'Girl Next Door' Story Could Happen Anywhere

In 1982, she was 15 years old, a straight-A student, a virgin from a strict American-Irish Catholic family living in an affluent, Michigan town.

Two years later, she was 17 and hiding a horrific reality from her family.

The once-innocent, bright-eyed girl was a sex slave, blackmailed into pleasuring hundreds and hundreds of men as part of a billion-dollar, human trafficking industry, one that still exists today.

This is a story that is never told in America. This is a story that might be hard to believe. This is the story of Theresa Flores, and now, thanks to East Hampton-based filmmaker Andrea Picco, it is one that will finally be heard.

“I heard Theresa speak at a rally for Stop Child Trafficking Now in 2008 and I was immediately hooked,” Ms. Picco recalled during a telephone interview last week. “I knew this was something. Nobody had done a film. I thought it would be amazing to have an interview with her. Of course, it was not that easy. To open up in an interview to someone she’d never met before, that was a little tricky. I didn’t know if she could tell me the entire story. But she did.”

The daughter of a traveling businessman, Ms. Flores and her family uprooted every two years—sometimes to a new town, sometimes to a new state. In 1982, they moved to Birmingham, Michigan, and like any young girl, Ms. Flores soon developed a crush on a boy at school. They had classes together, chatted and even went to the same church. But she wasn’t allowed to date until she was 16.

One day, he offered her a ride home from school—which was technically not a date, in her mind—and she accepted. When he made a wrong turn, red flags went off.

“Of course her mom and dad would not want her to do this,” Ms. Picco said. “She knew something was wrong, but she was too young, too naïve.”

He pulled into the driveway of “a huge mansion,” the filmmaker said, and invited Ms. Flores inside. Not wanting to come off as a prude, she got out of the car.

That afternoon, she lost her virginity to a boy she thought she could trust. To a boy she liked. To a boy she thought would never drug and rape her. But that is exactly what happened. And what she didn’t know was there were two other men in the room, taking photos.

Days later in school, the boy cornered Ms. Flores.

“He said, ‘I’m sorry I have to say this, but my cousins are going to post these pictures everywhere in school. They’re going to send them to your father’s company. They’re going to tell your church, if you don’t do things for us,’” Ms. Picco said. “He said, ‘You have to earn them back. And there’s no way around it. We’re going to call you.’”

The young girl was easy prey. She was disconnected from any social scene, didn’t have many friends and her father was always out of town. She was the perfect victim.

From that day on, she would receive a call about once a week to come outside through the back door of her home and get into a waiting car. She was dropped off at a house, usually in the same community, drugged and locked in the basement.

Man after man would enter. And Ms. Flores was forced to serve them.

This continued for two years. The gang threatened to hurt her family if she told. They followed her home from school and infiltrated her classes. They killed her dog and occasionally left dead animals in her mailbox. They ruled with scare tactics and manipulation.

“And I was just a kid,” Ms. Flores wrote in a testimonial on her website, TraffickFree. “One night, my junior [year] in high school, I was kidnapped by men in this group and taken to an inner-city Detroit, nasty, dirty motel. It was announced, as I was dragged into the small motel room, with two dozen men waiting for my arrival, that ‘Here was a reward, a payment for a job well done.’ I had become an incentive for men to continue their hard work and this is what they could receive ... and that night, I was sold to the highest bidder.

“That night I was drugged, beaten and sexually molested to the point of unconsciousness,” she continued. “When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was and had no way home. No idea what to do. No one helped me. No one saved me. There was no law against this back then. And no services to help me even if I had been rescued.”

They left her for dead. Just that she survived is a miracle, Ms. Picco said. After washing up in the bathroom, she went to a local diner. A waitress called the police, who drove the teenager home.

The gang did not call Ms. Flores for a long time after that, Ms. Picco said, and soon, her family moved to Connecticut. It was there that she began to heal.

“She was always afraid they might find her one day,” Ms. Picco said of Ms. Flores. “Eventually, she was able to get through and turned around her darkest hour into an amazing idea. Years later, she was driving on the highway to a speaking engagement in the same town where she was trafficked. And she had this moment of breakdown. She gets lost and thinks, ‘How can I ever help anyone? I can tell my story a million times, but how can I get the girls?’ It came to her to put soap in every motel room in the country, like the one she was in, and put a label on it that says, ‘Are you being trafficked? Are you being held against your will?’ with a number to a hotline, Her project took off like crazy.”

In 2011, Ms. Picco released a 26-minute documentary, “The Girl Next Door,” which tells the story of Ms. Flores, from her childhood to her triumph. It will screen on Saturday, February 2, at the Amagansett Library, according to children’s and young adult librarian Jeanne McDermott. She added that teens will be welcome at the screening but due to sensitive content, they should bring a parent or caregiver.

“It just struck a chord because you always think of it as something that happens away,” Ms. McDermott said of human trafficking during a telephone interview last week. “It happens in Eastern Europe. It happens in Mexico. But it happened here, in America.”

While Ms. Flores’s experience is extreme, the initial assault—the catalyst for the continued abuse—may happen to anyone, Ms. McDermott said. In September 2011, Vice President Joe Biden launched the “1 is 2 Many” initiative in response to the statistics.

Women between age 16 and 24 experience the highest rates of relationship violence, Ms. McDermott said. In 2010, one in 10 teens was hurt by someone they were dating. While in college, nearly one in five women will be the victim of a sexual assault.

“Theresa’s story is really unique, but it’s really not if you look at the statistics. They show it happens a lot. We just don’t know about it,” Ms. Picco said. “I’ve seen human trafficking in Queens, so nobody can tell me now that it’s not our problem. And I bet in the Hamptons, during the summer. We just don’t know because anybody can rent any place. And where there are tourists, girls are in demand. That makes it our problem, an American problem. It’s our girls. Our American girls.”

“If you don’t think human trafficking happens in your zip code,” Ms. Flores wrote on her website, “think again.”

“The Girl Next Door” will screen on Saturday, February 2, at 6 p.m. at the Amagansett Library. The documentary is for mature audiences. Teens will be welcome, but due to sensitive content, should bring a parent or caregiver. A counselor from the Victims Information Bureau of Suffolk County will be on hand to answer questions. For more information, visit traffickfree.com.