INSIDER SESSION | Reframing Trafficking: Ellyn Marsh on the Language of Exploitation

Hello everyone. I'm Carol Costello. A short setup before we go inside. Today, we're diving into human trafficking because we were struck by the unsettling parallels between the allegations against Sean Combs Diddy and the Richard Beasley case. Two different worlds vastly different victims in terms of race, class and status, and yet disturbingly similar patterns. Mr. Combs was convicted on two counts of prostitution, but acquitted on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. He's been denied bail while he awaits sentencing in October. It's possible he could get a 20 year sentence, but I don't think anyone's holding their breath. That's not likely. Okay, now you're up to date for inside Sessions. Enjoy. Just a quick introduction of who we are before we go on because people listen to the God hook are used to me droning on and on. I'm Carol Costello. I used to work at CNN forever and now I'm a true crime podcaster. And Emily.

I'm Emily Pelphrey. I'm a former special prosecuting attorney, and I'm Carol's partner in this true crime podcast world.

I know I dragged her kicking and screaming because frankly she has sources that I need to exploit. We're calling the ensuing podcast episodes, the Insider sessions because we're going to focus on, oh, the many, many issues that surface during the God hook and the Beasley trial and everything else. I'm still recovering actually, and we have our first special guest. Can you believe it, Emily?

I love that we have a guest to come in and talk about this. I'm interested to hear how the podcast was received and any questions and how it translate, not just to this case, but other cases that are out there and that you're looking at in the true crime world.

That's why we dragged Ellyn Marsh from the I think not podcast into our world. We only regret Ellyn, that Joey is not with you.

Yes, I know. Hello. Well, I'm so happy to be here and I'm happy for it to be a girls only day. I'm totally fine with that. Even though Joey's kind of one of the girls. It could be a girl's only day.

He is kind of one of the girls. I so enjoy that about him. I like when you call him my love. I love that. I do. He

Is my love. He's the sweetest. I'm an ally through and through, but I'm like, really? You got to be gay. Okay,

I so get that. We are glad to have you here because Emily and I have lived in darkness for what the past two years putting together the got hook, and we wanted to talk about the not so uplifting topic of human trafficking.

I am so happy. Flattered is more the word, and I have been diving into the Beasley case through you guys, and I am hooked mean. That's how you know, have a good podcast when you're like, let me do some chores so I can listen to my podcast and let me drive around so I could listen to my podcast. So I'm about six and a half episodes in, but it's been a dive. So you guys did amazing work. It's just tremendous. The research is incomparable and just congrats. I mean, congrats is weird because we talk about such dark things, but you kind of have to find the reason, and I think what you guys are talking about is really important, and I didn't really know this case. I kind of live here and I didn't know about it. So it's just been a great journey listening to it. So congratulations.

Thank you. I think Emily has lived it for the past what decade?

A long time. Yes, a very long time. But what I appreciated about this podcast and the way that it was put together is it was such a complex story, and to have someone really take you through not just the case itself, but all of the other parts that weren't told is what I found interesting and I found really important, and I'm so proud that we were able to get all of the facts around this story out there.

And I think one of the most important aspects for us was the story that Amy shared with us. The former sex worker who was allegedly trafficked by Richard Beasley and Richard Beasley will never pay for those alleged crimes. And we were kind of listening to the Diddy trial actually through your podcast, and there's so many parallels. It's not exactly the same. The survivors are totally different, but you can see the parallels there. So we wanted to bring you in, Ellyn, just to talk about how people really don't understand what human trafficking really is.

I've been thinking about it a lot in different ways. Obviously we see a lot of cases that come to us. I also have a dear friend who was trafficked by her boyfriend when she was in her early twenties, and now with the verdict from the Diddy trial, I feel like it's named incorrectly. This is sort of like the conclusion I've come to after listening to the story. There are a couple things in the world that are just named wrong. For example, we were just off mic talking about A-D-H-D-A-D-H-D is named incorrectly. I have no problems concentrating and dysregulation. And I think the same thing with the word trafficking because I feel like, and this is just totally my speculation, but it's been coming to me in the past couple of days when people hear trafficking, they think of a movie where girls are locked in a basement or they're kidnapped by strangers or taken to a foreign country. They don't imagine that it could be a woman in a penthouse and taking pictures and walking the red carpet and smiling next to her abuser. It seems much more nefarious and darker, but it's actually very simple, and I do think that was one of the shortcomings in the verdict because coercion just needs power. You don't need violence or chains or cages. So I think that our perception of the word is confusing to people. Do you know what I'm saying? I

Feel like, oh, yeah, yeah, because Emily has talked a lot about this because she's tried these kinds of cases and just to try to explain it to a jury, Emily, right?

It's so hard. But it's not just that trafficking aspect that people have to get over. It's the involvement of sex and how people perceive victims of sexual crime, and they're already held to such a different standard. So you have these women who present a certain way and jurors will be like, oh, well, if she was really raped or sexually exploited, she's going to act a certain way, not understanding the psyche of that person and how they go day to day. So you take that already hard stink for juts to understand, and then you throw in, well, now we're going to take that and now we're going to show you this whole new situation of trafficking where they've been forced to do this by this individual. Why couldn't they leave? And so it's like the jurors are almost having to get over two really, really hard hurdles to get any kind of verdict.

So that's why it is hard when you try these cases and even when you indict these cases, indicting a case is such a specific thing and you put so much thought into how you indict a case. Oftentimes, I used to say with my co-counsel, especially in high profile cases, the attorneys will over try and they will overcharge because they want this big sexy, they're already in the media, so let's make it look really sexy and show off our skills. But what they're doing is they're just complicating the whole matter for these 12 individuals that have to come to a unanimous

Verdict. We were talking to an expert in human trafficking and she said, sex trafficking, human trafficking is an ugly business even for us to deal with because you would think you bust into a sex trafficking ring and there's the survivor, and you expect that survivor to run to you with open arms and start crying. And it just doesn't often happen that way because the survivors are often brainwashed and don't actually want to leave. And that's incredibly hard for people to understand.

I think that the word that kept getting glossed over in my mind in the Diddy trial was coercion because like you said, Emily, it might not be someone holding a gun to your head. It might not be violent at all. It could be, for example, in Cassie Venturas instance, it could be leveraging, right? He leveraged her dreams, he leveraged her apartment and this fancy lifestyle, and then that leverage turns into fear because they fear leaving. I don't know about you or how closely you were covering the Diddy case, but I was pretty on top of it every day. And I have to tell you, it just felt like a punch in the gut every time the defense team said, but you stayed, but you liked it, but you posted a picture. And that right there, it just shows me that how many defense lawyers did he have? I dunno, 37, 38, I don't know. And they were just playing into that narrative that I just think that people don't understand. And then I think only after the verdict did we get into the conversation of the perfect victim, which

Amy

Actually represented a not perfect victim. But then you say, oh, but she's a sex worker. She doesn't matter. Okay, so which is it? It's lose lose situation. It's always going to be wrong.

When I think about what happened to Amy, it wasn't even that she wanted out of the business per se. She just didn't want to be controlled by Richard Beasley. She didn't want to be sent back to jail on some whim that he had. She didn't want to be forced to recruit other women for his alleged enterprise. So it's just so complicated. And you're right, Amy was the most imperfect victim of all, but she wasn't asking for much, right?

I would even go farther to say that she's kind of the perfect victim because she exemplifies what you see in movies, right? She is what you would see in a law and order episode. So I think she really exemplified and showed what it is that makes a perfect person to be preyed on by a trafficker. She checked all of those boxes, but even at that point, even with experts or victim advocates or someone explaining that to a juror, humans are humans and they're still going to judge, and they can say, well, why didn't she leave you? Try getting out of prison. If you don't have a place to live and you don't have an ID and you don't have a job and you can't get an ID because you don't have your birth certificate, where are they supposed to go and how are they supposed to start up this life and how are they supposed to leave?

So that's why I think she was the perfect victim in that sense because she has to rely on that situation to stay. So that goes back then to when they tried these cases, how are things explained to the jurors and are they really hitting home? You have to really leave all of your bias toward these individuals at the door and listen to how we're presenting. And then what makes it even harder in the Diddy case is you now have this person that everybody knows. How do you separate your perception that you've had of this individual in your mind to now this dirty trafficker individual? You have all the hard hurdles there for these people to get over.

It's interesting because in my mind, I would think of Cassie as the perfect. I mean, really the perfect victim is someone not on drugs, dresses, modestly quiet, never had sex. That's the best. No,

There are none. It's a nun.

Yeah, no criminal record. And they need to be broken, but not too messy. I mean, it's kind of like that monologue from the Barbie movie about what it's like to be a perfect woman. You can kind of insert this in there too, because I saw someone speaking about how we need victims to perform their pain for us, and I think that's sort of why Jane wasn't a very good witness for the prosecution. I have to applaud her honesty because she was saying, I loved this man. I loved Diddy. But everything that she was saying led them to believe that she wasn't being trafficked, and she was saying, I only wanted to have sex with him. It's like women were just in this little maze or a little mouse trying to get around there, and we never get the cheese no matter which way we go.

I just think there's too much out there in our culture or popular culture that define a woman's sexuality and how we should act when it comes to sex. And I don't know that I'm going to be so depressing when I say this. I don't know that we'll ever escape that.

No, not in our lifetime.

I don't think so. No.

I tell my daughter all the time, I hope that the world is a better place when she grows up. But she just turned 16. I was like, well, maybe the next one. I

Feel your pain. I have a 15-year-old, same thing.

Oh

Yeah, 15 and 12. And how do you tell them to navigate the world and how to dress, but not to provoke and not to be mean, and not to be bitchy, but to be nice. I mean, we like to think that we've made all this progress forward, but I just don't know that it's going to change much more. The only difference now is these poor kids have social media and there's a footprint of what they've done compared to the scrutiny that we didn't face as the Gen Xer.

It is better as the oldest woman in this trio. It's better. I will say though, back in college, I was the victim of domestic violence and there was not a chance in hell I would've ever gone to the police in my twenties because no one would've believed me. And even if you look at the Diddy trial now, the way those people celebrated his, I mean, it's on camera. And that makes me wonder because if that abusive moment with Cassie wasn't on camera and caught by a hotel surveillance camera, would anyone have really believe that he beat her?

Even though with that video we have this 4K video of a woman being attacked. And of course there was all kinds of noise. But I found it interesting in Maureen Comey's rebuttal closing argument when she said, all you have to believe is that she was forced to do this one time. One time. She was forced to have sex with someone when she didn't want to. And in my mind, I'm thinking, what in that video of him dragging her and kicking her made you believe that this wasn't a common occurrence? So even with a video in 4K that we all saw, we're still like,

But I feel like you kind liked it. I had a case where a woman was a sex worker and she was picked up, but she was raped. She didn't want to have intercourse. And so when we went to trial, she did not testify, but he had cut her up so badly with a box cutter that we had all these medical records and photos. And so he was charged with rape, and I believe like felonious, assault, kidnapping, the jury convicted him of everything except for the rape. And we're like, well, wait a minute. Even though she wasn't here, she went to the hospital. She talked about the fact there's proof that there was damage from the rape, and she was cut with box cutters. You tell me who likes to have sex while they're getting cut wide open to the bone with a box cutter. So even in that situation, I'm like, I can't. It was the fact that they were held up, that she was a prostitute and that she was a sex worker. And it's like, okay, I'm done. What else do I have to do here to prove this? What else do people need,

Whether or not you believe in sex work? And there are some countries and some places where it's perfectly legal. That was still her job. I don't particularly like rugby, but those are people's jobs and they play rugby. And it's like, well, would you go into a nail salon and hold a gun and be like, put these tips on Now. It's still her work. You can like it or not. But the fact of the matter is, what they were saying was you sell your body. So you always want sex. That's it. You are a slut. You're a whore. You constantly want to have sex. No, they're probably in a cycle of abuse and poverty and addiction

That actually describes Amy to a T. She's raped by a family member when she's 13 years old. Her mother is an alcoholic, but loves her, but is unable to care for her properly. She becomes a sex worker and she becomes addicted to heroin. And no, I'm sure that isn't the life that Amy wanted for herself, but she at some point felt she had no choice. So to me that she even survived that life and is now a strong woman who cares for her children and grandchildren is amazing. But you're right. It's not like Amy wanted to go out and necessarily have sex with all of these people, and she was raped many, many times. She told us, but she also told us that she reported some of those rapes to police and they didn't believe her.

I do have to say about the podcast, I'm so grateful you actually put Amy's voice on there. I'm so glad she agreed to do it. I mean, I love hearing people's stories in the first person, but there was such a heaviness to her voice. I feel emotion through people's voices. I podcasts, I listen to podcasts so much. So I'm so glad that she agreed to do it. It just added a whole level of depth because just that pain and the exhaustion in her voice, it really made an impact on me. So that was just a great decision, and I'm glad she agreed to do it.

We were so worried about her. Emily was sitting right beside her during the whole time. I was so grateful for that. Emily,

You could also feel a strongness even just sitting there because she was reclaiming her story after all of this time. And because I had prosecuted the murder case and was not involved with the trafficking case, I'd never met her. So to sit there and say, this is actually the woman that started this whole thing. I mean, she started, and I think that she's one of the heroes of all of this because she reclaimed her story back and she told it, and it was just a really powerful thing to sit next to her while she did it.

Okay, so let's talk about possible solutions. Ellyn, you brought up, maybe we shouldn't call it human trafficking. Maybe it should be called some other sort of offense,

Sexual exploitation maybe. I don't know. I just think it's, what would be a better

Word? I get that it's hard to name something, but I think in these kinds of cases, it really just falls on the prosecutors to really define and to maybe do a better job of explaining what it is and to be very particular with the cases that they choose to indict in such a way. So if you do have someone who is just abusing, and perhaps the abuse is at a felony level, do you want to risk having a harder case to explain when you kind of have a home run with if there's evidence of a domestic violence situation or evidence of an assault that you can prove a thousand times easier and have the individual still go to prison? So charging, I think, an explanation to the jury that has to be a better solution to be a better way of getting to that end.

So you're suggesting the Diddy prosecutors shouldn't have tacked on the trafficking charges and had just limited it to domestic violence.

A big conversation is did they overcharge on the rico? And I feel like that was a whole separate thing because they didn't bring out his guns with the serial number scratched off, and they didn't bring out a lot of other stuff. I felt like the prosecution was really just focusing on his freaky behavior, and rather than focusing on this freaky behavior, which I don't kink shame as long as you're consenting adults and doing it behind closed doors. But I feel like that wasn't made clear enough that of course, you all can have sex with 20 people if that's what you all want to do. But I feel like the sex trafficking should have been there. I feel like it would've been a disservice to the survivors. I'm wondering if the RICO was an

Overcharge, and I think it's very easy as a prosecutor to sit back and kind of Monday morning quarterback a case and to say that they should have done things this way or the other way. But again, when you start throwing on really complex legal terms and RICO a very complex charge, yes, it can be a bit confusing. And you have to think too, when the jurors go back to deliberate, they have jury instructions that are hundreds of pages long and they have to go through and they have to figure out, well, what does this definition mean for this charge? And they really have a lot of work to do. So then you start putting on common people that aren't used to such legal words, having to decipher, and all it takes is one person to kick off that verdict. You need a unanimous verdict. So yes, when you have a case that I think can be cleaner, you don't need to tack on all of the extra stuff.

And I think too, when you have similar acts, which I know is something that we've talked about with our case, when you have multiple victims that have had the same kind of treatment by that individual, that might not be included in that indictment, but you're introducing that behavior to show that this individual has a pattern of activity of doing this. Again, that can be an appellate issue, even though it looks great and it can help build up and say, Hey, this person really is who we're showing. He has this pattern of doing this, but then you might have an appealable issue. So you've worked really hard on this case. The victims have come forward and talked, but now you're going to have it kicked back on appeal just because you were trying to do a really good job of proving the case. There's so many pitfalls that you can run into when you're doing a prosecution case and when you're indicting and trying it. So do I think that RICO is a little hard for these? Yes, but again, I'm Monday morning quarterbacking it.

Sad to say we need men talking about this, the three of us talking about this, chances are we're probably talking to 80% women who also are nodding their heads along and they're not learning anything. They know what we're saying. And everybody listening, if they're not a survivor, they know at least one survivor, this is not uncommon. We need men screaming about this. I'm happy to hand over the microphone to any cis, white, straight, just regular finance bro. If they were screaming about it, men would listen. Unfortunately, the ones who need to listen, they're not tuning into this podcast and they're not furthering any kind of understanding.

I do think we're in this period of backlash. The Me Too movement came out and the Harvey Weinstein stuff heated up, and for a while it was great, but then the backlash set in, and we're in that period of time now where we've taken a step forward and now we're going to take three steps back. Why? And it happens with every back. The loudest voices coming from men were the voices that said women were whining. Those were the loudest voices. And for the moment, I think that those voices are winning.

That's a great point. But I think that continuing to talk even like this, if we hit one person who might not have understood this before, that still is worth it to me, you're helping one more person understand. And that's one of the things when we started the podcast that I wanted just one person to understand how prosecution and defense work was different than what they saw on the news or what they saw in TV shows, because it just takes that one person, they might get jury duty called next week, and they might then have a sexual assault case. I mean, they could say, you know what? I heard this podcast and I heard these people talk about difficulties in sexual assault cases. So even if it's just one person, yes, I want all this cis white men out there talking, yes, please, God, let them do it. But still we need to keep doing

It. I will also say, and I learned this from Emily, sometimes even women don't get it.

I totally agree. Absolutely.

I'm a little embarrassed saying this. The other day when the verdict came in, I was nauseous, number one, because I was shocked. I really thought that they had it. I would love to hear what you thought of the prosecution's case, Emily, but I was like, oh, wow, there we go. Back in the shadows. Now, why would any woman want to speak when Cassie's face has been blasted everywhere? And they still essentially were like, enjoy your $30 million. We don't think it was all that bad. I say I'm embarrassed to say that because I was so viscerally affected, and I have nothing to do with that case at all. I don't know anybody involved, unlike you guys who have a very deep connection to this case. You guys have emotional connections and everything. I don't. And I was almost ashamed to say I was nauseous. I had to lay down in the middle of the day. It felt very out of body.

Any of the big cases too. I mean, look at the sexual assault cases with President Trump and how she was treated during that. And then people say, well, you don't have to believe every woman. You don't have to believe every woman because every woman isn't coming forward and asserting that she's been sexually assaulted. What you do have to do is listen to the case and listen to it properly. So how it's presented, but you just have to listen to each case individually. And I think, Carol, when you're talking about this backlash, I think it's because they take all these sexual assault cases and they push them all together, and everything is then supposed to be the same. And every sexual assault case is the same. And people have a hard time separating them out and listening to each one independently because they're like, well, this is the one that President Trump dealt with. This is the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. What was that survivor like? And instead of really, really paying attention to each individual, and they bring their preconceived notions and opinions and they can't leave. So the prosecution did what they could. I mean, you have to make calls. You can go back and you can say, maybe I shouldn't have done this. Maybe I should have done this differently. I'd like to believe that they put on the best case that they thought that they could put forward.

I think some people thought they concentrated too much on the sex parties and the baby oil and all the sensational details of,

But they sort of had an uphill battle from the start. It's sort of the way the justice system, well, I shouldn't say the justice system. It's sort of the way society is laid out, because the system is built to almost immediately and inherently doubt survivors more than we feel comfortable holding abusers accountable. And that's really weird. And the numbers don't lie. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 1% of sex trafficking cases are prosecuted and even less are charged.

It sounds like that's what it is. And I think it all comes back to how many cases of sexual assault are actually reported, and then how many are indicted, how many go to trial or are they pled out? So yeah, by the time you get down to the ones that actually go to trial and go through that full evidentiary process, it's a very low number.

Okay. So we have to end this on a positive note. Yes. Okay. Yes, Carol, you have a comedy podcast show about Drew Grime Allen. We're leaving this to you. Positive. Positive.

My podcast is called, I Think Not, and it is very confusing to say true crime comedy because my partner Joey, we met when we were in the original company of Kinky Boots on Broadway. So we're big old hams. We're big old weirdos, but we never laugh at crime. We sort of derail and laugh at ourselves, or we laugh at bad reenactment actors. And the reason that I sort of like that is sort of what you two were just saying, it gets heavy and it gets dark. And a lot of us have anxiety around these crimes, and I don't want someone to stop listening. They feel uncomfortable. So we give them a little palate cleanser, we sing a show tune or a pop song that comes to mind, something having to do with the case. But these stories need to be told, and not everybody is comfortable having so much darkness, which, hello, we're just listening. These people had to live it. They're not comfortable with that. So it's true crime comedy, but we never laugh at crime. We never laugh at victims. We are very victim centered, but that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. We are big goal, silly empaths, and I love taking a break and listening to deep dives like you guys did. Again, you guys just did a phenomenal job.

I think that psychologically it does really get to you, even if you're just the storyteller, which is what I was. So I applaud people like Emily, who's willing to put herself through that again, because it's a lot. And I'm sure Emily, you wouldn't say, oh, poor me, I know you.

But I think Ellyn, what you talk about with having a comedy or trying to find some humor in some part of it is I think how a lot of us were able to get through it. So just finding something ridiculous. Not in the case itself, not obviously, we're very victim heavy, but we always used to say that we'd find Mountain Dew at every crime scene. Something as silly as that. And it's true. There's Mountain Dew, doesn't matter kind of crime, white collar drugs, rape, whatever. There was a random can of Mountain Dew in this case on top of a grave. So it exists. But to find the humor in that,

Who the hell drinks Mountain Dew anymore? What's happening? Is

That a thing? No. And we would see Mountain Dew trucks, and this is going to say that Mountain Dew, it causes crime, but we would see the trucks going down the highway and we're like, whoa, crime's afoot.

Right? Right.

Better not go that way. So no, please don't come after me Mountain Dew. But to find the humor in those things, you have to stay sane. And I think if you don't, or if you don't have that outlet, you can't really listen to these cases and then hopefully gain some kind of perspective on how to prevent them or how to help the people that go through them. So thank you for what you do.

Thank you. I have 10,000 questions for you about the Karen Reed trial, Emily, so don't give me your email or else Please do. She's like, oh God. Big mistake giving that girl. I love it.

She does love it. She does. Ellyn, thank you so much. And thanks to all of you who listened to our first Insider session podcast episode. Did I say that right? I did. We're going to do a deep dive on the relationship between Richard Beasley and his ever fiercely loyal mother, which is very difficult for me to, oh God, I can't, right? So

Weird. That was so weird. Oh my God. I kept actually saying, Ew.

I know. It's so hard to understand. Yeah. But that will be our next deep dive, and thank you, Ellyn. Thank you. Until next time. Bye everyone. Thank you for listening.