ended up reading the whole thing like I was watching a movie on Twitter
November 18, 2015 3:46 AM   Subscribe

She had posted and removed the story twice before and no one cared. To garner more interest this time, she made it darkly funny while preserving the gist of what happened. And she has no regrets. "I made people who probably wouldn't want to hear a sex trafficking story want to be a part of it," she says, "because it was entertaining."
Rolling Stone interviews and fact-checks Aziah "Zola" Wells, whose 158-tweet-long story about a trip to Florida (archived here) became an overnight sensation, receiving accolades from Selma director Ava DuVernay and Missy Elliot (quoted in the title), along with many, many others. The Washington Post has released its own report on the story. A movie is reportedly in the works.
posted by rorgy (21 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think it's a terrific read, and to have been following it live (over about 3 hours) would have been engrossing.

She's got a great way with words - she's producing a range of clothing with some of the lines from the story on them - but clearly there are lots of issues with her account vs. other people's, and I'm sure she never expected Reddit etc to find all the people, the Backpage ads and so on.

This was my favourite tweet from the days after:

Zola’s story had:

-character development

-plot twists

-atmosphere/tone

-racially diverse cast

-passed the bechdel test
posted by DanCall at 4:16 AM on November 18, 2015 [16 favorites]


The Rolling Stone story is interesting. There are a whole bunch of events that all four people agree happened, but almost none of their stories agree on who did what. Jessica says Zola turned the tricks, Zola says Jessica did instead, and so on.

She is clearly a good writer and is trying to control her own narrative. I hope she gets a nice fat movie contract out of it and goes on to have a great writing career. But I also hope that when this becomes a movie it keeps a complex story, rather than a simplistic "trafficking" plot since that is the flavor of the day and will sell well. As-is, part of what makes it good is the lack of easy victims or villains.

My favorite moment in the story:

"Drama, humor, action, suspense, character development," Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, tweeted. "There's so much untapped talent in the hood." ("I'm not from the hood tho Ava," Zola replied. "Ima suburban bitch. Still love you tho").
posted by Dip Flash at 4:34 AM on November 18, 2015 [15 favorites]




Thank you for those links, divabat. I was wishing I had more links about the sex work aspects of this story, but didn't trust any of the pieces that I found (or myself, for that matter, to filter through them responsibly). Reading all these now.
posted by rorgy at 4:52 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


The most dramatic and filmic parts of this story are almost certainly made up (forced sexual humiliation, jumping out a window) while the most depressing and realistic parts (the economics and culture of semi-coerced sex workers in rural America) are elided or played for comic effect.

That said, it's a damn good story.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:05 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


What makes this 'trafficking' rather than regular old prostitution? Not the ads? Interstate commerce?
posted by eustatic at 5:16 AM on November 18, 2015


eustatic: Besides the legal definition, it seems in multiple versions of this story that people were being prostituted against their will.
posted by divabat at 5:21 AM on November 18, 2015


Control over women s bodies via geographic dislocation?
posted by eustatic at 5:22 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


...and via forcing them to put up Backpage pages, hand over their phones, and hand over most of their cash to the point that they find ways to make some money without the pimp knowing.
posted by divabat at 5:23 AM on November 18, 2015


Also I'm not sure how I feel about RS and WP republishing everyone's full names and photos. They probably did get consent, but as Tits and Sass notes, this could be irresponsible in that it could hurt people's livelihoods:
It was irresponsible of her to post pictures of the other people involved in her narrative, but I don’t think her intent was malicious. That said, Zola is one person. Megasites like Buzzfeed, Fader and Jezebel have entire editorial staffs, tenured media professionals who should have known better. Journalists have a responsibility to consider the fall-out of what they publish, to consider if an otherwise private individual could get hurt. That consideration wasn’t made here. It seems that consideration is often absent when it comes to sex workers.
posted by divabat at 5:25 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


eustatic: There's a lot of debate over the term 'trafficking' right now, but the general definition wrt this story is kidnapping someone by force or fraud and forcing them to engage nonconsensually in sex work. It's unclear what the arrangement was between Jess and her pimp and how much of that was a consensual (although abusive) business arrangement, but Zola was 100% trafficked, out of Hooters no less, when Jess got her to agree to a stripper field trip to Florida and she ended up trapped in a hotel room with a violent pimp and his fiancee who tried to make Zola do full service sex work she hadn't signed on for, handed a gun off to her, and basically made her an accessory to their operation under threat of her life. The pimp, Z, was caught in Nevada doing the same thing to two other girls, who were stranded when their car broke down: he drove them to supposedly dance and ended up assaulting them and threatening them into having sex for cash.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 5:28 AM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


but Zola was 100% trafficked, out of Hooters no less, when Jess got her to agree to a stripper field trip to Florida and she ended up trapped in a hotel room with a violent pimp and his fiancee who tried to make Zola do full service sex work she hadn't signed on for, handed a gun off to her, and basically made her an accessory to their operation under threat of her life. The pimp, Z, was caught in Nevada doing the same thing to two other girls, who were stranded when their car broke down: he drove them to supposedly dance and ended up assaulting them and threatening them into having sex for cash.

It's important to note that the events as described in the original tweet story (which is really her third draft revision of the story after the first two didn't get much response) by Zola describe trafficking in exactly this way and fit the common definition fairly neatly. The slightly fact-checked versions of the story in the Rolling Stone article are more complex at every stage, complicating the trafficking narrative in most places.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:14 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


I read the whole thing and kept feeling like it was the plot from an Elmore Leonard novel.

Then I read the RS piece and realized Zola was from Detroit... So, yeah, Elmore Leonard makes sense.

Done correctly, this would be a strange, fascinating movie. Done right, the proceeds would go to helping out people caught in sex trafficking situations.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:56 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


I really don't know what to make of tge tone. Like the Tits and Sass link says:

Maybe that’s what Zola was doing: defusing the horror of her experience with humor. I certainly hope that’s the case, though it’s hard not to read some contempt in the way she describes the characters in her story.
posted by Omnomnom at 8:19 AM on November 18, 2015


"(the economics and culture of semi-coerced sex workers in rural America)"

'Choo mean, "rural" America? The Tampa MSA contains 2.3 million people.
posted by toodleydoodley at 9:38 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wow, disturbing story in all versions. First read made me feel sick, fact checked version still did.

Glad to hear Rudy is actually in jail. Like if this story was out there and he wasn't, holy shit.

Also interesting on the angle of "is this what you want to come up when people Google your name?" Jarrett and Jessica probably gave consent to Rolling Stone, but that's in the wake of the internet detectives already doing 75% of the work of revealing actual identities, could be consent was pretty dilute at that point because of an interest in "setting the record straight."

Will be interesting to see if/how the "hoeism" clothing line takes a tact of advocacy. It seems like the word has some inertia that may not align with a message of advocacy -- I'm guessing people that typically use that word probably aren't thinking like "woah, the plight of sex-workers" as they use it. I may be wrong and certaintly like any word it can come to hold new connotations.

I'm not going to hold it against Zola for trying to make money but I am super skeptical of the clothing line thing, I hope that if she wants to help sex-workers that stays in the fore and that profit and notoriety aren't the endgame. Seems like sex-workers have enough people trying to profit off their work as is.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 9:42 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


Dip Flash, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but Zola's description of events-- one out sex worker (stripper) talking about being coerced into a different kind of sex work and talking about the differences between consensual and abusive sex work arrangements (and straight up kidnapping as w/ the dreadlocked guy) is already pretty far from the conventional trafficking narrative, which is basically a rehash of white slavery moral panic. The incidents involving the two young women in Nevada came from a police report that, iirc, Zola did not see until her story blew up on twitter.

A lot of the way Zola has been kind of shunted out of the sex worker identity via this story's exposure, and been recast as some kind of outsider or opportunistic voyeur, bothers me. She isn't some jaded hipster from VICE who wanted to write a "we followed a pimp to go trapping in Florida!" piece, she's a young girl who was tricked into taking a road trip with a terrifying predator. I've shown this story to baby strippers I work with as an object lesson in why you NEVER go along with random people who ask you to go on a trip out of state. Everyone in this story except Rudy/Z struck me as very young, making very typical young-person mistakes, and I was horrified to find out that they were even younger than I originally thought; Jess and Jarrett are 21 and 22? Zola is 20? TWENTY??? Are you fucking kidding me? Zola isn't even old enough to work at my club. Fucking awful.

About those ages: I'm seeing Zola get a lot of judgment for being callous, for being somehow responsible for the wellbeing of all these other people, and that disturbs me on a couple of levels. It was pretty clear to me, reading her story, before I got any definitive ages, that she was the youngest person on the trip. A huge part of what makes her story so compelling is how perfectly she captures the experience of being the youngest and most unqualified person in a group who finds themselves promoted to a leadership role because all the adults and/or other kids around you are out of their minds, of being adrift in a mad world, basically the R-rated version of the "Onion Friend" episode of Steven Universe. A lot of the relatability of the story was how well Aziah wrote about being a child surrounded by insane, irrational adults, even if most of the people who read it had no other way to relate to what she was describing. Now that I read she was 19 or 20 when all of this happened, that really gets driven home, and the criticism of her handling of this situation... Yes, she was stupid to post Jess's face on Backpage, and she was stupid to post everyone's photos and real names on twitter, and she was making stupid mistakes like that because she's REALLY YOUNG. I have to wonder if people would be holding Zola to such a level of responsibility and correctly performed empathy if she weren't a young black girl and if young black people weren't considered to be basically adults by late elementary school. If people wouldn't be ignoring the many, many times she talks about being so afraid or horrified that she was crying in her story to call her her callous and trivializing of what was clearly a traumatic experience.

On that note? I also think the story would have been very different, and probably would never have been told this publicly, if it hadn't had a more or less happy ending: everyone who was in peril is alive and safe and the truly scary villain, Rudy/Z, is safe behind bars. If Jarrett had managed to do lasting harm to himself or if Aziah hadn't found pictures of Jessica, smiling and happy and alive, on facebook? If the end of the story had been "I never saw her again, I don't know what happened to her" or if Jarrett wasn't stable enough to be talking about Rudy's arrest with Zola on the phone? I don't think we would have seen the whole thing on twitter in this hilarious "look at my crazy life" style; I don't think we would have heard the story at all. A big part of that particular storytelling tone is the intensity of the relief that you *can* tell this story like it's a Tarantino movie because the people involved weren't *actually* destroyed by what happened.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 10:02 AM on November 18, 2015 [24 favorites]



'Choo mean, "rural" America? The Tampa MSA contains 2.3 million people.


Doh. Misremembered where this took place. Let's pretend I said "interstitial " there.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:13 AM on November 18, 2015


Dip Flash, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but Zola's description of events-- one out sex worker (stripper) talking about being coerced into a different kind of sex work and talking about the differences between consensual and abusive sex work arrangements (and straight up kidnapping as w/ the dreadlocked guy) is already pretty far from the conventional trafficking narrative, which is basically a rehash of white slavery moral panic. The incidents involving the two young women in Nevada came from a police report that, iirc, Zola did not see until her story blew up on twitter.

Her story is getting all of this attention because she's a fantastic writer, but also because it simultaneously has the key elements of an old-school white panic trafficking story while being smart, self-aware, and full of much more complicated elements. So you have the villainous African pimp who could be straight out of central casting, and yet at the same time you have the characters of Zola and Jessica who are presented in much more complex and ambivalent ways.

(And I'd argue that it is key to see her twitter story as a constructed narrative, not neutral reportage. It has a lot of attention to language and pacing, and the key events are deliberately cinematic. The fact checking confirms the key events, but also illustrates how she constructed a specific story out of them. One of the articles compared it to Spring Breakers and I think there is a lot of truth in that, not just in the plot but also in the deliberate shifts back and forth between surreal and hyperreal.)

On that note? I also think the story would have been very different, and probably would never have been told this publicly, if it hadn't had a more or less happy ending: everyone who was in peril is alive and safe and the truly scary villain, Rudy/Z, is safe behind bars.

I totally agree. The more or less happy endings for everyone except Rudy and his very satisfying arrest are central to how this has been received.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:48 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


The slightly fact-checked versions of the story in the Rolling Stone article are more complex at every stage, complicating the trafficking narrative in most places.

Just knowing a bit about human nature, I would guess that a lot of the exploitative relationships look a lot like those described here. You take young, immature people (who wish to and are able to make adult decisions, yet are--as they themselves admit--lacking in judgment, maturity, and experience); you put them in the hands of older, manipulative operators; you start off by getting them to freely agree to A--but soon manipulate or force them to doing B, C, D, and E as well (which they would not have agreed to sans manipulation); you use money, isolation, friendship, sex, threats, power imbalance, and every other trick in the book; expose to plenty of force and violence, even if not directed at the victim (in fact, if the operator can get the victim to be his ally/supporter when he perpetrates violence on some 3rd party, that is all the more effective); you involve them in various shady and illegal things so as to cut them off from family, friends, and authorities, and create an us-vs-them mindset; you make sure to point out to everyone who will listen--especially including the victim herself--that "she's no angel" because she willingly agreed to A and so who's going to believe she didn't agree to B, C, D, and E as well; etc.

And in the end, the manipulator ends up getting as much--or more--out of the victim through this type of force as any other type

So I guess maybe this is horrifying in a slightly different way than the conventional "white slavery" type of horrifying--but by God it is just as horrifying in its own evil way. And given human nature, I'd wager than trafficking happens a lot more often along these lines than along the conventional narrative.
posted by flug at 12:23 PM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


Two things I found puzzling about the (fact checked) story:
- Why did Rudy end up paying for her ticket home when just before he was trying to bully her into staying?
- Rudy called the police and wasn't worried about being exposed?
(Not doubting, just trying to understand the story better.)
posted by Omnomnom at 1:42 PM on November 18, 2015


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