When people knowingly say, “Your 20s are your 20s for a reason,” or, “God, you couldn’t pay me enough to do that again,” I join them, even when I know we don’t mean the same thing.
I watch from the outside-in as my peers share pictures of their wild days and late nights—in chunky necklaces and cold-shoulders, swilling down Jagerbombs while Mr. Worldwide hypes up the whole room, gauzy memories of too many early mornings walking home on one broken heel, hungover and famished.
I never thought I wanted these memories, because I don’t have them. Instead, I have a disparate puzzle of too many nights hiding alone in my hovel of a house, my stomach sick with fear and anxiety after being scammed duped swindled
Those words never felt right, conveying annoyance, a pain in the ass—not the icy fear that gripped me for years. Fifteen years later, I learned the truth:
trafficked.
A year after college, I’m a working actor. It’s 2007, and I’m performing on my first paid contract—making $20 in cash per show in a children’s theatre production of “The Little Mermaid,” an original musical that is not yet in the shadow of Disney’s Broadway hopeful. My days are regimented while my peers live for the night: I am up by 5 and in the city by 7, singing my heart out for 16 bars in studio after studio, waiting for the next sweet gig to land. I sling soap at LUSH for 8 hours after. When I come home, I crawl through the trades—NYCastings, Backstage, Actors Access, Jagger Kaye’s listserv (a golden oldie for those who remember).
When I find a listing for a new production company seeking funny and talented young women for a variety hour and a whole slate of projects, it all looks legit. At this familiar audition studio, there are men in suits signing us in, taking our headshots. I coo the same 16 bars I sang at 7am, and deliver my scathing Rosie O’Donnell monologue from Beautiful Girls. I and several other women are held for an immediate callback—a meeting with Theresa*, the VP of the company.
Theresa is the picture of success. In a sharp white suit with a sleek, platinum bob, she’s engaging and smart—reserved with just enough warmth—and we are all mesmerized by her. We want to work for her, to make whatever she’s making. By the end of this callback interview, we are offered to join her repertory cast.
Days later, a town car delivers me to a production meeting in the Empire State Building, the only time I had ever been. I go up the countless floors to find a conference room full of incredible young women of all backgrounds—singers, dancers, actors—filling out their start work papers. We bond immediately as theatre family does.
When someone finally walks in, it’s not Theresa, but Max*—the president, the beating heart behind this company, with his own storied career behind him. He is loud and fun and jubilant and charming and cool, and he drops names like Mr. Bean holding a stack of fine china. He introduces us to the production slate: a powerpoint of movies, television pilots, stage shows, and galas, all in development with us attached as talent.
There’s too much to cover in just one day, so we come back for weeks, receiving handsome paychecks for our time in development as we build out plotlines and releases. The men in suits deliver us Guy & Gallard paninis and tall iced teas as we excitedly plow through long work days, anxiously waiting to collaborate with Theresa.
The towncars take us home later and later, never delivering us to our doorsteps before 3am. We wait hours in vain for Theresa, for food, for the men in suits to stop their hushed conversations and let us go for the night. We start hounding them for paychecks. We need to go back to our old jobs if you’re not going to pay us, we say. I’m mortified to draw from my savings, blowing through what my grandma left me that was pristine, untouched. After more hushed conversations, an envelope is stuffed into my palm that lets me breathe for another month.
Max is getting increasingly cagey, his earlier enthusiasm skewered with menace, excoriating us in this windowless room when we ask to be fed or to go home. We quickly learn to stop asking, to simply be grateful that we made it home at all.
A man from Verizon comes to what I lovingly call my hovel, a rental share that is terrible but mine. He installs a phone line in my room, “in case you need to be reached.” It’s fine. Max told us to expect this. I lie in my bed and stare at that phone hanging on the wall, ghastly lit by moonlight, sure it can hear me breathing.
A gala is held in a soaring ballroom of the Walfdorf-Astoria, where we are introduced like debutantes. Theresa is nowhere to be seen.
The phone starts ringing and it won’t stop. I am terrified to pick it up. It’s not the men in suits listening, but collection departments from Citibank, Discover, Chase, Bank of America, over and over. Where is your payment. Your bills are outstanding. When I tell the men in suits about these calls, they tell me to ignore them. It’s just company cards.
To boost morale, Max sends us on a mandatory company cruise. We’ll all be flown from JFK to Puerto Rico, where we’ll embark upon a one-week Carnival cruise. We’ll be shooting a music video for their up-and-coming recording artist, a woman who Google has entirely disappeared, taking exotic island pictures for our portfolios.
I don’t remember anything about this trip.
When we get back, we are dizzy with distortion. The luxury of the cruise, the Waldorf, the office, crossed with the endless timesuck with no food, no news, no money in a windowless room, Max screaming and raging. My savings has dwindled down to pocket change. Girls start dropping like flies.
I get a hushed phone call from two other girls who I’ve not seen in weeks.
Jen? Are you home? E-mail them and tell them you’re sick.
I white-knuckle the phone as they tell me everything. Theresa was just the bait. Our work papers were used to open credit cards, loans, whole businesses. They’re sapping us for everything our virginal credit scores will allow, and they have been for nearly 6 months, landing us tens of thousands in fraudulent debt.
Still worse, Max had been grooming, controlling, and sexually assaulting several of our members.
You can’t warn anyone. They don’t know we know. They can’t know we know.
I email the men in suits, telling them I have a cold, and we call the police. We’re grilled for weeks by the DA, then the FBI.
I live in such abject terror that my whole world closes in like a shell. I shakily ask Verizon to remove the phone, but the feeling of being bugged won’t go away. I refuse to go into the city. I barely leave my house, sure they’re monitoring me.
I want to tell you all that justice won in the end, but it didn’t. Max and the men in suits flee for Los Angeles, where they will do it again, just as successfully. The FBI case goes cold and the detectives stop returning my calls. When I eventually screw up the courage to go back to work at LUSH, my anxiety is a tripwire, certain someone will snatch me right off 34th Street on my way to the train.
All these years later, and I can barely remember more than whispers of this time, of 23, 24. Those friendships, once a sisterhood, dissipated in the dangerous wake of what had happened. Any remaining closeness felt like a target on our backs. There were quiet unfriendings and erasing from phones. I curled up in my tiny room through the spring, finally emerging to quietly do a musical far, far away, in a children’s theatre castle.
Max and the suits have since scrubbed the internet of any proof of life. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened, but my credit report still bears the scars of fraudulent jobs I never worked, fraudulent places I never lived. Deep Googling finally leads me to Theresa–someone who now works incognito among children and artists. Her hair isn’t that severe, iconic platinum anymore.
We have 7 mutual friends.
I wonder if she worries I will see her on 34th Street, too.
xx Jen
This is wild, Jen. I am so sorry. I also appreciate the Jagger Kaye reference!
Ho-lee shit. How terrible. I'm so sorry this happened to you.