Believing survivors today so there are less victims tomorrow.

I truly never expected to be here, but as a teen girl studying in Germany, I met a young woman named Rafif who changed my life. When I learned she had been sold into domestic servitude and was being abused by her trafficker, I vowed to find her. Only, I didn't.

At 23, after completing my Master's degree from the University of Bonn, Germany, I moved to Boston and co-founded FAIR Girls. In 2014, my team and I created the first safe home for survivors of human trafficking in the nation's capital. In my time as the executive director of FAIR Girls, we served almost 1,500 young women and girls and created safe homes, artisan economic empowerment programs, and changed laws. We worked in Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Russia, and Uganda. Most of all, though — the young women and girls we served in D.C. were from the D.C. area. These young women and girls were almost exclusively in foster care with prior experiences of child abuse, neglect, arrest, domestic violence, and sexual assault. I learned over time that human trafficking is the bad icing on an already bad cake of abuse. More than 90% of our clients were women and girls of color whose abuses were also compounded by the systemic racism within our country. These are facts I refuse to soften.

More than 80% of my clients were arrested as a result of their trafficking. This inspired me to co-found Karana Rising with my dear friend and colleague, Fecha Talso. Karana Rising helped launch a national movement to stop the incarceration of trafficking survivors, and its Survivor Justice Initiative. One young woman — Tiffany Simpson — was a teenager sentenced to 30 years as a result of the sex trafficking she endured at the hands of a man more than twice her age. In 2022, Tiffany was freed, but many survivors like her continue to be arrested.

In 2009, while still directing FAIR Girls, a horrible new truth came to light. Sex trafficking had moved largely online. Traffickers were finding, selling, and abusing victims on websites like Backpage.com. For more than a decade, I joined advocates across the country to fight back, and in 2018 the owners of Backpage.com were finally arrested. They were charged with many crimes but never sex trafficking. And online sexual violence continues to grow.

In 2022 I became the director of The Reclaim Coalition to End Online Image-Based Sexual Violence at Panorama Global, and in 2024 co-founded STISA (Survivors + Tech Solving Image-Based Sexual Abuse), a global coalition of hotlines, technologists, and survivors built to fight deepfake and image-based abuse.

In 2025, I joined more than 20 survivors of image-based sexual abuse to form The June Coalition, and recently became the director of The Digital Identity Foundation. Serving survivors is at the core of everything I do, and this includes giving a voice to their experiences and ensuring their deep lived experience is heard, honored, and incorporated into the laws, policies, and technologies that shape our lives, this country, and the globe.

I continue to brief the U.S. Department of Justice on the ratification of the UN Convention Against Cybercrime, the United Nations Women Fund and UNFPA, the French Foreign Ministry, and many more.

Writing has always been my deepest form of expression and truth-telling. My reporting and essays have run in The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS, NBC, CNN, the BBC, and Ms. Magazine. My advocacy has been covered by CNN, the BBC, Glamour, Vogue, Marie Claire, Oprah Winfrey's OWN with Lisa Ling, and The Katie Couric Show. In 2024 I published Believe Me: The True Story of How a Trafficked Teen and Her Advocate Changed the Justice System and Found True Freedom, my ten-year account of the Tiffany Simpson case and the fight that followed — to change the law that enabled her arrest, and then use it to free her. The book was named a Distinguished Favorite at the 2024 New York Big Book Awards and a finalist for True Crime at the 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards. I also write poetry and am currently working on my first young-adult novel, The Lucinda Knight Series, set to be published in early 2027.

I hold a Master's in European Law and Economics from the University of Bonn and a bachelor's degree in geography and international relations from Texas State University, where I later received the Distinguished Alumni Award. I've taught as an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

More recently, I'm also a certified Jungian life coach. I bring my trauma-informed work together with visualizations, dream work, and daily practice to ensure anyone working with me can truly become the version of themselves that allows them to reach their highest potential.

I am a survivor myself — of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. I don't wish that on anyone, but I know that taking my pain and turning it into my life's purpose is a gift I am grateful for every day. And, dear reader, I'm grateful you are here. Let's create a world together where you, me, and all survivors can thrive.