NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 151
after he was charged with murder; and Jack
Goldberger, the Palm Beach attorney who
helped broker a plea deal for Jerey Epstein.
Epstein himself, in his twisted worldview,
saw Kraft as a kindred spirit. A few months
after Kraft was charged, a Fox Business
reporter asked Palm Beach’s most notori-
ous sex oender if he knew that the girls he
had lured to his mansion for massages and
sex were underage. Epstein insisted that his
own crimes weren’t “that much different
than what happened to Bob Kraft. Only he
went somewhere, and they came to me.”
Kraft’s legal team bombarded the court
with motions, pushing to bar the public
release of the surveillance video from Orchids
as an invasion of their client’s privacy. “It’s
basically pornography,” Burck told the court.
On March 28, the state attorney’s oce in
Palm Beach offered Kraft a plea bargain. If
he admitted his guilt, the charges would be
dropped and his record expunged. Prosecutors
extended the same oer to the other defen-
dants in Palm Beach, a county that, despite
being the home of Mar-a-Lago, votes blue.
Next door, in the Trump-supporting Martin
County, no plea deals were forthcoming.
Kraft rejected the plea deal.
America’s criminal justice system relies
on defendants taking plea deals: More than
90 percent do so. The system was not built
to indict rich men, and so it was not prepared
for a rich man to reject an oer of leniency.
The case would have gone away quickly had
Kraft not decided to devote his tremendous
resources to destroying the state’s case.
. Florida, perhaps more than any other state,
has been a leader of the Christian right’s cam-
paign to “rescue” those they consider victims
of a globally syndicated criminal human traf-
cking ring. The rst comprehensive human
tracking act passed in 2000, but it wasn’t
until three years later, when President George
W. Bush pledged $50 million to support anti-
tracking organizations, that the campaign
became a full-edged industry.
Human tracking is a serious problem:
The Department of Health and Human Ser-
vices calls it the world’s “fastest-growing
criminal industry.” But some anti-tracking
groups, in search of funding, routinely over-
state the scale of the commercial sex trade.
They frequently claim that 300,000 minors
are “at risk” for being sold into sexual slav-
ery in America each year—a number that
has been debunked by researchers as wildly
overinated. (The Washington Post dismisses
it as a “nonsense statistic.”) In 2018, the FBI
conrmed a total of 649 tracking cases in
America, adults included.
Even more alarming, the exaggerated
numbers about sex tracking have come to
inform public policy. On May 3, driven in part
by spurious statistics, the Florida legislature
passed a sweeping new law to combat pros-
titution. The measure creates a statewide
“anti-prostitution registry” that is intended
to list men like Robert Kraft, should he be
convicted, as a john. But critics worry that the
registry, which is vaguely dened, will also
wind up including sex workers like Lulu and
Shen Mingbi. In doing so, the anti-prostitu-
tion law could eectively end up functioning
as an anti-immigration law, targeting poor
women of color, many of them from Asia.
Florida’s new sex registry is the latest in
a long line of similar laws. One of America’s
§irst laws against prostitution, in fact, was
the 1870 Act to Prevent the Kidnapping and
Importing of Mongolian, Chinese, and Japa-
nese Females for Criminal or Demoralizing
Purposes, intended to protect the public from
“scandal and injury.” The law was a precursor to
the Page Act of 1875, which aimed to “end the
danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral
Chinese women,” which in turn was a precur-
sor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the
rst law to bar all members of a specic ethnic-
ity or nationality from immigrating.
The raids on Orchids and other massage
parlors in South Florida were conducted in
the name of rescuing women from sex traf-
cking. But the only people put in jail were
the women themselves. A few, like Lulu
and Mandy, managed to post bail and were
placed under house arrest. But others were
transferred to the custody of ICE. Women
who migrated to America in search of work—
who chose the least bad option available to
them—were being punished for what one of
their lawyers calls “the crime of poverty.”
The New York Times and other news out-
lets, quoting investigators, initially presented
the raids as a clear-cut case of sex track-
ing. Women at the spas, the media reported,
were working “14 hour days” and “sleeping
on massage tables.” After “surrendering”
their passports to spa owners, they were not
allowed to leave the premises without an
escort. The “wretched” women in “strip-
mall brothels” were not sex workers, but
rather “tracking victims trapped among
South Florida’s rich and famous.”
But as police subjected the women to
hours-long interrogations, those claims
began to unravel. The only woman alleged to
have been locked up and forced to live on the
premises was Yong Wang, who went by the spa
name Nancy. In fact, like many other employ-
ees, Nancy had been hired from out of state,
so her boss drove her back and forth from the
job. When the owner fell ill, Nancy was asked
if she wouldn’t mind sleeping at the spa.
The one woman whose passport had alleg-
edly been taken away was Lixia Zhu, or Yoyo.
During questioning, the police repeatedly
grilled Yoyo, looking for evidence of human
tracking. Did anyone else set up her bank
account for her? Did anyone else have accessto her account? “Did you feel like you had a
choice to come down and work, or did you
feel like you were forced to?”
“No one forced me,” Yoyo insisted. It was
the terrible winter of 2018 back in Pennsyl-
vania, where she was living at the time, that
inspired her to move to Florida.
The interrogator pressed harder. “Did you
feel like you had to do this?”
Yoyo shook her head.
“Then why did you do it?”
The inquiry continued along these lines
for several more hours. It was somehow
easier for law enforcement ocers in South
Florida to believe that the women had been
sold into sex slavery by a global crime syn-
dicate than to acknowledge that immigrant
women of precarious status, hemmed in by
circumstance, might choose sex work.
In the end, Yoyo told police that her boy-
friend had conscated her passport, locked
it in a safe, and threatened her with a gun. He
was the one, she intimated, who had forced
her into sexual slavery.
Later, during a hearing conducted after
she had managed to retain a lawyer, Yoyo
recanted the story about her boyfriend. She
told the court that she had said what she felt
the police wanted to hear, in the hopes of get-
ting a lighter sentence.
Within weeks of the raids, the state’s case
had evaporated. There was no $20 million
tracking ring, no women tricked into sex
slavery. The things the state had mistaken as
markers for human tracking—long work-
ing hours, shared eating and living arrange-
ments, suspicion of outside authorities, ties
to New York and China—were, in fact, com-
mon organizing principles of many Chinese
immigrant communities. As an assistant
state attorney in Palm Beach told the court
on April 12: “There is no human tracking
that arises out of this investigation.” . -Democrats have tried, so far without suc-
cess, to tie the Orchids scandal to Donald
Trump. Kraft, after all, was a close friend of
the president. He had attended Trump’s wed-
ding to Melania in 2005, and gave $1 million
to his inaugural fund. (Trump once reportedly
tried to set up Ivanka with Tom Brady, hop-
ing to make the Patriots quarterback his son-
in-law.) Li “Cindy” Yang, the former owner
of the Orchids spa, also donated to Trump’s
campaign, and ran a consulting §irm that
promised Chinese business executives access
to Trump and Mar-a-Lago.
On March 15, congressional Democrats
on the intelligence and judiciary committees
asked the FBI, the director of national intel-
ligence, and the Secret Service to open an
investigation into Yang and her alleged ties to
Trump. I emailed Nancy Pelosi’s oce to ask
why she wanted Yang to be investigated by a