We drive around on a cold, snowy Friday night, and a stretch of Division Street in Grand Rapids appears lifeless. Leslie King said her 20 years experience as a prostitute on these streets has equipped her to see what others cannot.
Everybody is sitting around, seeing who is going to make what move. Are you out of your mind? At years-old Anny Donewald dropped out of Western Michigan University and fell into the world of prostitution. Christine Sheehy was also lured into the prostitution industry by money. In just six months, Sheehy went from exotic dancer to selling herself for sex. If money was the reason to enter into the profession, drugs were the reason these two gave for coming back time and time again.
Then there is Leslie King who said at the age of 15 she was forced into prostitution by her pimp. That was funny, the same police that chased me for 20 years. When our cameras went out with King it took us less than an hour to find one of women hiding in plain sight.
We pulled over on Division Street, just North of 28th. King gets out of the car and crosses over to the woman. King gets back in the car and catches up to the SUV in a nearby parking lot. King gets back out and comes face to face with the driver. He drives around her roadblock and speeds off with the woman in the passenger seat.
When King is not on the street, she is fighting prostitution from her non-profit called Sacred Beginnings. Her goal is to convince sexually exploited women to come to the safe house before they are picked up by police. In , there were 79 arrests and in , 96 total arrests. In a way that a prostitute can use their own experience to hide in plain sight, Donewald uses her experience to find them and offer alternatives. As was the case for Christine Sheehy.
