Brand New Mediaite Writer Says Sex Trafficking Isn’t Really a Thing

When some lunatic spews garbage on a fringe website like InfoWars or The Daily Caller, no one really pays attention, but print the same garbage on a site with a more legitimate reputation, and suddenly, it’s “even Mediaite says that ‘blah, blah, blah’.” With that in mind, it was extremely disappointing to see that new Mediaite columnist Cathy Reisenwitz devoted her first effort to debunking the liberal media myth that “sex trafficking” (which she literally put in scare quotes) is really, actually a thing.

The ostensible point of the piece is to highlight one story of sex trafficking that might not be true, coming a few weeks after another high-profile victim was outed as a fraud, but it goes on to attack the very notion that sex trafficking is a thing that people should actually worry about. That just makes sense. If two stories might not be completely true, how is it possible that any of them are, right?

The latest victim of sex trafficking to be “debunked” is Chong Kim, but so far, the evidence against her consists of Facebook posts by an advocacy group that she was a member of, and which has expressed dismay that she hasn’t given them credit and/or endorsements in public. The group, Breaking Out, insists it has conducted an investigation into Kim, and “found no truth to her story,” but rather, “found a lot of fraud, lies, and most horrifically capitalizing and making money on an issue where so many people are suffering from.”

But Breaking Out also asks, “How come being a director of a legit non profit has she never wanted us to hear her speak or contribute to us anything as much as a name mention when she knows we have showed results in this cause, gave her money, assisted her in anything she needed.”

Kim has responded with legal action.

However that situation shakes out, so far, Breaking Out hasn’t produced any evidence. As debunkings go, this is pretty weak sauce, especially when you consider that Reisenwitz goes after an opinion columnist and a book reviewer for failing to “do actual reporting, and find out the truth.”

As far as it goes, though, it’s a decent enough point: promoting false stories, by definition, undermines efforts to reveal the true problems and nature of sex trafficking. Mainly, that it’s no big deal:

This is par for the course for the media, however. The white slavery moral panic has been around for at least a hundred years, starting with 1910’s White-Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act. What it refers to is prostitution, under the supposition that no one enters it willingly.

The Mann Act clamped down on prostitution by making it illegal to help women cross state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Campaigners boosted support for the act by peddling lurid tales of innocent girls drugged and kidnapped right off of city streets and sold into sexual servitude. This sounds exactly like the reporting on “sex trafficking” seen today. Kristof isn’t even original.

Yes, that’s “sex trafficking” in scare-quotes, because…READ MORE

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.