In December of last year, the Delaware County District Attorney charged Matthew Sipps with several charges including Patronizing Victim of Sexual Servitude under the Commonwealth’s comprehensive human trafficking statute. On Friday, September 9th, 2017, according to Daily Times News, a jury found Sipps guilty of all charges. On several separate occasions in 2015, Sipps arranged to buy sex from a 16-year-old girl at a motel in Marple Shade, New Jersey through a site commonly used by sex buyers to connect with prostituted persons, Backpage.com.
According to The Daily Times News, the victim had informed Sipps that she was underage and that she had runway from her home prior to Sipps bringing her to the residence he shared with his mother and adult brothers. The victim had been isolated from the other people in the house, and claimed Sipps would not allow her to leave. She was held in Sipp’s home for about one month until she was able to call her mother in Rhode Island and escape.
The Assistant District Attorney on the case, Alan Borowsky, considers Sipp’s guilty verdict “a victory and a voice for human trafficking survivors everywhere.” ADA Borowsky commends the survivor in this case for “having the courage to come to court and tell her story, [. . . which in turn] helped bring human trafficking out of the shadows and into our consciousness.”
While this one case does not end all human trafficking, ADA Borowsky acknowledges that one survivor’s voice can encourage other survivors to speak up and know that they will be believed and that justice can prevail. We commend the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office and Assitant District Attorney Borowsky for this successful prosecution and for their ongoing efforts to combat commercial sexual exploitation by giving survivors of trafficking a voice in our legal system.
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University