An actor sits on the edge of a bed in a $90 motel room at night, dirty curtains are cumshot. The cobwebs darken the stained ceiling and the room smells of moisture and old smoke. In the bathroom, the tiles come off the edges and the beige stripes stain the bathroom and toilet. Bulletproof vests are attached to the back of the chairs, ready. On the table are bags of dried beef, roasted chips and oranges. There are cans of fuel and enough water bottles for everyone: two dozen police officers from the local county sheriff’s department; two external agencies; an FBI agent; Two civilian lures; a former government researcher. And Marisol Nichols, star of the hit television series Riverdale. But she’s on a Hollywood set, playing a role: the role of a parent supporting a child or, as the stage calls it, the role of a child who is taken from a boy: a dust bag on his way to a dreary motel. having sex with an 11-year-old woman who doesn’t exist.
Nichols sends a message in a popular branching app between men to have sex with children. She pretends to be the child’s father: “In the city today/only tonight, someone has to teach their son/daughter while Mrs. And I watch.” (Educate is a sex code).
Online, Nichols is a horny adult dealer who needs to sleep with children. On the phone, she fakes a child’s voice, hunting drugsed and embarrassed. “What do you like?” men, thinking he’s thirteen years old. She laughs and stutters at the right time. Unlike the other roles he chose, Nichols is not paid for this performance. He flew here, halfway across the country from his home in Los Angeles, to this midsize Midwest city for the two-day operation.
Nichols saw the paper in case a culprit (aggressor) sees it through the window. She is 46 years old, but is 163 cm with a hoodie over her head and a draped sheet over her shoulders, she may look like a teenager. Or she can wear her long, tangled black hair and put on a beer-soaked T-shirt, and she’s a young drugged mother who prostitutes her son. She can play the lady or the victim.
This morning, she is dressed in a black upside-down baseball cap, a black V-necked T-shirt and low-bottom flared jeans. Bring a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. It could be anybody. Most of those guys, he says, are “weak.” Loose. Sick men who need to enjoy a girl. She recalls an episode in which she played a drug dealer who organized sex parties for children. The 38-year-old target looked like a real estate agent, probably in a college fraternity. “Look at the boy in front, ” he said, putting her in the belly. “These guys look like people in general. And you say you’re only preparing young people with whom you have sex.”
Every sting is like a war that may never end. But if the two days and all the power of men and the spending of taxpayers’ cash catches a single predator, it will have been worth it, because this guy could possibly not lead to those who suffer with who he knows as children.
Child sex trafficking, Nichols says, is sometimes considered a third global scourge, but it is also an epidemic in the West (in the United States, for example, estimates place thousands of victims of human trafficking). People look out the blind eye because they don’t need to hear the dirty details. People don’t need to know about adults who have sex with children, what they say they should do with them. “Your brain protects you from so much evil, ” he said. “[But] if the other right people don’t know, they’ll keep happening, because the other people in the right place are the only ones who do something.”
Nichols’ determination to catch these criminals is due to non-public trauma. She is 11 years old, the year of her life in hell, the same age as the maximum of imaginary women she embodies in stings.
One night, she dated a friend in the Chicago suburbs and was raped through an organization of older boys. The memories come back in fragments: flashes of “wake up in a bed without underwear and everyone laughs.” After the rape, she says, “I was kicked on the sidewalk in the abdomen in the middle of winter.” She’s someone who says, “Get up, bitch.
“It’s the total trajectory of my life in a day,” she says to herself.
Everyone in the city knew and Nichols turned to drugs and used them until he was twenty. He moved to the city to continue playing, putting gasoline and checking coats between auditions.
Her big break came here when she selected as a pilot in 1995 and moved to Los Angeles, before making her debut in the Las Vegas film Vacation as Chevy Chase’s daughter two years later.
He then gave the impression on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Law – Order: Special Victims Unit and Open Case. More than once he played a policeman and, as a component of his role-liner, went for a walk with murder and narcotics detectives. His role as law enforcement in the action/suspense series 24 has sparked a component interest in the fight against human trafficking.
Then, when his career slowed around 2012, he asked about it. In 2014, she founded her nonprofit, Foundation for a Slavery Free World, and during a vacation to attend a covert child sex tourism operation in Haiti, she was spontaneously invited to deploy her acting skills to help catch a predator. Since then, a dozen sexual injections to young people from all over the world have participated in part as a volunteer.
Predatory children, Nichols says, “are all disgusting.” But his commitment is to abolish human trafficking, to capture what would appear knowing that this child is being held against his will, he says. “I step after those boys because, to me, they’re the most dangerous.
She admits that such paintings make it difficult to look at men in the same way. “It’s hard not to make it as difficult as men do that,” he says. Wondering what would happen if looking to prevent sex trafficking was his full-time career, he said, “I would lose my religion in humanity.”
Nichols and the team have been at the motel since nine in the morning. A yellow lamp off turns on and the TV plays at low volume, tuned to a travel program. Outside, there’s a $2 store. At least five churches are within walking distance. Officers line up parking spaces where they sit with walkie-talkies, internal cars with polarized glass and no air conditioning. Expectations may increase to the dark hours of the night, and the undercover team cannot move freely or leave the room, as this may warn a suspect who might be circling.
Paedophile capture depends on generation (apps, chat rooms, dark internet) and generation is constantly evolving. Five years ago, Nichols was part of an operation with detectives running sex ads with young people in the non-public sections of Craigslist. “In 15 minutes, we had 30 dates,” he says.
Then there was Backpage, “Disney’s Terrifying World for Paedophiles.” It was introduced in 2004 as a classified ad site, but in 2010 Backpage has become a global hub for online dating and sex trafficking. The site was closed in 2018 (following the passage of two federal laws that found websites that facilitate sex trafficking guilty). Craigslist also removed its non-public segment in 2018 under increasing pressure, however, experts say it can access the site at any time and locate coded classified ads that promote young girls.
In one corner of the motel room, one is installed next to two walkie-talkies. Nichols works with an undercover agent to run ads on dating sites known for being used by traffickers. Today, the band published on Backpagepro. Nichols says he uses “exactly the same font as Backpage.” Colors, design, style. All.
She leans over an assistant’s shoulder and tells him what to write. There are two young people to have sex with, she says her fake ad: a woman and a child, aged 12 and 13, who travel with an adult partner. “Do you need them to come here?” Nichols asks. “Yes, ” said Nichols, his arms up. “Caucasian?” “And Mexican, ” he said. “We two.” “Weight?” Asked. “108 [49 kg]. OR 102 [46 kg]. He’s a kid.”
They take pictures to upload to the message. Photographs are not explicit; represent innocence. One shows a woman with long black hair, a plating shirt, hunting sullen and vulnerable. The other is a smiling blond boy who appears to be part of a football team. Both are photographs of adult agents that Nichols has worked with before. But the photos have been from older people using a photo app that Nichols helps keep on their iPhone.
The ad indicates that the “lawyer” who sells to young people is called Bob. Age: 46. Price: $0. (Actual costs are negotiated via SMS or telephone). In addition, an email and a phone number belonging to a phone issued by the police. The wizard downloads the manipulated photos and the ad is published online.
A pop-up window appears: “You have a new message”. In 15 minutes, there are 10 messages from stakeholders. “A clean and discreet guy who looks…” “Dad is able to use you…” “I’m drug-free and sick, five feet 11 inches, average constitution, a little over seven and five inches. I need to massage my hot and hard rhythms … »
Nichols and other undercover agents move the messages one by one and respond. A respondent, after learning that the user they think they are communicating with is underage, responds: Have you ever done that?
Throughout the morning, a phone chat with the sheriff’s branch communicated with the men via a text message. The talk, sitting in a pink garden chair, with a blanket with the American flag over her legs, displaces them, preparing Nichols before she selects the phone. “You’re 15, ” he told her. “Where are my parents?” Ask Nichols. “Dad’s in jail. Mom’s tense,” replies one deputy. Nichols nods, sitting on a dusty air conditioner.
“Room 231, ” an officer reminds Nichols. That’s essential information. Room 231, next door, is equipped with a bulletproof wall and is full of officials in a position to stop the predators. There are too many civilians in this room. It would be hard to arrest the guy here if he got a gun. “You need it on speaker, don’t you?” Ask Nichols. “Radios off”.
The play is silent as he dials the number. At first, the user hangs up. Nichols calls again. This time, someone’s responding. “Hello, hey, ” said Nichols, hunting shyly. “How are you?” “Are you available?” He asks. “I’m available, right? I’m hunting for fun, baby.” “Do you have a picture?” “Well, I sent you one.” I didn’t notice it. “Oh, stranger, it’s okay. I’ll pay you back if you want. Do you have one? It’s hanging.
The morning is moving slowly. Promising clues are disappearing. Many men communicate simultaneously. Some end the contact, nervous at the thought of having to deal with a sting. Others continue to chat, promising to stop at the motel.
In a text conversation, a boy sends an image of himself with a pastel-colored blouse and rectangular-rimmed lenses, a smile with his lips closed appearing on his jowl. He writes he’s 52 years old. He’s thinking of talking to a 15-year-old.
Just before 2 p.m., surveillance officers saw a suspect entering the motel. This is one of the men with which the talk was sent earlier. Everybody stops talking. They spin around the door and expect a sound from the outside, listening to the walkie-talkies.
“Knock on the door,” says one officer, reporting the activity in the adjoining room. A close congressman turns the button and sunlight penetrates. There’s the suspect, a middle-aged guy with a polo shirt. The agents are already holding him.
“I have one, ” said the deputy. “No fight.”
This is the first of 12 arrests that will be made over the next two days. Nichols is satisfied with the result, they can be difficult paintings and many of his attempts fail. But he’s already making plans for his next operation.
As the sun goes down and officials keep their equipment, a call is broadcast on the radio: an outdoor shooting at a local high school. The main assistant wrecks the parking lot in a van, avoiding alerting the organization to the crime scene. He beckons To Nichols so he can get in if he needs to go upstairs. Nichols can’t help it. Jump into the passenger seat.
“We had a high-speed chase for filming!” Nichols later wrote in a text message about the trip. “I love this thing!” Every moment you spend with the police is a lesson in human habits and a curtain for your next performance. More importantly, it is one step closer to getting rid of heinous criminals; one step closer to the protectors and innocent 11-year-olds around the world.
This article was originally published in Marie Claire’s September 2020 factor.