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Massachusetts court weighs whether all prostitution is sex trafficking

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Massachusetts court weighs whether all prostitution is sex trafficking


“So every John is a sex trafficker?” asked Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Scott L. Kafker in the courtroom last week.

“Yes, your honor,” replied Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Julianne Campbell.

The case—Commonwealth v. Garafalo—represents the latest assault on civil liberties and basic language to be carried out in the name of stopping sex trafficking.

Victimizing ‘A Fictitious Individual Created by Law Enforcement’

It’s long been a goal of certain radical feminists to define all sex work as sex trafficking. If you completely remove agency and free will from the equation—at least for women—then anyone who accepts money for sexual activity can be a victim and anyone who makes or facilitates this payment a criminal.

This paradigm is the basis for the “Nordic Model” of regulating prostitution, in which paying for sex is illegal but the basic act of offering sex for money is not. The Nordic model is established in many European countries, was adopted last year in Maine, and is gaining ground in the U.S. (where it’s sometimes, confusingly, called the Equality Model).

In keeping with this paternalistic mindset, some places have also started to raise penalties for prostitution customers, even elevating solicitation from a misdemeanor to a felony. Meanwhile, at the federal level, trying to pay for sex with someone under age 18 counts as sex trafficking even when the solicitor does not know the minor’s actual age.

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Massachusetts may take these ideas one step further and declare anyone who tries to pay for sex at all to be a sex trafficker, thereby defining all prostitution, even between consenting adults, to be a form of sex trafficking.

A case that came before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) last week involves a prostitution sting conducted by Massachusetts state cops in 2021. The officers, posing as adult sex workers, posted ads online and arrested people who responded to the ads and attempted to meet up for paid sexual activity.

Regrettably, this type of sting is incredibly common in the U.S. It typically results in solicitation charges—still a misdemeanor in most places—for those ensnared. But in this case the state indicted those who responded to the sham ads on sex trafficking charges.

Massachusetts law says that anyone who “subjects, or attempts to subject, or recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides or obtains by any means, or attempts to recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide or obtain by any means, another person to engage in commercial sexual activity, a sexually-explicit performance or the production of unlawful pornography” is guilty of trafficking of persons for sexual servitude—a.k.a. sex trafficking. The crime is a felony, punishable by at least 5 years in prison (without eligibility for probation, parole, or work release) and a possible 20 years, plus a potential fine of up to $25,000.

The five defendants in Garafalo, arrested in the 2021 sting and charged with trafficking of persons for sexual servitude, pushed back against the charges, filing a motion to dismiss them in 2022.

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State Judge Maynard Kirpalani agreed to dismiss the charges. “The grand jury heard no evidence that there were any actual victims in the cases involving any of the Defendants, as the woman in the advertisements was a fictitious individual created by law enforcement, and there was no money and/or sexual services exchanged,” wrote Kirpalani. “Consequently, there was no evidence that any of the Defendants knowingly enabled or caused, or attempted to enable or cause, another person to engage in commercial sexual activity.”

‘We’re Going To Take Tvery Single John…and Put Them in Prison for Five Years?’

The state appealed, but the Appeals Court judge also sided with the defendants. So the state appealed again.

The Massachusetts high court heard oral arguments for the case on January 6.

Massachusetts’ position is that the state’s sexual servitude statute clearly captures paying for sex among its prohibited activities. It comes down to the word “obtain,” the state argued.

But at the same time the state legislature enacted a sex trafficking statute in 2011, it also raised the penalty for “soliciting a prostitute,” making this misdemeanor crime punishable by “a fine of not less than $1,000 and not more than $5,000” and up to two and a half years in jail.

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“We’re going to take every single John, charge them with sex trafficking, and put them in prison for five years? I don’t think that was the intent,” defense attorney Patrick Noonan told Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justices last week. It would make the misdemeanor offense completely redundant.

It’s unclear when a decision will be issued, but “SJC cases are typically decided within 130 days,” the Boston Globe reports.

The Dangers of Exploitation Creep

This is an important case to watch for folks concerned with the inflation of human trafficking and sex trafficking—concepts that have undergone a massive case of what sometimes called “exploitation creep.” In recent decades, we’ve seen a series of attempts to expand the parameters of these crimes from truly heinous and coercive acts to much less serious offenses.

In many cases, this has involved roping in third parties—drivers, websites, hotels, social media platforms, sales software companies, etc—into liability for coercive or violent acts that did take place but of which they had only the most tangential and unwitting involvement. Another element of this impulse involves defining consenting adult sex workers as prima facie victims and anyone who pays them as a victimizer or trafficker.

If Massachusetts’ high court justices side with the state, it obviously won’t bind other states to similar interpretations of their own sex trafficking statutes. But plenty of police agencies and prosecutors across the country already refer to plain old prostitution stings as “sex trafficking operations” and the arrest of potential prostitution customers as a “human trafficking bust,” even when the only charges brought are misdemeanor solicitation charges. The authorities in many states would clearly welcome the opportunity to include attempting to pay for sex under the official rubric of sex trafficking.

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If Massachusetts’ top court greenlights the state’s attempt to charge sex-work customers as sex traffickers, you can bet it will encourage authorities in other states to play faster and looser with their own definitions. If the court sides with the state here, I think we’ll be looking at a major escalation of an already dangerous trend.

Labeling people who want to pay a willing adult for sex as sex traffickers is certainly unfair to those people, and not just because they can be imprisoned for so much longer. It’s one thing to have a misdemeanor arrest on your record or to have to disclose a solicitation conviction; it’s quite another to have a felony record and have to tell people you’re a convicted sex trafficker.

And the negative consequences of this shift don’t stop with those convicted. Defining all prostitution as sex trafficking threatens to drive the industry further underground and to make customers less likely to engage in screening protocols and other safety measures, making the work more dangerous for adult sex workers and for adult and minor victims of sexual exploitation alike.

It also takes resources away from fighting crimes where there are actual victims, instead encouraging cops and prosecutors to conduct sure-thing stings where the only “victim” is an undercover cop.

And it does all this while letting authorities ratchet up sex trafficking arrest and conviction numbers, confusing the issue by conflating two very different things in public data. This spike in arrests and convictions can then be used to stoke public fear and build demand for more action. It’s can be used to justify raising police budgets, expanding surveillance power, suppressing online speech, and generally calling for more tough-on-crime policies. It can also be used to call for new regulations on businesses as diverse as massage parlors, hotels, and social media platforms.

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Policies like these affect people far beyond sex workers and their clients, and they do nothing to help actual victims of sexual violence, coercion, and abuse. Let’s hope Massachusetts justices see the state’s ploy for what it is and make the right call here.


More Sex & Tech News

Things aren’t looking good for TikTok after a U.S. Supreme Court hearing last week considering a law that would force the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell off its U.S. operations or be banned. Reason‘s Robby Soave has written a rundown of what transpired in court. “The Supreme Court appeared largely—though not entirely—unmoved by arguments that a federal ban on TikTok would violate the First Amendment rights of the app’s millions of American users,” writes Soave:

During oral arguments before the Court on Friday, the justices seemed inclined to agree with the federal government that a national security rationale was sufficient to force the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell to an American company…. President-elect Donald Trump opposes the ban and petitioned the Court to delay it until he takes office so that an alternative can be worked out. Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary and billionaire Frank McCourt have offered to buy the app for $20 billion, but ByteDance has insisted that it would sooner comply with the ban than sell the company. Supporters of the ban tend to see this as evidence that the Chinese government deems TikTok too useful for its nefarious propagandistic purposes.

Of course, even if it were true that the app is rife with Chinese propaganda, Americans enjoy the First Amendment right to consume such content. The justices seemed most skeptical of the government’s case to the extent it hinged on this point. Justice Elena Kagan likened the banning of TikTok to the Red Scare, in which the federal government violated the free speech rights of American communists due to their affiliation with the Soviet Union.

“That’s exactly what they thought about Communist Party speech in the 1950s, which was being scripted in large part by international organizations or directly by the Soviet Union,” said Kagan.

Several justices also seemed disturbed by the secretive nature of the government’s case against TikTok. National security experts have posited that TikTok poses a fundamental risk, but the evidence they showed to lawmakers has not been released to the public. Justice Gorsuch objected to “the government’s attempt to lodge secret evidence in this case without providing any mechanism for opposing counsel to review it.”

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If it was just a matter of TikTok itself being banned, the justices would probably deem this an impermissible, content-based suppression of speech. Unfortunately, most of the Court seemed sufficiently persuaded that forcing ByteDance—a foreign company that does not itself enjoy First Amendment rights—to sell the app was not necessarily a content-based restriction on speech.

What is Tubi? You might find Tubi tucked away among the apps preloaded on your Smart TV. The free, ad-supported streaming service owned by Fox fields “the kind of movies you might have once found mindlessly flipping through the channels, back before streaming came along and algorithms began crafting our entertainment diets,” writes The Washington Post‘s Travis M. Andrews:

Tubi isn’t only filled with so-bad-they’re-good movies. It’s got a bit of everything. A Criterion movie here. A strange Rob Lowe-hosted game show there. “Bad Boys,” “Dances With Wolves” and every episode of “Columbo” and “The Magic School Bus” are neighbors on the streaming service. It’s like a T.J. Maxx or a Marshall’s: an awful lot of bargain-bin fare, not particularly organized—currently, you’ll find “Despicable Me 3” but not its predecessors—but also packed with diamonds in the rough if you’re willing to spend time sorting through the riffraff.

Today’s Image

Reading, Ohio | 2014 (ENB/Reason)

 



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Man cited for alleged wrong-way deadly crash

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Man cited for alleged wrong-way deadly crash


BOSTON, (WPRI) — A somerset man has been cited for allegedly causing a deadly wrong-way crash in Boston late Saturday night.

Just before midnight, troopers from the H9 Barracks were called for a report of a multi-vehicle crash on I-93 North before Exit 15A.

A preliminary investigation showed that the driver of a 2004 Cadillac Escalade, identified as 81-year-old Antone Carvalho, of Somerset, entered Route 93 North at Exit 15B and drove southbound in the northbound lanes.

Two vehicles, a Honda Odyssey and an Audi A4, attempted to avoid the Carvalho and crashed into each other.

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Four people in the Honda Odyssey, were taken to a Boston-area hospital for evaluation.

Shortly after the initial crash, police say Carvalho collided head-on with a Chevrolet Cruze.

Carvalho and the other driver were taken to Boston-area hospitals for their injuries

The driver of the Chevrolet Cruze, identified as a man in his 20’s from Haverhill, died from his injuries.

Carvalho will be issued a summons to appear in court at a later date.

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8 Picture-Perfect Main Streets In Massachusetts

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8 Picture-Perfect Main Streets In Massachusetts


Norman Rockwell painted Stockbridge so often that the real Main Street now looks like one of his canvases come to life. That is the trick these Massachusetts towns pull off. A whaling-era cobblestone lane on Nantucket and a Revolutionary common in Concord do the same thing in different accents. Each one packs its best landmarks into a few blocks you can cover on foot. The eight New England streets here all sit under 50,000 residents and earn their reputation the honest way.

Stockbridge

Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Fewer than 2,000 people live in Stockbridge, yet its Main Street may be the most recognizable in the state. Credit Norman Rockwell, who lived here and painted the view down the street so many times it lodged in the national memory. The white clapboard buildings, the old inns, and the big shade trees are all still right where he left them, and people still use them.

The Red Lion Inn has welcomed guests on this corner since 1773, and its long front porch is the street’s anchor in every sense. A short walk away, the Norman Rockwell Museum holds the largest collection of his work and even his relocated studio. Naumkeag adds a Gilded Age cottage with terraced gardens climbing the hillside. Come December, the town recreates Rockwell’s famous “Main Street at Christmas” scene with vintage cars parked along the curb, which is about as close as a real place gets to stepping into a painting.

Lenox

Downtown street in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Downtown street in Lenox, Massachusetts. Image credit Richard Cavalleri via Shutterstock

Edith Wharton built her dream house just outside Lenox, and the writer’s eye for proportion seems to have rubbed off on the whole town. The center is small enough to park once and walk, with bookshops, cafes, and galleries shoulder to shoulder under the trees. Under 10,000 people live here, and the place wears its Berkshire elegance lightly.

The Mount, Wharton’s 1902 estate, runs as a house museum and public garden and hosts readings and outdoor events all summer. Ventfort Hall, a Jacobean-style mansion built for a sister of J.P. Morgan, fills in more of the Gilded Age story. Just up the road, Tanglewood draws crowds every July and August as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, so a quiet shopping street can be ten minutes from a world-famous concert lawn. Few towns this size balance that kind of culture against that little traffic.

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Concord

Main Street in the historic town center of Concord, Massachusetts.
Main Street in the historic town center of Concord, Massachusetts.

On April 19, 1775, the shot heard round the world was fired a short walk from where Concord shoppers now buy their morning coffee. That is the strange gift of this town. Its pretty village center sits below 20,000 residents, and its old houses, churches, and civic buildings look calm until you remember what happened among them.

Minute Man National Historical Park preserves the battle road and the fields where colonial militia turned back British regulars. Old North Bridge marks the spot itself, with Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man statue standing guard. Concord also raised more than its share of writers, and Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, where she wrote “Little Women,” still opens for tours. Two miles south, Walden Pond holds the woods Thoreau made famous, an easy swim or walk that closes the loop between the town’s history and its quieter ideas.

Marblehead

Marblehead, Massachusetts: Sites of historical homes and buildings in historical downtown district.
Marblehead, Massachusetts: Sites of historical homes and buildings in the historical downtown district. Dee Browning via Shutterstock

The streets in Marblehead’s Old Town were laid out for foot traffic and fishing nets, not cars, so they bend and narrow and dead-end at the water. The town tops 20,000 residents now, but the historic core feels far older and more intimate. Washington Street and the lanes around it run past brick sidewalks and preserved houses, with the harbor flashing into view between rooftops.

The Jeremiah Lee Mansion, a grand Georgian house built in 1768 for the wealthiest merchant in colonial Massachusetts, still keeps its original hand-painted English wallpaper. Old Burial Hill rises above town with weathered colonial gravestones and one of the best harbor views around. Abbot Hall, the brick town hall with the clock tower, houses the original “Spirit of ’76” painting. Walk the waterfront and the reason for the whole town becomes obvious. Marblehead grew up facing the sea, and it never turned away.

Newburyport

Downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts
Downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts. Image credit Heidi Besen via Shutterstock

Federal-era sea captains built their fortunes at the mouth of the Merrimack, and their three-story brick blocks still line the streets of downtown Newburyport. The Main Street feeling here spreads across several streets rather than one. Under 20,000 residents keep the center humming, with shops and restaurants filling old facades right down to the riverbank.

Market Square and State Street form the heart of it, a tight grid of brick that survived a great fire and a wave of 1970s urban renewal to come out the other side intact. The Custom House Maritime Museum, set in a granite 1835 building, tells the port’s seafaring story. Waterfront Park gives you a bench and a view of the boats. A few miles out on Plum Island, the Parker River refuge at Joppa Flats turns the same trip into prime birdwatching, so a downtown afternoon can end with herons instead of storefronts.

Rockport

Rockport, Massachusetts.
Rockport, Massachusetts. Editorial credit: Starmaro / Shutterstock.com.

A plain red fishing shack on a granite pier may be the most painted building in America, and it sits right in Rockport’s harbor. Locals call it Motif No. 1, after an art teacher who got tired of seeing his students paint it. The town runs under 10,000 residents and folds its best parts into a few tight blocks by the water.

Main Street leads to Bearskin Neck, a skinny peninsula crammed with galleries, candy shops, and lobster shacks that ends with the open Atlantic. Front Beach puts sand and water within a short stroll of the shops. The Shalin Liu Performance Center, opened in 2010, built a concert hall with a wall of glass behind the stage, so the ocean becomes the backdrop for a string quartet. You can wander from a storefront to a harbor view to a gallery without ever breaking stride.

Great Barrington

Rustic brick buildings along Railroad Street in the town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Rustic brick buildings along Railroad Street in the town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Editorial credit: Albert Pego / Shutterstock.com

Great Barrington wired the first downtown in the world lit entirely by alternating current, back in 1886, and the place has kept that forward lean ever since. Under 10,000 residents fill a center that feels genuinely busy, with restaurants, bookstores, and galleries spread along Main Street and Railroad Street. It looks like an old Berkshire town and behaves like a young one.

The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, a restored 1905 theater, books films, concerts, and live broadcasts year-round. The Housatonic River Walk threads a half-mile greenway along the water right behind Main Street, the work of volunteers who spent decades clearing a once-polluted bank. Just outside town, Monument Mountain offers a short climb to a quartzite ridge and a long view over the Housatonic River valley, the same trail Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne hiked together in 1850.

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Nantucket

Main Street in Nantucket, Massachusetts
Main Street in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Image credit Mystic Stock Photography via Shutterstock.

Whaling money built Nantucket’s Main Street, and the cobblestones laid to keep wagon wheels out of the mud are still there to rattle your suitcase. The island stays well under 50,000 year-round residents even at the height of summer. Brick sidewalks, weathered shingles, and window boxes give the downtown the texture of an old port rather than a new outdoor mall.

The Whaling Museum, set in an 1847 candle factory, explains how a small island once lit the lamps of the world, right down to a full sperm whale skeleton. Brant Point Lighthouse marks the harbor entrance and ranks among the most photographed beacons in New England. Straight Wharf keeps the working waterfront within steps of the shops, and the Oldest House, built in 1686, anchors the streetscape in the island’s first century. Every detail down to the gray shingles seems to point back to the same seafaring story.

Massachusetts Main Streets Worth Slowing Down For

What ties these eight together is not a shared look but a shared honesty. Stockbridge and Lenox lean on Berkshire culture, Concord carries the weight of 1775, and Great Barrington keeps reinventing itself. Marblehead, Newburyport, Rockport, and Nantucket all grew up facing salt water and never lost the habit. The best Main Streets here are not stage sets. They are working downtowns that happen to be worth a long, slow look.



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Battenfeld: AG Andrea Campbell’s errors sting Massachusetts voters

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Battenfeld: AG Andrea Campbell’s errors sting Massachusetts voters


No single person in Massachusetts bears more responsibility for denying voters the right to cast a ballot than inept Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

No rent control? Blame Campbell.

No state income tax cut? Blame Campbell.

No audit of the state Legislature? Blame Campbell.

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Again and again Campbell has screwed up or worse, been complicit, leaving Bay State voters without the ability to exercise their right to decide important issues.

No amount of fawning pieces in the Boston Globe or publicity-seeking lawsuits against President Trump can cover up that fact.

She is a disaster. Unfortunately we have to suffer through another four years of her bonehead decision-making because Republicans in Massachusetts are just as inept at fielding viable candidates.

Massachusetts voters had the best chance in two decades this fall to establish rent control with a referendum question capping rent increases at 5%. Polls showed the ballot question with a solid advantage.

But Campbell, a liberal Democrat, allowed language on the question giving exemptions from the rent limits to religious institutions, which in Massachusetts violates the Constitution. The Supreme Judicial Court voted unanimously to kick the referendum question off the ballot.

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This was not a case of political decision-making on Campbell’s part, since Democrats favored the rent control question. It was purely a rookie botch job, and a huge one at that, which will have major ramifications for renters, who will now be denied a much needed break from astronomical increases.

A simple reading of the Constitution should have caused Campbell to flag the question, and get the rent control advocates to strike the religious exemption. She admitted after she “got it wrong” — which is of no help to the renters in this state.

Apparently following the law, as Martin Short’s synchronized swimmer character would say, is not the Attorney General’s strong suit.

A similar error — or possibly an insidious political move — on Campbell’s part also blocked voters from getting a chance at lowering the state income tax from 5% to 4%.

The referendum question clearly had majority support, but was strongly opposed by Democrats like Campbell who argued it would have led to unconscionable cuts in social service programs to make up for the lost tax revenue.

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Campbell okayed fatally flawed language in the ballot question which again caused the SJC to punt it off the ballot. This one may not have been just a simple mistake, but a possible deliberate act by Campbell to poison the question.

Politics again played a role in Campbell’s moves around a 72% voter-approved legislative audit by Auditor Diana DiZoglio. By not enforcing the new law, Campbell is flagrantly keeping DiZoglio from auditing the books of the despised, free-spending Legislature.

Campbell — rather than do her job — will not represent DiZoglio in her efforts to secure the audit, but authorized her to seek outside counsel, which will cost millions.

So on one hand saying she’ll enforce the law, she’s done everything she can to block it.

So what does Campbell do exactly? She has sued the Trump administration 50 times already, on a pace to exceed even Gov. Maura Healey’s lawsuits against Trump back when she was AG.

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And she rarely ventures outside her Dartmouth, Mass. manse. Far from being the people’s lawyer, she stands against the people’s will.



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