One 60-ish man, a former Fortune 500–company administrator, bragged, Sergeant McKee says, that his retirement plan consisted of having sex with as many prostitutes as possible. Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t. The men believed the ads, and the legend of the Happy Hooker. Each of them also assumed they were the one exception to the rule of the repulsive customer. Says Karen Stauss, the former staff attorney for Polaris Project, a D.C.-based not-for-profit anti-slavery-and-human-trafficking organization, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care.”

Amy Fine Collins, “Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door”