 Lindsay didn't think sex trafficking happened in Canada until she lived it. She hopes that by sharing her story, others will avoid the same fate. Names have been changed to protect the identity of Lindsay and the integrity of the ongoing court case.
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TORONTO – It was May 23, 2010, just after midnight.
When the hyperventilating subsided and the paramedics walked away, Lindsay was left sitting in a grassy area on the side of a Toronto road, numb.
The preceding moments had felt like an out-of-body experience. The 911 call. The threats. The police chase that ended the horror of the last few weeks.
In the distance, Lindsay could see her pimp talking to one officer and his girlfriend talking to another. She was safe.
A police officer walked up to the 28-year-old mother of three with his hand outstretched and helped her to her feet.
"OK," he said. "Now we need your story."
Lindsay was about eight when her parents divorced.
She resented her mom for leaving her dad. As she saw it, she was no longer from a "normal" family. She no longer celebrated just one birthday or just one Christmas.
All the other kids went on picnics with their moms and dads and Lindsay couldn't understand why she couldn't do the same.
Now she gets it.
Her dad was an alcoholic. She remembers watching him slap her mom around.
Despite this understanding, Lindsay's relationship with her mother is still strained. That's because she also understands there were a lot of things her mom did wrong by Lindsay and her older sister.
"She had us very young so it's like she was kind of learning to be a mom at the same time she was raising us," Lindsay says in the living room of her Niagara Region apartment while her boys — three, four and 12 years old — happily distract themselves in the next room.
It wasn't until Lindsay was pregnant with her first child that she remembered what her uncle did to her.
The flashbacks came while she slept.
"From what I can recollect, just having dreams, I was probably between anywhere from five and 10, five and nine, around there."
At first, Lindsay wasn't sure if the nightmares were due to her pregnancy hormones. They were so vivid.
"I could feel his beard rubbing up against me and making me itchy," she says. "When I finally asked my mom, my mom finally confessed that she did know and not only did he do it to me, he had also done it to my sister."
The dreams made the abuse feel fresh. Lindsay woke up crying, shaking and with cold sweats — the same cold sweats she suffers to this day, but for a different reason.
"What I went through in May, I still have some of the dreams," she says. "If I get locked into a car, if (the doors) automatically lock, I'll freak out, I can't have that, I need to know that I can get out of the car whenever I need to get out of the car."
***
It was the spring of 2009.
Lindsay was about a year out of an eight-year physically, emotionally and mentally abusive relationship.
A girlfriend thought it would be a good idea to set up an e-mail account and get Lindsay on Facebook to distract her from the memories of what had been.
Lindsay's flirtatious profile picture reeled in several friend requests from men on the social networking site, but the glow of her computer screen sucked her into one of those men in particular.
His name was Geoffrey.
He told her she was beautiful and, truthfully, he wasn't so bad himself.
Perhaps more attractive was the life he projected online. His pictures showed fancy cars, gold jewelry, motorcycles, a nice house and vacations in The Bahamas.
He was an R&B singer and songwriter who had YouTube videos and, according to his MySpace page, performed across North America.
Yes, he had a girlfriend, but the way he spoke to Lindsay made her think that maybe he liked her more.
He was a charmer to be sure, but maybe, just maybe, Lindsay thought, she would be that woman who really meant something to him.
Geoffrey shovelled the pieces of Lindsay off the floor and moulded her into something that felt, well, amazing.
She thrived on the attention.
"I felt like I had finally found that right person that was going to respect me for me and wanted to be with me and show me the finer things in life that I never had, that I had always longed for."
By April 2010, the pair had gone from Facebook to MSN chats to phone conversations. Finally, he dangled the bait within arm's reach.
Geoffrey was going on vacation. Lindsay joked with him that he sucked, that it wasn't fair, that she was stuck in St. Catharines, Ont., with three kids, and that she wanted to go, too.
"That's when he started, 'Well you know, you can have this lifestyle, you can do the same things I'm doing. I'll take you to Las Vegas with me. We can go here, we can go there.' I was like, 'Really? How?'"
He told her about his company, Private Genies, and sent her the link to its website, which showed beautiful, "pin-up type women" like Lindsay had never seen.
All Lindsay would have to do was go on dates with businessmen from all over the world. They would take her on vacations, show her the finest restaurants, the finest hotels, the best nightlife Toronto had to offer, total VIP access.
And she would only have to work the weekends, leaving her Monday to Friday to pamper her kids.
Lindsay felt no need to ask questions. She trusted Geoffrey. He was her friend.
"You always want that, to have the finer things in life, especially when you've struggled all your life and to have someone just offer this to you and say, 'Here you go?' I jumped for the chance and I said yes."
***
Eric was an addict, period.
Booze, cocaine, Tylenol, it didn't matter what it was. He needed something to get him through each day.
Lindsay and Eric started dating when her oldest son was a toddler. Hot on the heels of her childhood molestation epiphany, Lindsay was in a dark place.
Of course, he was charming at first. The abuse didn't start until about two months in.
"It starts with the slap, the push, the pulling the hair," she says. "When they get away with it for so long, it's like, 'OK, well I've gotten away with that, so now I can punch her in the face and I'm going to get away with it.'"
If Lindsay didn't want to have sex, he would beat her for it. Or, he would beat her and then go out and get it from someone else.
The first restraining order came after Lindsay and Eric returned home from a club and their downstairs neighbours heard the beating.
Police found Lindsay with a bloody nose and puffy eye and charged Eric with domestic assault and forcible confinement.
Eric called Lindsay from jail. He said he would make it right, that it wouldn't happen again.
"I went on the stand and I lied. I said it didn't happen. I did that two or three times throughout our relationship. I would constantly make excuses and I would accept his apologies and think it would never happen again and maybe he's actually really changed this time. Never did."
Lindsay went into labour a week early with her second son because Eric stomped on her stomach. Her third baby was born three months early because of another beating.
He never touched the kids, but sometimes he would wake the oldest one up and make him watch.
"'This is how you treat a woman when she gets out of line,'" he would say. "My oldest son would try to get in the middle of it or I would have one of the babies in my arms and he would come in and try to take one of the babies out of my arms because he was afraid his brothers were going to get hit in the process."
This part of her story, the part about her brave 12-year-old boy, makes Lindsay cry.
"Even though I'm the mother and he's the son, he really tries to take care of me," she says. "When I see other kids play, it's like, he doesn't play like your typical 12-year-old.
He's so much more mature and so much more grown and I feel bad because I feel like I took his childhood from him because of the stuff that he had to go through and the stuff that he had to see."
For years, Lindsay's friends pleaded for her to leave Eric.
"Her words to me were, 'I'll never find somebody else, I'll never ever. I'll always be alone,'" says Chantal, who was in an abusive relationship with Eric in the years before he hooked up with Lindsay. "He was just so mean and you never knew when he walked through the door if it was going to be a smile or a smack."
Lindsay thought of how her mom was beaten by her dad. She thought of the abuse by her uncle. She thought she didn't deserve any better.
Even after she locked him out for the last time, after she met her Prince Charming on Facebook who would bring her to Toronto to experience all that the exotic big city had to offer, the adage Eric would always say rang in her ears: "The easiest thing for a woman to do is to lay on her back and get paid."
tamara.cherry@sunmedia.ca
TOMORROW: Lindsay becomes a "genie" in Toronto, but soon realizes that escorting isn't what she thought it would be — and getting out may not be an option.
