At 17, Tiffany Simpson was being sold for sex when she was accused of trafficking a 13-year-old girl. Would Georgia ever see her as a victim?
April 25, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
The handwriting was round and bubbly, the hallmark of a teenage girl. The paper was unremarkable, a lined sheet that could have come from anywhere. Tiffany Simpson had written and rewritten this letter, trying to get it right. She was 19 years old, and she was desperate to know the answer to a question.
“I was wondering some thing,” she scrawled. “Maybe you can help me.”
She was writing to a woman she had read about in the newspaper, a stranger who lived in D.C.
Tiffany lived in Georgia, where she’d spent her whole life. Where, at 17, she met a 34-year-old man who promised to take care of her. Where she became pregnant with his baby. Where she was driven to trailer parks to have sex with as many buyers as would pay.
She’d been thinking about those buyers a lot, lately. In her loopy handwriting, she posed her question.
“Am I a victim of sex trafficking, or am I a prostitute?”
At the end of the letter, Tiffany signed her name, and then wrote something else to identify herself: “#1000711773 Pulaski State Prison.”
She folded the page and tucked it away until she was allowed to go to the prison mailbox. It was October 2012, and she’d been locked up for 10 months.
She’d thought that trafficking was something that only happened to girls from foreign countries. But the newspaper article she’d read described American teenagers. They weren’t kidnapped or tied up. They thought, at first, that they were in love. Even when the threats and the violence started, they stayed. Tiffany thought about the scar on her left thigh — a reminder of what happened when she, too, stayed. Then she started writing.
A few weeks later, her letter arrived in the mailbox of Andrea Powell, an anti-trafficking advocate who had been quoted in the article. Andrea plucked the envelope from the pile on her way home from work, and started reading. Tiffany’s words stopped her on the sidewalk.
Andrea had answered the question Tiffany had asked so many times before. In front of tearful teenagers, agitated police officers and leery lawmakers, she’d explained that people under 18 are never prostitutes. Legally, they are not old enough to consent to being sold for sex. Under federal law, no matter the circumstances, they are always victims.
But it wasn’t Tiffany’s question that left Andrea stunned. It was something else Tiffany had included in her letter: the reason she was in prison.
“I was convicted for 30 years,” Tiffany wrote, “for sex trafficking a minor.”
Andrea thought Tiffany must have been mistaken. But when she got home and looked up the case, she read about a 34-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl, both convicted of the trafficking of another girl, just 13 years old.
Now, Andrea had another question to answer, one she would spend the next decade untangling as she advocated and argued and begged to free Tiffany from prison.
If a child sold for sex is always a victim, what happens when that child is accused of selling someone else?
‘I was scared of him’
In rural Georgia, in 2011, what happened was this: Tiffany, 17 and seven months pregnant, was named in a 21-count indictment for rape, aggravated child molestation and trafficking for sexual servitude. In Georgia, 17-year-olds are prosecuted as adults.
The sheriff’s report said Tiffany and a man named Yarnell DeShawn Donald picked up the 13-year-old, a family friend of Tiffany’s, and drove her to a trailer park. There, four migrant workers paid $25 or $30 each to rape her.
When the girl tried to resist, the report said, “Tiffany told her to just go do it.”
The four men admitted to what they had done. They said they’d bought “the pregnant one” from Donald before. But this time, they said, she was the one who brought the condoms and collected the money.
Tiffany was assigned a free public defender. There was no chance of her family paying for an attorney to help her, she told The Washington Post years later.
Her father was in prison, serving a life sentence for a murder Tiffany learned about when, at age 6, she saw his face on the news. By the time she was 8, she could decipher how much Crown Royal her mother had consumed just by the sound of her voice. At school, Tiffany said, she lied about her parents, making up stories about a life far happier than her own.
By 16, she started running away in hopes of finding it.
Instead, she found that if she gave men what they asked for, they’d give her money in return. And that if she did enough cocaine, she didn’t have to feel any of it.
Her grandmother and her aunt, Brenda Brown, reported her missing to the police again and again. They tried putting her in a treatment center. They tried showing her that they supported her choices — even when she started bringing around Yarnell DeShawn Donald, who she called Shawn. Before long, wherever Tiffany was, Shawn was, too.
“I didn’t like it for the simple fact that he was 34 years old. He had no business being with her,” her aunt remembered. “But when we finally accepted the fact that she was with him, we took them out to eat.”
Some nights, Tiffany would call her aunt begging to be picked up, only to refuse to get in the car once she arrived. Then one day, she called her grandmother to ask for her Social Security card so she could apply for WIC, the federal nutritional program for women, infants and children.
“Are you pregnant?” her grandmother asked.
Tiffany, who never finished her sophomore year of high school, assured her family that she was excited about the baby. That Shawn was going to be there for her. That the day she showed up with her left thigh bandaged and bruised, it was because she fell going up the stairs.
Two months before the baby came, Brenda received a call from Tiffany. She needed to be bailed out of jail. Neither of them fully grasped just how much trouble Tiffany was in. Brenda was just relieved that Shawn now seemed out of the picture.
In August, Tiffany gave birth to a boy, just 5 pounds 8 ounces, all brown eyes and peach fuzz. Brenda watched Tiffany throw herself into motherhood. Soothing her son’s tears. Selecting his outfits. Promising she would give him the childhood she never had.
For four months, she did. Then Tiffany asked her aunt to drive her to court. She told her to wait in the car.
She went inside, signed some paperwork and answered every question from the judge with “sir,” until he asked the one that mattered most.
“And to the offense of trafficking in persons for sexual servitude as alleged in Count 17, how do you plead?”
“Guilty,” Tiffany said.
It was, she would say in interviews later, exactly how she felt.
Why, she was beginning to wonder, had she run away in the first place? Why had she thought that selling herself was worth it? Why had Shawn taken such an interest in her?
At first, she said, he promised to set up “dates” for her without ever taking the money. He called her beautiful. He said, “I’m falling for you.”
Tiffany said she did not know that Shawn had once been convicted of child sexual abuse. In 1996, when he was 19 years old, he’d pleaded guilty to statutory rape of a child under the age of 16. According to Shawn’s mother, Lilly Smith, the victim became pregnant with Shawn’s child.
Court records show he was sentenced to 10 years of probation, then violated that probation by failing to notify the state of where he was living.
His mother said in an interview that she warned Shawn to stay away from young girls after that. So when Shawn started bringing around Tiffany, his mother instead warned Tiffany to stay away from Shawn. She told Tiffany that his last girlfriend said he was abusive.
“He did prostitute Tiffany out,” his mother said.
But in a letter to The Post from prison, Shawn denied ever selling Tiffany or the 13-year-old girl. He said he only pleaded guilty to rape, molestation and trafficking of the 13-year-old because he was ignorant of the law and was afraid. He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
“They railroaded me,” he said. “I did not rape anybody, I didn’t molest anybody.”
He said he and Tiffany had a good relationship that “had its ups and downs.” He denied ever hurting her.
For a few weeks after they first met, Tiffany said, that was true. That changed the moment she tried to turn down a “call for service.”
Shawn grabbed her throat and slammed her against the wall, she said. She fled, she said, and he tried to hit her with his car.
“I cried myself to sleep,” she remembered. “And then the next day, it was like nothing happened.”
She learned to say yes. Even when she was pregnant. Even when the money was no longer hers. Only once, she said, did she try again to convince him to let her stop. She said he went into his cousin’s house, returned with a steak knife and stabbed her in the leg.
So when the 13-year-old who Tiffany saw as a little sister called and asked to be picked up, saying she wanted to run away, Tiffany said she did nothing when Shawn took her phone. When they pulled into the trailer park and she realized what was going to happen, she didn’t grab the girl and run out the door.
“I could have tried to get help. But I didn’t look at it like that back then. I know it’s because of all the threats that were made. But even to this day, I still feel like at some point, I was being selfish,” she would say later. “It was me looking out for my son.”
The way Tiffany remembered it, she, too, was purchased by the men that day. But as she pleaded guilty before the judge, she didn’t explain that.
“I have prostituted before, and I do regret it,” she said, claiming that it only happened once.
“Who prostituted you?” asked the judge, A. Wallace Cato, according to a transcript of the hearing.
“Yarnell,” Tiffany answered, using Shawn’s first name.
She did not know that the men from the trailer park, who were each sentenced to five years in prison, admitted to buying her before. She did not know about the Georgia law, enacted four years earlier, that declared all minors involved in commercial sex are victims of trafficking.
She knew only that her attorney had told her that if she pleaded guilty, the prosecutors would agree to a sentence of no more than 15 years in prison. That the judge might give her even less.
So she said out loud what she hadn’t yet told anyone: “I was scared of him.”
“Scared of who?” Judge Cato asked.
“Yarnell,” Tiffany answered.
Cato scoffed. “That’s why you shacked with him for a year or so because you were afraid of him?”
After a few more questions, Cato — who did not reply to messages sent by a reporter — stopped. “I’m done,” he said.
Before Tiffany was placed in handcuffs, she was allowed outside one more time. She sprinted to the car where her 4-month-old was waiting. She clutched her son to her chest and started to sob.
The judge hadn’t followed the agreed-upon plea or given her less time. Instead, he was sending Tiffany to prison for longer than she’d been alive. A 20-year sentence, followed by 10 on probation. And when she was released, he ordered, she would be registered as a sex offender for the rest of her life.
As Andrea read and re-read Tiffany’s letter, she knew what police and prosecutors would call Tiffany. Andrea didn’t use the word, because it was an of term traffickers used, too: the “bottom” girl — or more often, the “bottom b—-.”
This is a person in a trafficking operation who, in addition to or instead of being sold, helps run the operation: posting the ads, taking the money, luring new recruits.
At the time of Tiffany’s arrest in 2011, it was common to see a so-called “bottom” punished as harshly as her trafficker. There is little data on victims who are also deemed offenders, and experts say their level of consent and culpability can vary greatly.
But the assumption that they are always willing participants was beginning to change as police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges received training from survivors and advocates on the brainwashing, threats and violence that trafficking victims endure — and how often the crimes that victims commit are acts of desperation to survive.
In a Justice Department study of human trafficking investigations from 2008 to 2010, women represented 19 percent of suspects. By 2020, a similar study of trafficking prosecutions in state courts showed women represented just 8 percent of defendants.
There was a reason, Andrea told Tiffany, to have hope.
“Trafficking is what happened to you. It’s not who you are.”
— Andrea Powell, executive director of Karana Rising
In 2021, anti-trafficking advocate Andrea Powell recorded a call with Tiffany Simpson about her experiences growing up. (Video: The Washington Post)
“Trafficking is what happened to you,” she wrote back. “It’s not who you are.”
Her reply was the first of hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls and visits with Tiffany over the next 10 years. Then there were all the messages Andrea sent about Tiffany. She tried calling the sheriff and the prosecutors involved in the case. She found Tiffany a new lawyer. She wrote op-eds and contacted journalists. She got a filmmaker to make a video about Tiffany’s life. She and other advocates got more than 75,000 signatures on a Change.org petition.
There was a reason one D.C. detective called Andrea “Rescue Barbie.” She was known for her ability to make people, especially potential donors, pay attention to the issue of trafficking. At the nonprofit she co-founded in the nation’s capital in 2003, called FAIR Girls, some saw her zealousness as proof of her dedication; others said she was exploiting survivors’ stories to impress donors. By 2018, the board of FAIR Girls had voted to replace her.
To Tiffany, who knew little about the turmoil around Andrea, all that mattered was that someone who had promised to help her had actually followed through. In letters and phone calls with Andrea, she marked three, then five, then 10 years in Pulaski State Prison.
The longer she stayed, the more dangerous the prison became. A 2022 investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution confirmed what Pulaski inmates had long reported: In a prison increasingly understaffed and overrun by gangs, extortion, beatings and rape were a daily reality.
Though Tiffany’s assignment in a dorm for rule-following long-termers afforded her a measure of protection, she was constantly on edge and trying to distract herself. She earned her high school degree and a cosmetology certificate and spent hours playing spades. She wrote to the other trafficking survivors Andrea was helping, through her new non-profit. And Tiffany dreamed about her son and what he might be doing, or saying, or thinking, or if he remembered her.
The Post is not naming her son to protect his privacy. Tiffany’s mother, who continued to struggle with alcoholism, lost custody of him a few years after Tiffany was imprisoned. He was eventually adopted by Shawn’s mother. It has been years since she had any contact with him.
She tried to stop envisioning what a reunion with him would feel like.
Because as much as Andrea promised her that the world’s understanding of trafficking was changing, her case remained the same. Her new lawyer’s efforts went nowhere. The Change.org petition had no legal standing. The high-profile anti-trafficking organizations Andrea contacted were wary of supporting someone labeled a trafficker, even if they acknowledged she was a victim, too.
So when Andrea told Tiffany in 2020 that she had convinced an attorney named Susan Coppedge to take over her case for free, Tiffany didn’t expect much to change.
Coppedge, who was the country’s top anti-trafficking ambassador during the Obama administration, told Tiffany about a growing movement to pass vacatur laws for survivors of trafficking. The laws allowed survivors a chance to clear their criminal records.
As the issue of trafficking gained national attention, vacatur was becoming an easier sell to lawmakers.
In Georgia, where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and first lady Marty Kemp had made anti-trafficking one of their signature issues, the vacatur law passed in 2020 without a single vote against it.
What was even more remarkable to advocates: Rather than limit which kinds of crimes could be vacated to only prostitution or low-level offenses, Georgia’s new law said it could apply to any crime that was a direct result of being trafficked.
The first lady herself appeared in a video with Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr to announce the change.
In August 2022, after the vacatur law was updated to allow those still in prison to apply, Coppedge filed a petition for Tiffany. She included an affidavit from a retired FBI agent, Barbara Brown, who volunteered to investigate Tiffany’s background. If 30 days passed without a response from the prosecutor, Tiffany’s convictions would be cleared.
That week, Tiffany called Andrea. She was starting to feel like maybe, this time, she had a chance. But Andrea had news to share.
The prosecutor had already filed his objection.
‘A victim and an offender’
Joe Mulholland didn’t remember much about Tiffany’s case. He’d been the elected prosecutor in the South Georgia circuit for nearly two decades, but one of his assistant district attorneys had handled the case back in 2011. He expected one of them to handle it now, but that changed when they started receiving calls about Tiffany from advocates across the state and from her new lawyer. It wasn’t every day a former U.S. ambassador came calling.
“I literally was told, ‘Some big wigs are in this thing,’” Mulholland said in an interview. “And I’m like, ‘Okay, well, if Kim Kardashian wants to come down to South Georgia, we’ll buy her some barbecue, but it’s not going to change our position.’”
But a few months after his objection was filed, he did change his position. One day after a Post reporter contacted him about the case, he emailed Tiffany’s attorney saying he was willing to consider a deal.
It wasn’t the media attention that changed his mind, Mulholland said. It was a conversation he had while on a walk with his wife, who suggested Tiffany might be able to do community service by warning young girls about the dangers of trafficking.
“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”
— Heather Lanier, judge
“It’s not simply a black-and-white role,” he decided. “You can be a victim and an offender.”
On the morning of the November hearing that would decide Tiffany’s fate, Mulholland and Coppedge were still arguing over what, exactly, he was willing to do.
Tiffany shuffled into a tiny jailhouse courtroom, wearing a sweater that advocates bought for her at Target. Her ankles and wrists were bound by metal cuffs. On the benches behind her were nearly a dozen people she had never met, who she would later learn were anti-trafficking advocates, there to support her.
In one row, she saw Andrea, who had come all the way from California, where she now lived. She’d already invited Tiffany to move in with her if she was released, saying she could spend every day walking on the beach.
Beside Andrea, Tiffany saw her Aunt Brenda. She was the only member of Tiffany’s family there. Her mother and grandmother had both died of lung cancer while she was in prison.
“You ready?” Coppedge whispered to her, and then the prosecutor was reading out all the crimes she’d been charged with. Coppedge was explaining the state’s new vacatur law. A psychiatrist was describing what a “bottom” was and the way trauma impacts the brain.
Tiffany watched Coppedge show the judge a copy of the letter she had sent to Andrea a decade earlier, the reason she’d started to understand that she was, in fact, a victim. For the first time, the court was going to acknowledge that, too.
But though the prosecutor had changed his mind, he wasn’t willing to give Tiffany what the vacatur law had promised.
“I did not think that was the appropriate solution, to just get rid of the entire thing,” Mulholland told the judge, Heather Lanier. “That’s why I came up with the proposed resolution.”
The resolution: The state would dismiss the trafficking charges Tiffany once pleaded guilty to. She would be let out of prison. She would not be placed on the sex offender registry.
In return, she would have to remain on probation until she completed 500 hours of community service. And she would have to plead guilty to a new charge, which could eventually be cleared from her record if she followed the rules of probation.
“One count,” Mulholland told the court, “of keeping a house of prostitution.”
Under the new charge, Tiffany would be both the house and the prostitute. Rather than allow her to go free after 11 years in prison, the state would charge Tiffany for the other times that she was purchased at the trailer park in 2011. She would be punished for her own exploitation.
“Ironically enough,” the prosecutor said.
“It’s up to you,” her lawyer said.
“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the judge called it.
Tiffany was asked if she was still willing to plead guilty. She did not hesitate.
“Yes ma’am,” she said.
Within a few minutes, her wrists and ankles were unshackled. She was wrapped in strangers’ hugs. She was telling Andrea and her aunt not to cry.
She assured Andrea that one day, she would move to California like they had planned.
But for now, Tiffany was not allowed to leave Georgia. She was ordered to remain in the state until she completed her community service hours and a transition gprogram for victims of trafficking that would last a year or more.
And first, Tiffany was informed, she would be sent back to prison until the paperwork was complete.
She was allowed 10 minutes of celebration.
Then she did as she was told. The cuffs closed back around her wrists.
When reconsidering what Tiffany deserved, the prosecutor’s office did not contact the other victim in the case.
The 13-year-old girl who was repeatedly raped at the trailer park is now in her mid-20s. Mulholland said they no longer had contact information for her. Tiffany’s attorney tried to get in touch with her before the hearing but never heard back. The young woman, who The Post is not naming, did not reply to any messages from a reporter.
Tiffany has not spoken to her since the day of the crime.
During an interview three months after her release from prison, Tiffany struggled to talk about the girl. Every time she thinks about her, she said, she starts to have a physical, visceral reaction, like her brain is replaying all the moments she could have stopped what happened from happening.
She finds herself imagining that somehow, the girl has heard about her release and the reasons behind it.
“I just pray that she forgives me.”
— Tiffany Simpson
“I pray,” Tiffany said, “she realizes that there was more to the situation than what she’s seen. And I just pray that she forgives me.”
She has been living at the transition program for survivors of trafficking near Atlanta, where her days are filled with lessons on life skills and healthy relationships and equine therapy.
There have been moments where an entirely new future feels possible to her — when she threw away the prison-issued outfit she was released in, when she tried an avocado for the first time, when she envisions opening a hair salon for survivors of trafficking and domestic violence.
Then there are the hours when she is furious for a reason she can’t explain. The breakdown she had in a grocery store when she saw men who looked like the buyers from the trailer park. The realization that for all the progress that has been made around trafficking, not everything has changed.
Every attempt Congress has made to introduce a federal vacatur law for trafficking victims, like the one that spurred Tiffany’s release, has failed. And even if those bills had passed, not all would apply to victims charged with child trafficking.
Someday, Tiffany said, she wants to be a part of changing that. For now, she is trying to focus on what she can control.
One night recently, that meant logging into her old Facebook account. She still remembered her password.
She looked up the profile of the mother of her trafficker, the woman who has custody of her son. He was 11 now.
He may never want to see her again, she reminded herself.
She stared at the screen for a while. Then she clicked “request friend.”
Kati Schardl in Georgia and Alice Crites contributed to this report. Story editing by Lynda Robinson. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Allison Cho and Wayne Lockwood. Design by J.C. Reed.
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