My seven years of hell: Former sex worker opens up
A woman who was forced to work in the sex industry for seven years has opened up on her experience.
Jasmine Marino-Fiandaca was 18 years old when a man she described as "very seductive, very promising" began grooming her for what claimed to be a massage parlour.
"He groomed me," Marino-Fiandaca told the SeaCoastOnline.
"He bought me fancy clothes and shoes, spent money on me. He drove a Mercedes. I felt very special. He said, 'You could make a ton of money if you just worked in these massage parlours.'"
Her first day on the job was both "disgusting and exciting", but the feeling soon soured when the money she made was taken straight off her at the end of her shift.
"He said, 'Is there going to be a problem with this?' In my mind, I said, 'Yes, there's going to be a problem.' But I didn't have the guts to say it, so I just handed it over."
Not long after, she decided she wanted out of the relationship, but that's when things turned violent.
"He would be very violent. Either that, or he would sit me down for hours and scream at me, humiliate me. He'd tell me I was no good, that I was ugly, that no one would ever love me. And he had a gun on him at all times," she said.
He continued to abuse her for several years, both physically and verbally, on a daily basis and forced her to keep working at the since closed down Danish Health Club in Kittery.
In a good turn of luck, she left the club just two weeks before it was raided by US federal agents in 2004.
She was still stuck in the prostitution business. After she was forced to have an abortion by her pimp, she realised she needed to get out of the business.
That's when she started hiding small amounts of money away and plotting her escape.
"I'd put it in Ziploc bags, and dig holes in the dirt of my potted plants. I knew he'd never look there," she said.
After six months, she saved enough to escape and made a run for it. Yet her ordeal continued, as she turned to Oxycontin to deal with the memories of what she had been through.
"It numbed all that pain," she said.
It got worse as she started using heroin.
"I lost my apartment. I slept on park benches, in people's cars. My family wouldn't talk to me," she said.
"My parents said, 'It's over.' I loved my grandparents dearly and I couldn't see them.
"I said, 'You need to get clean, or you're going to die.'"
Marino-Fiandaca turned things around in 2007, and now works with at-risk youth and teenage runaways.
She said being her upbringing in a large working class family with no real issues proved being groomed for prostitution could happen to anyone.
"It's very real, and it's happening in your backyard, to girls from all backgrounds, whether middle class or lower class. I'm a white girl from America, and it happened to me," she said.
"Shame is what keeps you quiet. Shame keeps you secretive, because it's too intense," she warned.
"You're only as sick as your secrets. As long as you keep quiet, you can never be free. I want to tell young girls that they're treasured — because no one else is telling them."
