In 2018, a young, black girl from Milwaukee named Chrystul Kizer shot and killed a 34-year-old man named Randy Volar III. Chrystul was 17 at the time. This act put an end to over a year of sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation perpetrated by Volar against Kizer, starting when she was just 16 years old.
Chrystul first met Volar through Backpage.com, a website notorious for facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking that has since been seized by the U.S. government. At the time, Chrystul and her family were in a vulnerable position, recently out of a homeless shelter after fleeing a domestic abuser and supported by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet. Taking matters into her own hands, Chrystul placed an ad on Backpage.com to help with some expenses, and Volar was the first to respond.
He soon began showering Chrystul with gifts, money, drugs, and extravagant dates in exchange for sex acts with the young girl. He even paid her bail after she was arrested on charges relating to driving a stolen vehicle. Growing up in poverty, this was Kizer’s first experience receiving the financial support that she longed for. Kizer later expressed feeling manipulated by the gifts and said that Volar took advantage of her trust in adults. At one point, Kizer’s dependence on Volar became so strong that she described him as “her only friend.”
In the month’s leading up to his death, Volar was actively being investigated by local police for child sex trafficking. During a police investigation in 2019, police found Volar to have hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse, including more than 20 he’d filmed himself. Some of those videos showed Chrystul engaged in sex acts. Among Volar’s other alleged victims is a fifteen-year-old girl who officers found “in the street, drugged and shirtless” after receiving a 911 call from inside Volar’s house. This young girl made additional accusations of Volar, claiming that he had been paying her for sex since she was only fourteen years old. She warned them that he was also filming his abuse of other girls, including one named “Chrystal.”
Volar was arrested and charged with child enticement and child sexual assault related to the child sexual abuse material found in his house. However, he was released later that day while officers waited to verify that the young girls on his videos were minors. Although there was no concrete confirmation, investigators stated that some of the girls in the videos appeared to be as young as twelve years old.
Then, on June 4, 2018, she had enough of Volar’s incessant abuse. After turning down sexual advances from Volar, he pinned her to the ground in frustration. Kizer claims that she then grabbed a gun from her purse and shot Volar before she fled the scene in his car.
At only sixteen years old, Kizer was still a minor, and “[u]nder federal law, no minor can consent to being bought or sold for sex, regardless of the circumstances.” Indeed, the alleged acts Volar committed forced Kizer into a vulnerable situation before she understood what sex trafficking was.
These actions, if supported, would make Kizer a victim of human trafficking. In addition to claims that Volar was personally assaulting Kizer, she also alleges that Volar was trafficking her to other men in exchange for money. These alleged crimes were recorded on video, revealing that Kizer and many other young women were all potential victims of Volar’s actions.
In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Kizer could argue that the shooting of Volar was justified due to his abuse he put her through, making her a victim of sex trafficking. The court affirmed that “victims of human trafficking or child sex trafficking have ‘an affirmative defense for any offense committed as a direct result’ of the trafficking.” Accordingly, this statute provided Kizer with an affirmative defense for the charge of first-degree intentional homicide.
After the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision, Kizer had a choice; she could either proceed to trial with the risk of receiving a life sentence, or take a plea deal. Kizer ultimately chose to take the plea instead of facing the criminal justice system and the embedded consequences of systemic racism.
Since Kizer’s case appeared in the national spotlight, there were over a million signatures urging the District Attorney’s office to drop the charges against her.
Chrystul Kizer was ultimately sentenced to 11 years in prison and an additional five years of state supervision after she pleaded guilty in May. She pleaded to one count of reckless homicide according to Kenosha County Court documents.
Although Chrystul did not choose to proceed to trial and argue for the application of her affirmative defense, the CSE Institute commends Wisconsin for recognizing the importance of providing survivors with an affirmative defense. Victims of commercial sexual exploitation and human trafficking are often put in situations that require them to commit crimes as a direct result of their trafficking, such as street crime, begging, or drug trafficking. We urge states to consider the existence of forced criminality when crafting laws to provide for affirmative defenses like Wisconsin’s.
The CSE Institute will continue to provide updates as they become available.
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.