New York: Sex worker forced to sleep with 20 men in one night

Kika Certa arrived in New York from Caracas because she was in love with a man and thought she would be staying with his family.

Instead, she found herself living a nightmare on Roosevelt Ave, the NY Post reports.

“I slept with 20 men my first night,” Ms Certa, now 51, said this week with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“I didn’t get to say who. They just came in one after another.”

The men paid $US35 ($55) each.

Ms Certa, who asked to use a pseudonym, said she recently decided to discuss her three years as a sex worker in the early 1990s after hearing Mayor Eric Adams say last week that recently arrived Venezuelan migrants were propelling the sex trade in Corona.

“They’re still there,” she said of the brothels.

“So if those places are still there, there are still women being forced to become prostitutes.”

Ms Certa studied accounting in her native country and was working at a Hilton Hotel there when she met and fell in love with a man named Daniel, she recalled.

He introduced her to his cousin, Sandra, who offered her a place to live in New York City.

“She said we were like family,” Ms Certa recalled.

But when Ms Certa took her up on the offer to find a better life, and arrived at JFK Airport in 1992, the cousin changed.

“I saved $US3000 that I brought here to the United States,” Certa said.

“I remember getting out of the airport and she immediately took my passport and she took my money.”

The woman brought Ms Certa to her Queens home and told her she wasn’t allowed to leave.

She was told she’d get in trouble if she was caught with no passport.

About two weeks later, she sat Ms Certa down next to Daniel for a talk.

“She said Daniel was living here and he owed her a lot of money,” Ms Certa recalled.

“And then she said ‘you’re going to pay the money and the way you’re gonna pay is you’re going to prostitute yourself.’”

Ms Certa, who thought she was going to get a job as a nanny, was enraged at Daniel.

“I said ‘What have you done? You brought me here to do this?’” Ms Certa said.

His response, “Just do it.”

“This is what all of my family does,” he told her.

“They all bring people here. They all work with young women. They all make money.”

After that, Sandra “prepared her”, purchasing a bathing suit for her to wear and giving her the name Lily.

She then drove her to a house at 92nd Street and Roosevelt Ave and took her inside.

“When she took me there, she said, ‘This is a new girl. She’s fresh. She’s just 20 years old,’” Ms Certa recalled.

Ms Certa was directed to a bedroom. Every time she opened the door to a knock there was a different man standing there.

“The first night I slept with 20 men, one after another,” she recalled, crying.

“That was the worst night of my life.”

Her days were spent sleeping at Sandra’s home and then at night she would be driven to different brothels.

“I had no spirit, no soul,” she said.

“I just get up in the morning and go and eat something, go back to sleep, waiting for the time I have to go back to work.”

She said there were usually about 20 other women at the brothels with her. Their ages ran the gamut, from 16 to 40. They came from Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines and China.

“I never saw any of that money,” she said of the $US35 ($55) fees.

The johns would usually tip her around $US3 ($4.70). She tried to get away.

“I used to hide from her for a month and then [Sandra would] find me,” Ms Certa recalled.

Ms Certa said the brothels were frequently raided by the police, who arrested the women and let the johns go free. She was arrested five times, including within her first week. That policy is now reversed, with the NYPD, in what little enforcement it does, letting sex workers go but arresting johns, pimps and madams.

“They didn’t even ask me if I needed help,” she said of the cops.

Officers now refer sex workers to non-profits who can counsel them. After a collar, Sandra would pay her bail and wait for her outside. Thugs often robbed the brothels and raped the workers, Ms Certa said.

Ms Certa eventually demanded her passport back and agreed to pay the madam more money for her freedom.

She wants people to know she wasn’t a prostitute by choice.

“It’s not a pleasure sleeping with 30 men Monday, 30 men Tuesday, 30 men Wednesday, 30 men Thursday, 30 men Friday … ” she said.

Ms Certa is now married and has three daughters – one in law school – but is still disturbed by the Venezuelan women she sees working in brothels on the same street.

“They’re not there because they want to be,” she said.

“It’s because they’ve been forced to somehow and somehow they get broken. After they get broken, there is no way out.”

This article originally appeared on NY Post and was reproduced here with permission