The point of the prurient presentation: “You can’t make sex work safe,” one senior deputy prosecutor said.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County prosecutors gave an astonishingly graphic presentation about sex work and human trafficking to Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle’s public safety committee on Tuesday, showing unredacted images of brutalized women with bloodied and battered faces and bleeding bodies. (Content warning: Although I’ve redacted all identifiable images from the presentation as it appeared yesterday, the graphic language remains).

The carousel of images included a photo of a identifiable weeping, partly nude woman in a bathtub who, according to prosecutors, had been urinated on by her pimp after her he bashed in her eye.

Prosecutors accompanied the images with pornographic commentary copy-pasted from online review sites that dehumanized and belittled sex workers. Reading out loud from one of the slides displayed in council chambers, King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Alexandra Voorhees intoned, “Find them, fuck them, forget them. … Stupid fucking whore. Spread your legs, and that’s it. That’s it. That’s all you’re worth. A cum dumpster.'”

Later in the presentation, Voorhees read a list of objects a victim of sex trafficking said men had inserted into her by force, and read quotes from women who described vomiting and bleeding from forcible sex acts. Sex work, Voorhees claimed, often leads to dangerous physical conditions such as “vaginal prolapse, anal prolapse… fecal incontinence, forced abortion.” The presentation continued in pornographic detail: “Girls in dog cages, girls being waterboarded… stunned with stun guns… burned and strangled.”

During public comment, Emi Koyama—a longtime advocate for sex workers and founder of Aileen’s, a peer-led community space for women working along the Pac Highway in South King County—said the prosecutors “selectively quote and weaponize survivor testimonies that are useful in ceding further power to the law enforcement, while neglecting how the law enforcement itself is also a source of violence in the lives of many women.”

“Policy making should not be adversarial, and efforts should be made together with those who are impacted by any given issue, whether they align with law enforcement or not,” Koyama said.

UPDATE: Kettle apologized for the presentation the day after the committee meeting. On Thursday, he told PubliCola he had “contacted the KCPAO late last week to express my own concern regarding the explicit nature and privacy implications of the presentation.  While I advocated for a different approach, the timing of the response, me seeing it, and the pending committee meeting led me to proceed with the KCPAO approach.

“The goal of my committee is to support survivors of sex trafficking – particularly minors and young adults – who are forced into these situations,” Kettle said. “We are careful to distinguish this work from those who choose sex work as a profession, and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to clarify that.

The two prosecutors argued repeatedly that the public is misinformed about the inherently exploitative nature of all sex work—”this is not ‘Pretty Woman,'” Voorhees said—and said the graphic, exploitative images were necessary for people to understand that pimps and sex buyers need to be punished.

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After other council members, including Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Eddie Lin, expressed concerns about the lurid presentation, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion sent a letter to the council saying that although “the goal of the presentation was to make clear to Council the violence that survivors experience at the hands of buyers and traffickers,” the prosecutor’s office will “do a better job of protecting victim’s [sic] privacy” in the future.”

The presentation has been removed from the committee agenda but is still available in the full agenda packet and viewable on the Seattle Channel recording of the meeting. UPDATE: As of noon on Jan. 28, he agenda packet has been removed as well.

Douglas Wagoner, the public affairs director for Manion’s office, stood by the intent of the presentation when he spoke with PubliCola on Tuesday evening. “The goal of the presentation was to make clear to City Councilmembers the violence that survivors experience in the hands of buyers and traffickers,” Wagoner said. “Their trauma is incredibly difficult to watch and learn about, but it’s also real and most people don’t know how bad the experiences are of the survivors who are going through it every day in King County.”

“Maybe in the future, we’d make a different choice in terms of the exact images and language in the presentation,” Wagoner added.

Whatever their intent, the images and words had the effect of re-brutalizing the women on the screen, who did not consent to be used as examples by prosecutors pushing further criminalization of sex work. Although the prosecutor’s office denied any political agenda, they noted during the presentation that they’re hoping to drum up support for state legislation that would elevate paying for sex, currently a misdemeanor, to a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000.

The bill would take the question of whether to prosecute sex buyers out of the City Attorney’s Office, where progressive Erika Evans just took over from Republican Ann Davison, and put it into the county prosecutors’ hands. Sex trafficking is already a felony.

Kettle, along with his fellow committee members Maritza Rivera and Debora Juarez, used the presentation as an opportunity to express disbelief that people in Seattle, including advocates for sex workers and sex workers, have the gall to oppose the city’s recent crackdowns on sex buyers, including a law reinstating “SOAP” banishment zones and “john letters” sent to the homes of men identified as possible sex buyers through their license plates.

“There’s so many women in our city who make two points that really not should be made together— ‘Oh, Epstein, this, that whatever,’ but then… they decry the letters by SPD to those johns or potential johns,” Kettle said.

“These people come in here and yell at us when we’re trying to go after the men. … We as a city, need to stop, take a deep breath and think about that. When I read something online by the chattering classes in the city that talk about these pieces, they need to stop and look at themselves.”

Rivera, too, said she couldn’t understand why anyone would participate in “this whole movement of defunding things and ‘We’re not going about it the right way’—No.” The solutions—SOAP zones, “john letters,” and imprisoning sex buyers—”are so clear,” Rivera continued, and the fact “that people can’t see that you all really are helping victims is beyond me.”

Later, Voorhees yes-anded Rivera’s outrage that anyone would question the decisions the council has made in recent years to further criminalize sex work. “You were asking some questions about people who are who are opposed or somehow think that this is consensual, so it’s okay,” Voorhees said. “The problem is, you can’t make sex work safe. It is inherently dangerous. It is inherently a power imbalance.”

The idea that sex work is inherently so dangerous that it must be abolished is far from a consensus view in Seattle or the United States. Juries don’t tend to buy the notion that men who pay for sex are inherently abusive or dangerous, which is one reason they rarely go to trial—it’s harder for prosecutors to sustain a prurient image of monster predators when faced with a real man (in Seattle, typically an immigrant) who got caught trying to pay for sex.

While no one would express sympathy or support for men who beat, rape, or kidnap and traffic women, those crimes are separate from patronizing a sex worker (formally “commercial sexual exploitation” in Seattle law), and can be prosecuted on their own. Treating all men who pay for sex as monolithically evil does not stand up to reality as sex workers themselves describe it. No sex workers were invited to attend the presentation, which allowed prosecutors to paint them as childlike, helpless victims with no agency in their own lives.

Also, the approaches the two prosecutors described as “innovative” — increased penalties, “john letters,” and banishment zones—aren’t new, don’t work, and can put women at risk.

Near the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Saka asked the prosecutors what warning signs parents should watch out for to make sure their daughters aren’t being recruited by pimps..

“When I was a kid, it used to be called ‘fast’— don’t be a ‘fast little girl,’ ‘she’s a fast girl,’ whatever,” deputy prosecutor Braelah McGinnis said. “Kids who come home and have unaccounted-for money. They have their nails done all of a sudden, and things like that. And so, you know, those can be red flags of, like, ‘Well, who took you to get your nails done?’ …We also find kids, lots of times, may have a second phone, and it’s because it’s used to communicate with their pimp or their trafficker. Those are some of my tips.”

I called Kettle to find out why he approved the prurient presentation and whether he would invite advocates and sex workers who disagree with the prosecutor’s approach to present their own views and experiences in his committee. I hadn’t heard back by press time, but will update this post if I do.