Three individuals have been indicted in Montgomery County for their roles in forcing a young woman into prostitution, according to a report by The Times Herald. The Attorney General’s office began their investigation in early October of last year, after a detective with the Upper Merion Police Department’s Special Investigation Unit was working on a case involving the solicitation of commercial sex through Backpage.com, a website synonymous with prostitution and trafficking. The detective responded to an advertisement on the website and arranged a meeting with the woman later discovered to be a trafficking victim at the Hampton Inn off of West Dekalb Pike in King of Prussia.
The victim allegedly asked numerous questions of the detective, geared at determining whether they were part of law enforcement. When investigators arrived at the Hampton Inn, they identified themselves and offered their assistance. The victim refused their help, but allegedly claimed that the people she was working for were in possession of her identification.
Later that same day, an Uber driver was sent to drive the victim to another location. She then allegedly told that driver that she needed to stop and get a money order. While they were stopped, the man who allegedly ordered the Uber, Kashamba Jahmal John, called the driver and asked if the police had followed them. John was later determined to have been one of the persons responsible for the victim’s trafficking. The Uber driver let the victim know about the suspicious call, which lead her to become “hysterical” and ask to be taken to the police. The driver then took the victim to a state trooper parked on the side of road.
Once the police were able to interview the victim, she told them she was 21 years of age and had been told by a man named, Tyler Batchel, at a club in Los Angeles that she could make $12,000 as an escort coming to the East Coast with him. Tyler also told her that she would not be required to have sex with the clients.
According the victim, arrangements were made for her to travel to Atlanta where she first met John and a woman named, Arianna Somerville. They confiscated her belongings, including her ID, and took her to a hotel room where men would come expecting sex from her. The victim told authorities that she was supposed to have sex with between 20 and 30 men per day during 14-hour shifts. She could not keep any money and was provided with little to no food. One time, when she did ask John for food, he allegedly forced her to drink alcohol and then raped her.
State police began investigating John and found that he had been previously arrested for human trafficking in West Palm Beach, Florida and for prostitution-related offenses in Secaucus, New Jersey. According to The Times Herald, police looked through the victim’s cellphone and pieced together a timeline of events, beginning with her recruitment by Batchel in California. Her text messages to Batchel revealed that she referred to John as “boss” and that she worried she had become a “slave” to the traffickers. Batchel admitted to police that he had indeed recruited the victim to work for John and arranged her flight to Atlanta as a way to repay a debt he owed to him. Somerville and Batchel now all face trafficking, conspiracy, and an extensive list of involuntary servitude charges.
The type of manipulation used by the traffickers in this situation is an all too common occurrence. Traffickers often employ false promises as a tactic to lure victims into trusting them. Through the diligence of the Attorney General’s Office, Upper Merion Police Department’s Special Investigation Unit and the State Police, this complex and national-scale trafficking operation was investigated and its’ details uncovered. In the primarily underground world of commercial sexual exploitation, every piece of information that can be gleaned about the tactics, practices, and patterns of traffickers can ultimately be used to help authorities in properly identifying future victims. The CSE Institute also praises the work of the Attorney General’s Office in convening an investigative grand jury and ultimately charging these offenders with trafficking and other appropriate related offenses. We will provide updates on this case, as the proceedings continue to unfold.
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.