‘I Was Kidnapped and Sex Trafficked as a Student. It Can Happen to Anybody’

One day, Frida Farrell was walking towards Oxford Circus, one of the busiest intersections in London, when she was suddenly stopped by a photographer. The photographer presented her with an amazing job opportunity.

“We’re casting for this project and we saw you walking past and you look perfect.”

Having just recently graduated, the young Farrell who was in her 20s was flattered and jumped onto the opportunity.

The street where Farrell was approached by the photographer

She remembered how well-dressed the photographer was, and he had a nice smile. After taking his business card, she went home and looked him up online. Sure enough, his story seems to check out. He had a professional website and everything!

The next day, Farrell went to his apartment to have some trial photos taken. The photoshoot included head shots and full length ones, it all seemed legit.

“It was a legit photoshoot,” Farrell told Telegraph journalist, Cara.

The day after, the photographer called her and offered her a job if she wanted it. It paid a whopping £7,000 (RM36,000) for half a day’s shoot and it was simply an offer that was too hard to refuse.

“I was excited to do a job that would make some quick money, pay the rent.”

However, things took an awful turn when she arrived at the apartment. After she entered the hall, the nice-looking photographer slammed the door shut behind her and locked it 3 times. He then pulled out a knife.

Farrell instantly felt sick, but she tried her best to remain calm.

“I would love to say there were loads of things going through my head but there wasn’t. There was panic, like, ‘How am I going to survive this? What do I need to get through this?’”

Farrell asked to go to the bathroom and the man told her to leave her bag and phone behind. Unfortunately, she got to the bathroom only to find a window too small to fit through. She knew she couldn’t escape, so she opened the door and played along.

He offered her a glass of milk. “I thought, ‘What’s worse, the glass of milk or the knife.’ So I drank the glass of milk.”

The man then forced her to put on some underwear and follow his instructions to pose for the camera. He asked her to smile, but it was too much for her to pull it off, as tears streamed down her cheeks.

It wasn’t long before Farrell blacked out. “He was sitting in a chair and asked me to come over and, you know, ‘do things’,” she says. “And the next thing I knew I woke up in bed with no clothes on.”

She was fed part of a sandwich before blacking out again, and this time, waking up in a completely different apartment. There were no furnitures whatsoever, only a wooden-framed bed.

Tragically, men would appear at the apartment and successively rape her, in between the photographer giving her doses of an unknown drug.

This went on for 3 days until one day, the photographer rushed in the room and told Farrell to get ready as someone was coming before running back out again. The man had forgotten to lock the door and this provided an opportunity for Farrell.

She crept close to the door to listen to his footsteps that soon disappeared into the lift.

“I became instantly sober from whatever drugs I had in my body and I slowly opened the door.

“I knew there was a doorman in there and I didn’t know if he was in on it, but I thought, ‘I’m just going to run’. I ran and ran and ran and ran i think for about 10 blocks, all the while thinking, ‘Is he behind me?’”

She stayed with her friend for a week before returning to her apartment, all the while being paranoid that the photographer will capture her again.

Despite keeping her traumatic experience all to herself, Farrell finally told her story in hopes that it would serve as a warning for every young girl out there. There are many cases of sex trafficking in the world that happen right under our noses.

Always ask your female friends, girlfriends, colleagues, sisters and daughter to be careful. Because even though we might feel like we’re safe from them, the fact is, “anyone could be a victim of sex slavery, even you and me.”

H/T: Telegraph