daddy” the more money he collected and the less she saw her son.
“And obviously his goal was to make money ‘off’ of me, not ‘for’ me to help me,” she said.
She escaped but went back and later wrote that Thompkins had “made me strip naked and beat me with the five-foot-long copper pipe.”
She finally got away for good after two and a half years in the human trafficking ring, and helped the Justice Department sent Thompkins to prison for nearly 24 years.
MS is now a mother of three. Her 13 convictions for prostitution and defiant trespass amount to a life of low-paying jobs, if she could even get those.
“Sometimes I feel useless,” she said.
But, under New Jersey’s Human Trafficking Prevention, Protection and Treatment Act, MS has become the first to have a judge vacate a trafficking victim’s crimes committed under force or threats, and to expunge and seal the record. A New York judge did the same last year and she’s fighting to have it done in other states.
“Once this is done and over with and my background’s completely clear, I have any option I want. I could do anything. I could be anybody. I could go to school for anything but this just has to go away,” she said.
“Walking out of court with our client on Friday, tears of joy in her eyes, there is not a more moving experience as an attorney,” said Geoffrey Rosamond, attorney with McCarter & English.
“It transforms this person from a criminal, which she had been considered in the system previously, to a victim, which she was the entire time. My hope, though, is that this takes it a step further and allows her to make the move from not just a victim but to a survivor, by allowing her to move on with her life,” said Jessica Kitson, attorney with Volunteer Lawyers for Justice.
Assistant Atlantic County Prosecutor Danielle Buckley has been investigating human trafficking cases for 10 years. She says the law was created for cases like MS’.
“She is a very unique individual who did deserve mercy and not condemnation in this situation,” Buckley said.
Gov. Christie signed this act in to law two years ago. It’s one that Volunteer Lawyers for Justice and ones at McCarter & English hope will be used over and over again.
“People should not have to live in fear. Nobody should be the property of somebody else,” Rosamond said.
“Just to help one person the way they’ve helped me, would make me feel like a god,” MS said.
MS plans to become a counselor, to pull people out of the life she bravely left. They’ll listen, she says, because she’ll share the brutal truth of her once brutal reality.