A Harlot’s Cry: One Woman’s Thirty-Five-Year Journey through the Sex Industry is the real-life story of my friend Mary Frances. In my hometown of Louisville, KY, Mary was trafficked by a biker gang when she was just fifteen years old, and the horrors she suffered sent her down a path of working in the sex industry and depending on abusers and pimps with nowhere else to turn.
I met Mary in 2011, about a year after she escaped the industry for the final time. God led us to work together to write her story, to show what life is really like behind all the statistics of human trafficking in our country. It’s an important book about an important topic, and I encourage you to take the time to hear her story and see how God brings beauty out of the worst of tragedies.
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It all started at an ice cream truck.
In a typical American city on a typical neighborhood street, fifteen-year-old Mary Frances found herself the object of interest to Dirty Dan, a biker gang member more than a decade her senior. Neglected, abused, and hungry, Mary thought she had found the love and affection she longed for when this handsome biker singled her out with gifts of milkshakes and banana splits and told her he would make her a star.
Little did she know that these ice cream treats would cost her the next thirty-five years of her life.
After spending the rest of her teen years being trafficked and pimped out, Mary finally escaped Dirty Dan–only to find that the grips of the sex industry reach far beyond the hold of a biker gang. With no education and nowhere else to turn, Mary went back to the only life she had ever known: a life of brothels, peep shows, and strip clubs, where if the drugs and alcohol don’t ruin you, the thieves and abusers certainly will. For the better part of thirty years, Mary tried everything to escape the sex industry–education, marriage, therapy, vocational training–but it all fell short until an encounter with God changed her life forever.
A Harlot’s Cry gives an unflinching look at the inner workings of the sex industry and all the evils that keep women entrenched within it, but it also offers hope to anyone who has ever felt trapped and forgotten in this life.