Anti-trafficking activist Somaly Mam has spoken out to defend herself for the first time following a bombshell Newsweek story which portrayed her as a fraud, saying, “I didn’t lie.”
Newsweek claimed in May that Mam had fabricated her life story and had encouraged a girl in her care to lie that she had been trafficked, creating a scandal that left Mam’s reputation in shreds, and forced her to resign from her own Somaly Mam Foundation.
In the new issue of Marie Claire, Mam tells Abigail Pesta, “I didn’t lie.”
So why did she remain silent about the Newsweek allegations for so long? “I was not silent. I had so many lives to fix,” she said, referring to the women in her care.
“For me, it’s not about fighting with everyone,” she added. “My priority was the girls. That’s not silence.”
Speaking at her home in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, she adds that she didn’t mount a legal fight against the claims because “I didn’t need a lawyer. Lawyers are all about money. You can kill people and have a lawyer, and if you’re rich, you can go free,” she says. “I did nothing wrong. My heart is my lawyer.”
I have not lied. They wanted me to say sorry. I’m not sorry for my life.
- Somaly Mam
Mam says her grandfather sold her virginity when she was around 12 and later sold her to a brothel. When she was around 21, a Frenchman, Pierre Legros, helped her leave the sex trade, they married and started a charity, AFESIP, to provide shelters for girls. They later divorced, but Mam continued her work, launching the Somaly Mam Foundation in the US in 2007 to help fund the AFESIP shelters.
Mam claims in the Marie Claire story that before Newsweek published its piece saying “key parts of her life story are not true,” her foundation had hired law firm Goodwin Procter to investigate her. She didn’t resist because “I have nothing to hide.” After the story came out, Mam says foundation executives asked her to sign a letter saying she had “created and exaggerated stories about my life that were not true.”
“I did not sign,” she said. “I have not lied. They wanted me to say sorry. I’m not sorry for my life.” Soon after, the foundation cut its funding to AFESIP, which runs centers that Mam says house 170 girls.
Newsweek had also said a woman confessed that she had lied about being sold to a brothel as a girl in a late-1990s documentary after Mam coached her. Mam denies coaching the girl to lie, and Marie Claire reports documents from an independent aid group show the girl had been sold by her mother to a broker for $100 in 1997, then later rescued and transferred to Mam.
Marie Claire author Pesta wrote, “While in Cambodia, I investigated the claims against Mam and spoke to people cited in the Newsweek piece, three of whom said their views were misrepresented. One of the three, identified in Newsweek as a woman, is, in fact, a man.”
Newsweek says it stands by its story.
Mam admits that the dates in her life could be scrambled because she was raped and abused for years, and “I was enslaved since I was a child.” She added, “I was a domestic slave, then I was in a brothel. How do you count? So I was in the brothel two years, 20 years, 20 days? I was a slave.”
Now, the piece reports, Mam’s future is uncertain, her house is for sale as she has little money after splitting with the foundation.
She says of the women who live with her, who are now activists after escaping the sex trade, “I cannot let myself get angry. If I get angry, they get a thousand times more angry.” She adds, “We’ve been through so many things in life. I tell them, you can get through this.”