My human trafficking experience during my modeling trip in Greece

Healing is in cycles my therapist taught me. I keep learning that deeper and deeper in cycles. I have always dreamed to share my story and be able to connect with other people in the world. I felt much of my childhood was stuck inside of my self. I couldn’t describe to you what the feeling of youth is. I wonder if that’s because of dissociation? Are we supposed to know what one bucket and phase of life is supposed to feel like versus another? Maybe it’s like how you wouldn’t know if the seasons changed without the weather. Maybe I never understood the concept without the presence of a real mother, or even my father.

I’m trying to work through my own inner healing journey to find out better how I should feel in the world. Trust me, I’ve looked under many rocks by now. I will say that there’s a little bit of truth about what everyone says. It makes sense though. All we are in this world are our own perceptions and collected external observations we deem as worthy to tack into our world view and personality. Each person sees with a different lens. Some see the world through the mirage of a garden with flowers. Others trap people away in iron cages; out of sight out of mind.

One bucket in life that I dropped into was the world of modeling. There were limited agencies you wanted to be with during this time because “Instagram Modeling” we called it (aside from all the other random platforms like Model Mayhem), had yet to gain traction. People eventually started to become their own booker, or worked with smaller and more flexible agencies. The career cycle for the average model would be to start at the youngest age possible. It depended how you matured of course, by whoever’s guidelines, and you were expected to first travel internationally and then nationally to places like NYC, Miami, and LA to become a true professional model. That’s how the game worked. They said that working internationally was one of the hardest things to do because of the labor and working conditions were ardenous. That was accurate for my experience and hearing from others at top agencies.

It’s like your experience resume. It gave you even more competitive advantages that bookers would see and know you would be more professional on their sets. It pushed you to be something past just a picture when they have an endless sea of pictures to look at. There’s nothing worse than a model who doesn’t know how to work hard and keep a good attitude. That’s usually built into when you experience model jobs with full blown wardrobe, hair, and make up changes. If you’re not prepared to stay “on” you can really crash during 12 to 18 hour sets and everyone knows. They also talk about it. 

At the time when I was working, my look was not “in”. I wasn’t the right height, weight, measurements, face, and I didn’t have the distinct confidence or uniqueness of my “essence” that most models owned around me. I was told this by different agents and photographers during my early days. I thought I would never go far in modeling. I would refrain from shoots or jobs and work with a agent booker as an assistant because I wanted to help manage the models. 

Maybe call it imposter syndrome, but for me, I was already so far out of where I thought I would be. I thought the experience would be snatched away at any moment. But as divine intervention would have it, the opportunities never stopped. I would meet someone at a shoot who would then rebook me to another shoot. That’s how I ended up booking jobs and runways where agencies with their models had the exclusive stage and feature. That’s how I got publications in Vogue and Vogue UK. Direct booking by designers, photographers, stylists, or make up artists. I can laughingly say that the agencies were furious just based on their faces and what the other artists said during our shoots together. Model diversity and “independent contractors” were not welcomed. However, when a door opens you’re supposed to walk through it and that’s what I did. Every one of them and all the way until I was able to go to Greece, my first professional international modeling trip. 

As you can assume what’s next, the world of human trafficking became the next bucket I would drop into. I can honestly say all the way up until 21 years old, which was 4 years after I had my feet wet in the industry, I did not understand the concept of “human trafficking”. The realm of human trafficking allows for the predators who play in it to be manipulative and gaslight their vulnerable and unsuspecting victims. They prey in industries where they can scrape their means for whatever reasons they have, organized crime or not. The average starting age of a model can be anywhere from 13 to 21 years old. If you were older than 21 you were usually looked at as “the older model” and you should also probably start to find your next gig. The models I was with in Greece were maybe 18 as the youngest and 24 as the oldest. 

As a naive and groom-worthy model starting at 17 years old, with hardly any support from family or friends, you watch the movies. You intensely observe social gatherings and how attention is gifted to various people. Remember, as a model, you are a muse. A molded piece of clay that anyone should be able to pick up and form you into the structure that they choose to manifest. Always the clay, never the molder. It’s my understanding now of course that allows you to become an innocent docile little dove just waiting to be plucked and shot down for the hunting season. That’s much different than being a vessel of art’s transcendence and eternal form. 

Rule number one as a model traveling internationally, you never tell anyone that you are a model. This was actually the first thing out of my agent’s mouth when I arrived in Greece. They even went as far as to say, “You tell them that you are student traveling for a sports game”. To try and help me feel somewhat safe, as they probably saw my burdened face, they also said to me, “all the neighbors know that you models stay in the agency after hours because of the attached apartments..they will watch out for anyone that might try and come to the apartment..no one should ever be coming to the agency ever after normal business hours..do not tell anyone that you live here with models..we have a promoter and his girlfriend that will take you out and around Greece to show you a good time..we trust them”. This was my first truly aware experience with club promoters meshing into the modeling and trafficking industry. 

The “lay of the land” guidelines were mentioned to us one time from the agent, and was also repeated amongst ourselves as models to make sure we all heard the same instructions. I think due to the jet lag from the plane, I was just happy that when I had to switch buses, and the Greek symbols were not adding up to my printed email instructions for arriving, I was thankful I was even at their doorstep. Needless to say I was highly optimistic I could navigate the trip just fine and felt that my years in modeling already would help me with any challenging events I might face.

It wouldn’t be until the last two weeks left in my 3 month stay that our trafficker experience came to fruition. Other than basically power walking to the tram in the dark early mornings or at night, which was a couple miles from our apartment, I didn’t try and think too much else of how I might be abducted or in a harmful position. I did experience someone putting a roofie in my drink at a Greek night club one evening with a notorious political hero figure. I will write on that another time, but I thought I was in the final sprint with no upcoming issues. My agent even confirmed to me that I had booked multiple designers for Greece Fashion Week. This was the biggest opportunity to make a good amount of money in a short time period. So on the day where I went with one of the new models, just coming in from Croatia, I was only medium-level alarmed when we saw the man in the black hat, long trench coat, and larger carry bag around 5 PM with our arms full of groceries outside our apartment.

To give you deeper perspective, we had been walking in, meeting with, and completely immersing ourselves in the Greek culture. Things are not done the same way in Greece as the US. Additionally, when some models are on opposite schedules as you, you are not quite sure what to perceive. Especially when some girls date men or meet new people. This gentlemen, around 5:20 PM, barely after 5 PM where it’s still daylight out, might have actually been an in-home care doctor. At least that’s what my mind was rationalizing on why a figure was at our door unlike any other day from the two and a half months prior.

This is one of the few collected moments in life where I experienced time bend to my human body’s internal processing. As we approached the door, hands full of very heavy groceries we carried from a far journey, time morphed slowly. It was my first visual that identified a man at our apartment door. My body told me it was danger and obviously so. It’s the mediterrean in fall. We were in tank tops and shorts, not black hats with long black trench coats. My mind scanned quickly to a memory of which one of the models from Germany was out sick that day. I thought, “oh, this might be a booked a doctor for her”. Except, each step that we took moving closer, I could see his confusion and then oddly an eagerness the closer we got. 

Intuition, when you haven’t followed it in a very long time, can almost be something masked as a bias. I didn’t want to assume any person that I was not familiar with was a danger to me. Except, when the buzzer clicked to let him into our building about 5 steps away, and he seemed just as surprised as I was, I felt that maybe I didn’t have all the details totally in the clear. When 7 model’s schedules are all at different times of the day or night, we typically just unlocked the door assuming it might be one of us. This was the day that we learned this lesson and the phrase “it’s just takes one time” haunts you forever.

As the buzzer went off, clicking the heavy door open, the man opened the door wide and stepped aside to allow us to go in first. This moment was the only video recorded that the agency had of this entire event. The words to describe what a predator feels like behind you, when you know very well that they should be no where out of sight, feels like fire on the back of your neck and rage in your soul. At least that was my experience. Aware that it does no good to have any person who might harm you behind you, I snapped around fast and immediately showed him my impatience of his presence. 

As I did so, I seethed “Can I help you?”. An obvious question to a much older man who seemed to be lingering behind two young girls in a small spiral stair case hallway. He didn’t say anything at first because I knew I caught him off guard with my power in the question and his conviction to not want to say the answer. In the game of chess, it was a check. He somehow managed to say, “Do you speak Greek?”, I said, “No” and held my stance. He said nothing. Another check. It was then finally that I said, “Well I don’t have anything for you and so if you’re looking for the other girls, they are upstairs”. We waited, he had almost a smirk of relief, and then walked up the stairway. It wasn’t until I saw him turn the corner out of sight that we opened the door to our apartment. We quickly went inside and we froze right by the heavy, thick wooden door. We both were surprised to see that we had the same reaction of confusion and fear.

This is a moment I revisit many times in different moments of life when I think of the mystery that is intuition. I don’t know what supernatural energy drives the experience of intution in how it feels, but my body knew. My head knew. My heart knew. Every part of me was aflame and I was totally disassociated from the moment. I felt like I was thrusted into a movie where I didn’t know what part I was playing or even what my lines are supposed to be. Looking at a model you just met with the same disarray, intuition, and fear, waiting by the door you just walked into moments ago evading a threat, is a situation of life you might only ever see in the movies. Fate was not so kind to our door.

I think we were both trying to shake off what odd situation just unfolded, and, it was maybe only seconds later, that we heard a very familiar scream. It’s hard to use the word “familiar” in that same sentence because we had never heard our lovely model friend ever even raise her tone. I’m not sure how it’s possible to reconcile knowing a tone from a person that you have never heard before, while also trying to understand why the man who just let you go into your apartment door was now terrifying the exact model who you thought he might be there for. To this moment, even writing it now, I can hear her words of  “Who are you?! I don’t know who you are!!”. The movie was in full motion and I needed to get a handle on how I was going to survive. 

The building we entered is a single spiral staircase with three floors. The first level was my apartment along with three other models who shared bunkbeds with me, a single bathroom with one toilet, and a tiny kitchen. All apartments had balconies that overlooked the street and alleyway. The second floor was our agency that we hardly went to after we knew what our day-to-day schedules were with castings or jobs. The third floor was the second model apartment where three models stayed. It was the third floor apartment that the man in all black went to first intrude and where he met our lovely German model friend. After the loud door slammed, and her bone-chilling scream ensued, we heard him walk down the stairs to relentlessly pound and attempt to enter into the second floor door. We knew he was no longer someone who was informed to be in our building because the agency was closed. So when he finally made it to our first-floor apartment again, it was obvious that he never had any intentions of trying to make anyone feel well.

Our reality was that we were all foreigners in a place we thought was safe and now were trying to collectively strategize our means to survive. If you call the Greek police, they do not understand your English, or at least they pretend not to when you utter the words, “We are models and someone is trying to break into our apartments and take us!”. They also do not come to the location where you called from. After the man did a few more passes up and down our stairwell, creating more distressing screams from us, we finally heard a booming door close with silence that followed so piercing our loud thoughts seemed to tell us otherwise. It was a shot-in-the-dark attempt when we charged out our apartment door and ran up to the top floor to see our friends. To our eventual realization, he did actually leave the building. We entered the top floor to where our lovely German model friend was and we all watched our perpetrator in all black nonchalantly walk across the busy street, across the medium, and disappear into a rustling of trees. We never knew how long he might have been watching us.

We screamed the most vile things to the man who had created such fear and chaos between us. Our Greek neighbors, who came to the top of their balcony when they heard our shouting, were in complete shock. Their eyes looked at us as if they had seen a ghost. Something that even further validated our understanding that whatever happened was not supposed to be. Their testimony in saying they had never seen this happen in all the years they had been next to the agency left us to know something was for sure wrong. The agency did not believe us. More than likely because they would have to admit to 7 model’s international agencies that their model apartment was now officially staked out for human trafficking. I was one of the lucky ones to be able to leave. They were not going to hire any kind of security for us, and my dad’s advice, within his knowledge of human trafficking from his Navy travels to the Philippines, was that it was real. I was even warned we might even be raided that night especially if the man across the street saw no aid or help from the initial shake-up. Eastern European looking women in the human trafficking trade are in high demand for top dollar. This is why the modeling industry is saturated with hungry traffickers looking to appease their clients.

I thought that might be my very last night alive or ever having a chance to be home again. We planned how we might attack another intruder if they scaled our first floor balcony with the floor to ceiling sliding glass doors. When we were met the next morning with opposition of our reality from the agency, even being told we were making up the story completely, I called my dad again and said that I needed to leave. I was one of the lucky ones as many were not able to afford the ticket. Agencies, especially ones who have a country with a struggling economy, will do anything to avoid international security legalities. They also will probably want to avoid telling different international modeling agencies why someone like that even knew of the apartment location at all. The saddest part was that even after all this happened, one of the models that was there quickly snapped out of the situation emotionally, probably from dissociation, and said our situation this was nothing and that she and other models were held up at gun point in Istanbul, Turkey. Even with models telling me the day I left, as I am waiting in the airport, that strange men were all over the outside of the apartment in broad daylight on their walk to the tram, something that was never the case before, saying things like “Are you a model, do you live here?” was heartwrenching.

You might think that these stories are from agencies that were not the best ones to go with. This is not the case. Because of the impact that this event made on me, knowing that if I continue to travel internationally to my next trips, such as Thailand and Spain, I might never get to share all that I feel needs to be told with my story. The fact is, not all models or talent in the industry are connected to such a status where they don’t have to do the hard labor of traveling to casting directors, or using the tram or cabs to commute. I was so embarrassed as to why I was no longer going to be pursuing modeling as I originally anticipated and publicly talked about. When I reluctantly shared the story with another model, who was placed in Italy at a top agency around the same time my Greece trip was, she said that her agent booked her a dinner with who she thought was a client for a job interviewing her. It was to her grotesque surprise only during the dinner that the man said to her there was no job and the agency set him up with her because he wanted to meet her and take her to dinner.

Healing is in cycles my therapist tells me. These stories to me are extremely raw and vulnerable, but I know that it happened in my path for a reason. To be able to heal more through my writing, breaking down my thought processes during the traumatic event, highlighting any helpful situational awareness, drawing my own formulas on how incidences like this occur, allows the opportunity to hopefully help other young models pursue a different fate. Deception evolves and changes. I understand the growth and changes the industry has adapted from. But with stories like Jeffrey Epstein and the entire #METOO movement, we understand that it’s a “type of person” issue, not a “situational issue”. I hope that if you relate to this story, you know that there are other people out there who went through similar circumstances. I know that there are even deeper stories that we carry that we might choose to never share, especially for our safety. I hope that you learned a little more about where my strength comes from, and that also this article helps or allows someone to feel less alone in some of the disturbances they might have gone through in their journey.

I have chosen to own my traumas and paint a different piece of artwork from them. Like how my kindness and innocence was preyed upon by those who wished to exploit it for their never ending pleasure. Thanks to them, I now educate people on who and what they look like. To the ones who use the modeling industry as a way to exploit young girls, whether it’s through their naivety or traumatized psyches, to be hypersexualized and groomed for those night outs in the clubs, thank you for having me see what wolves in sheep clothing look like. Even those times when I have been taken advantage of during national trips for professional modeling shoots, I now own my body as MY masterpiece and ensure that I leave no person unaware of just how powerful I am. Life was never promised to be easy for anyone. If you are one of the lucky ones to have never seen just how dark and hollow these eyes and souls can be, please share the message and awareness. The truth is, you need to fight to understand your intuition. You’ll become lost in this world if you don’t attach to anything.