SURVIVOR FOUGHT HER WAY OUT
The first man to pay for sex with Jasmine Grace Marino was old enough to be the teen’s grandfather.
Her pimp had driven her to a dark and musty massage parlor in Hartford, Conn. She wore a skimpy dress and stilettos. She worked from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. three days in a row. The men paid a door fee and picked out a girl.
“You go back into these other rooms with beds and you do whatever you do. You hustle, a half an hour, an hour,” Jasmine, who was in her late teens at the time, recalled. “My trafficker told me I had to make a certain amount each time.”
“The guy could have been
my grandfather,” she said of that first sex buyer. “It was horrifying. He came every week. He was a regular. It’s burned in my brain.”
To cope, she mentally and emotionally shut off from her body.
“It was horrible,” she said. “It was very hard.”
She felt disgusted after that first time, but excited that she’d made a lot of money very quickly. She handed every dollar over to her pimp.
‘Boyfriend role’
In her darkest days, as she was sold for sex for years by her abusive pimp, Jasmine wrote about her harrowing ordeal in notebooks, hiding them in closets and under her mattress. In one, she scrawled in big letters, “Help Me. Someone Please Help!”
Over time, she filled a chest with notebooks and recently published her journals, as well as her reflections, in a book, “The Diary of Jasmine Grace.”
Jasmine, now 36 and a pregnant, married mother of four, recently recalled her nightmarish sex trafficking years and her escape at the South End’s Emmanuel Gospel Center. She wore a shirt bearing a pair of little baby feet with the word “Blessed” on it.
She was 18 when she met her pimp at the Palace nightclub in Saugus. He bought her a $7 drink.
“I’m impressed because he spent $7 on me,” she recalled. “It didn’t take much.”
They got together a few days later. He showed up in a champagne-colored Mercedes-Benz.
“It was on from there,” she told me. “That’s how the process started.”
Jasmine said her pimp used the “boyfriend role” to gain her love and trust. He took her out to dinner and shopping. He was from Boston and had started selling drugs as a young teen. Jasmine was his first sex trafficking victim.
She came from a big Catholic family. She started doing drugs and drinking when she was around 12 or 13. She was raped at least twice before she was 14, like most sex trafficking victims.
“I carried a lot of shame,” she said.
She was a high school graduate who had gotten her cosmetology license and worked as a hairdresser. She went to community college. She wanted to be a journalist. The pimp preyed on her ambitions.
“Why would you want to work at a hair salon? You can own one,” her boyfriend would tell her. “I know a way we can make a lot of money and have a business and a family and a house. You’re having sex anyway. You might as well get paid for it.”
“You end up doing it because you think you’re in love and you think he loves you,” she says today. “Then once you do it, everything changes.”
Violence and drugs
She was sold for sex for five years, first in Hartford, then at a massage parlor in Maine and then on adult websites.
Her pimp began beating her up when she said she wanted out. The first time happened on a ride home from Hartford. He backhanded Jasmine, blurring her vision, then pulled her out of the car and beat her. Another girl in the vehicle who was also being trafficked pulled him off Jasmine.
Jasmine cried the whole way home.
“That’s when it set in, ‘Oh man. He’s just going to continue to beat me if I speak up,’ ” she said. “He always had a gun on him.”
She’d meet sex buyers at hotels, their homes and businesses after hours.
“I can’t tell you how many homes I went in when wives and kids weren’t there,” she said.
Her pimp charged $200 and up for an hour. They lived a lavish lifestyle with a Mercedes, a big home, leather couches, granite tables and Louis Vuitton bags.
She earned a business degree at Bunker Hill Community College. She got stronger. She became pregnant with her pimp’s child and he forced her to terminate her pregnancy.
That, she said, was a turning point.
Soon she was stashing money in plastic bags, hiding them in potted plants. She met a sex buyer online who wanted to hang out and didn’t want sex. He owned a business and she eventually asked him to be a reference to help her get an apartment.
Jasmine left her pimp with only two trash bags of belongings to her name. But she was suicidal and felt hopeless. A few weeks later, she called him, she said, because, “I don’t know how to do life without him.”
But it was the same sad old story of violence. When he broke a glass door at her apartment, she called the cops and got a restraining order. He left her alone.
Jasmine soon turned to using Oxycontin and heroin. It took all the pain away. “I don’t care if I live or die at this point,” she recalled.
She became homeless and stole from her family. She sold her body to support her drug habit.
She got sober in 2007 after her brother died of an overdose.
Now, she’s an advocate for sex trafficking victims. She founded Bags of Hope, an outreach ministry out of Emmanuel Gospel Center, which gives women and girls bags of toiletries, warm hats and a personal note of hope from Jasmine. She publicly speaks about her ordeal.
“No little girl dreams of becoming a prostitute. I know that,” Jasmine said. “We need services and help, not judgment.”