Anti-Trafficking Activist: I Didn’t Lie

Anti-trafficking activist Somaly Mam’s career was all but ruined when a Newsweek report indicated that she had fabricated biographical details about being sexually exploited in Cambodia and encouraged another girl to lie about being trafficked, as well. She was forced to resign from her own charity, the Somaly Mam Foundation, but she says she was telling the truth. “I never lied,” Mam tells Marie Claire. “I was not silent. I had so many lives to fix,” she explains when asked why she didn’t directly address the allegations. “My priority was the girls. That’s not silence.” The Marie Claire article also claims that three of the people interviewed in the original report now say their views were misrepresented.