The face of human trafficking

Woman escapes exploitation, moves on to productive life, career

By Mara Stine

The Gresham Outlook, Mar 19, 2010 (1 Reader comment)

Jim Clark / Gresham Outlook

Richardson was a teen prostitute who was trafficked throughout the west by her pimp. She's since escaped the illegal industry and is a Gresham businesswoman, teaching people how to save money on groceries.

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Sitting at the Jantzen Beach Red Lion last fall for a human trafficking lecture, Gresham businesswoman Jessica Richardson heard the whispers: “That doesn’t happen here.”

But she knew better.

Richardson had been a sex trafficking victim in that same hotel 13 years earlier.

Now 30, married, and the mother of four children, Richardson operates Money Maniac, teaching people how to save money on groceries.

Sitting in her Rockwood office, she recalled how she came to live in the world of tricks and tracks.

She had stable loving parents. But at the age of 4, three neighbors in Texas began to rape her.

“They weren’t brutal, violent or harsh,” she said, recalling her abusers, ages 13, 15 and 19.

“It was like their way of showing me affection and kindness. I know that’s really twisted, and now I know it was rape. But at the time, I had no frame of reference. I mean, who talks to their 4 year old about sex?”

The only hint of something wrong: They threatened to hurt her and her family if she told anyone.

At 5, the abuse stopped when her family moved. They settled in Joseph in northeast Oregon, where her father was murdered when she was 10.

At 12, out of rebellion and to fit in, she started having sex again. By the end of her sophomore year, she was doing drugs and dropped out of school.

Desperate, her mother sent her to Job Corps in Estacada, where her promiscuity continued. She earned her GED and managed a restaurant near Lloyd Center.

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