Demi Moore: Survivor of Family Trafficking
Demi Moore In her 2019 memoir, Inside Out, actress Demi Moore describes her childhood as being unstable due to her parents’ behaviors. They moved the household frequently, fighting with each other, as well as with friends and family, along the way. Any financial or emotional security was short-term due to their addictions and dysfunctions. When she was fifteen, Ms. Moore lived with her mother in Los Angeles. They were dining in a popular restaurant when a man who appeared to be financially successful came over to introduce himself. He offered them a ride home in his car, and Ms. Moore sat beside him in the front seat while her mother sat in the back. He then began grooming Ms. Moore: taking her to lunch, picking her up at school, and generally acting like a friend of the family. One day, she came home from school to find the man alone in the apartment, and he raped her. “I have blotted out the exact sequence of events—the details that led from me opening the front door, to wondering if my mother had given him a key, to feeling trapped in my own home with a man three times my age and twice my size, to him raping me. “For decades, I didn’t even think of it as rape … I couldn’t see that—as someone with no guidance or grounding, no sense of worth, someone who’d spent her whole life contorting herself to meet other people’s expectations—I was an easy mark for a predator.”a Her mother decided they needed to move again, and Ms. Moore was glad to leave the apartment where she had been assaulted. A week later, the man showed up to help them move, much to her distress. When her mother was busy unpacking boxes in the new apartment, he turned to Ms. Moore and said, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”b Ms. Moore states she never knew the exact nature of the transaction or how he came to have a key to the apartment. Perhaps there was no clear discussion of what he would get for the transaction, or perhaps her mother understood exactly what he expected in return and agreed to it.c Here are some key factors to consider in this account: • Ms. Moore was vulnerable to abuse due to her unstable home life, lack of oversight or support, and the gambling and substance abuse addictions of her parents. • Prior to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, there were no laws related to domestic human trafficking. Legally, this abuse would not have been labeled as such, even if it had been reported to authorities at the time. • Ms. Moore today does not use the term “trafficking” in the book or her interviews about the book. That is common. Victims of sex or labor trafficking rarely identify themselves as such, even today. The TVPA defines ‘‘commercial sex act’’ as “any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.d When the victim is a minor, it is not necessary to demonstrate that the trafficker employed force, fraud, or coercion to enable the transaction because children cannot consent to commercial sex. According to Ms. Moore’s quote from the sex buyer, the man’s access to her for the purpose of sexual contact was purchased by giving $500 to her mother. That is human trafficking.