Forced into sex work, Long Island woman details violence, abuse and survival

Tatyana Taylor was 13 the first time she was gang-raped, she said.

She had been living with a friend and the friend’s uncle. One day, she saw them having sex. Shocked, she bolted. She said the man ran after her, beat her and took her to a hotel, where he and his friends raped her. She wanted to fight, but went numb.

“You want to say that you're gonna defend yourself,” she said, “but when your back is against the corner, you just freeze.”

The man she thought was her friend’s uncle was actually her pimp. After the gang rape, he became Taylor’s pimp. Her days became a blur of rapes and beatings. Her pimp frequently spiked her drinks with drugs to keep her compliant — and thin, because small girls were in higher demand.

“I didn’t know anything about the streets,” she said.

Taylor’s experience offers a candid look at the life of a sex worker when worldwide attention has been focused on alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex A. Heuermann. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office has charged Heuermann with killing sex workers Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, Melissa Barthelemy and Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

Newsday does not identify sex abuse victims without their consent. Taylor’s story is based on extensive interviews over the past year with her and the people trying to help her, as well as court and jail records. The obstacles she confronts reflect the challenges faced by women who, after being coerced into prostitution, try to get out.

Over the past two decades, authorities have seen a dramatic increase in sex trafficking fueled by the opioid epidemic. By using social media to post photos and set up appointments, criminal entrepreneurs have moved prostitution off the streets and into hotels and homes and increased their profits with little fear of arrest or imprisonment, advocates and police say.

Gerard Gigante, former Suffolk chief of detectives who started the department's human trafficking unit, said some regard it as a “victimless crime.” Such an offense involves consenting adults where no one is harmed.

“They don’t understand that the sex worker herself is the initial victim in many cases,” he said.

[People] don’t understand that the sex worker herself is the initial victim in many cases.

Gerard Gigante, former Suffolk chief of detectives

State and federal statutes generally define sex trafficking as using force, fraud or coercion to compel someone to engage in commercial sex. The amount of trafficking that is occurring is difficult to quantify because of the hidden nature of the activity. Federal statistics show Long Island is among the top 20 destinations for human trafficking, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice's Community Oriented Policing Services unit.

Today, Taylor is 30 and trying to navigate a different path, away from predators. The Suffolk County Jail released her in late November 2022 after she served six months for violating her probation after a conviction for aggravated driving while intoxicated. 

While details of her story might sound shocking, they are familiar to the Suffolk correction officers who screen inmates for sex trafficking. The program, created by Suffolk Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. in 2018, has debriefed more than 300 trafficking victims. His staff has forwarded information from two women who had encounters with Heuermann, as well as 15 other leads, to the Gilgo Beach task force, jail spokeswoman Vicki DiStefano said.

“Most of them didn’t desire to enter the life,” Suffolk Undersheriff Kevin Catalina said. “They meet up with these individuals and get lured in a matter of a weekend or two weeks. Once you’re in, there’s no way out.”

The Nassau County Correctional Facility does not screen inmates for sex trafficking, said a spokesman for the Safe Center, a nonprofit that works with trafficking victims in Nassau.

Once you’re in, there’s no way out.

Kevin Catalina, Suffolk County Jail undersheriff

For Taylor, each day is an exhausting game of survival as she scrambles for rides, figures angles to earn money and tries to keep bad people and her own demons at bay. She makes plans by the hour, often changing them at the last minute. The constant backdrop to her struggle is her fear that someone from her past will kill her.

That’s because she knows the men who entrapped her as a teenager still keep tabs on her, either by sending other women to spy on her or by driving by where she lives. If she is seen making money without her pimp, that is deemed a sign of “disrespect,” she said. To survive, Taylor knows she has to abide by the codes of the gangs.

“I belong to the streets,” she said. “I belong to God, first, but they have a hook on me. It’s like this loyalty thing. Like even if I’m not prostituting, even if I’m not doing whatever is going on outside on the streets, it doesn’t really matter. You still have to pick up for them. You still have to answer to them,” she said, referring to gangs.

Taylor attracts male attention wherever she goes, something that is both flattering and abhorrent to her because she’s afraid they know her history. 

She said she prefers to focus on the fact that she’s out from under her pimp, but admits, “I didn't fully break away yet,” because he keeps tabs on her through other people. 

“I'm not under his thumb anymore,” she added. “And that's enough for me right now." 

Taylor has had trouble finding a job because of her criminal record and suspended driver’s license. She was thrilled when she landed a job at a delicatessen, but crushed when she lost it a week later after an angry friend created a scene there.

“I’m trying to take care of myself. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’ll be like, fine today, and tomorrow, I’ll be really suicidal,” she said.

Flashbacks surface when she least expects it.

“I’m scared. I’m scared I’m gonna die. I’m scared that things are going to spiral out of control,” she said.

I’m scared I’m gonna die. I’m scared that things are going to spiral out of control.

Tatyana Taylor

In the beginning

Taylor was born in the United States and grew up with her extended family in Brentwood. The grill her grandfather built is still there, and she has fond memories of family parties featuring the savory Puerto Rican fritters and arepas her mother cooked. Her grandfather, a Latin King gang leader known as Comanche, had influence, she said.

“My grandfather took care of everybody who lived on this street,” Taylor said. “There’s nothing that happened in Suffolk County, Brentwood, Bay Shore, that he didn’t know about.”

The Latin Kings were a dominant gang in the 1980s and 1990s but since have been eclipsed by the Bloods, MS-13 and the Crips on Long Island, said Gigante, the former Suffolk County chief of detectives.

Taylor was proud of her grandfather’s power as a child, but it didn’t always protect her. When she was 5 years old, a male relative sexually abused her for several years, she said.

Life was good again when her mother married Steven, a kind man who never hurt her. He died of colon cancer just before Taylor turned 13, and the family fell apart. The family planned a move to Florida. The day of the move, Taylor woke up to find her family gone. Her mother’s new boyfriend had insisted on leaving Taylor behind, she said. 

Court records confirm that Taylor was not living with her family when she was 16.

Taylor's mother, Jacqueline Assante, denied leaving Taylor behind. She said Taylor moved with the family to Florida, but ran away with a man who picked her up and took her to New York. 

She said Taylor was a troubled and violent child and that she tried getting her counseling, but it didn't help. “She burned her bridges repeatedly,” she said. “I'm just over it.” 

Taylor, on her own on Long Island at 13, was relieved when the friend she met on social media offered to let her move in with her and the man she said was her uncle. The girl became her lover, and both she and the man were nice at first, until the gang rape.

The assault is permanently imprinted on her memory, she said, recalling the burgundy carpeting of the hotel room. She remembers giving her friend a pleading look for help and that her friend simply looked down and walked away.

No one ever reported the rape to police, and the friend is currently strung out on drugs, Taylor said.

The scenario of grooming and gang rape is typical, according to court cases and advocates. A young woman working for a trafficker often recruits others with offers of friendship and a place to live. Then, the victim is gang-raped as a way of desensitizing her.

“There’s a blueprint for this,” Catalina said.

After that horrific day, it only got worse.

Taylor didn’t like needles, so she stayed away from harder drugs, “But that put me in an even worse spot because I was wanted more, like I was clean,” she said.

Girls who shoot up are cheaper, she said. Gigante confirmed that.

Although she does not inject drugs, Taylor does smoke marijuana, occasionally uses cocaine and often drinks — “Alcohol is my kryptonite,” she said.

Never saw the money

Barely a teenager in 2006, Taylor was in demand. Her pimp charged $1,000 an hour, or $600 for half an hour, she said. When communicating with customers, he used a code. One gift card was the equivalent of $100. And he referred to his girls as cars, as in, “a really fresh, brand-new model that’s smoking hot.” Reference to a late-model car is code for a minor, she said.

In the beginning, she saw up to six men a day. One day ran into the next, and she didn’t sleep for days. “I wasn’t even there for most of it,” she said.

She never saw any money, which is also typical, advocates say. Her trafficker paid for her clothes, toiletries and food. “We were never allowed to have money in our hand — ever,” she said.

He told her and the other girls that he was saving for them. She believed him.

Although she is now an adult, Taylor still has a girlish voice and childlike mannerisms. A small woman, she has gained about 15 pounds since leaving jail, which she considers a victory because she developed an eating disorder while she was prostituting.

“I was always supposed to be a certain size,” she said. “I remember him showing me how to throw up.”

Her pimp enforced an unrelenting control, picking out her clothes, her food, even her name, she said.

A gang member, he could call on his network of fellow gang members when he needed to instill fear in the girls. They held car parties, where they all met and paraded their girls around so that every other pimp knew who belonged to whom, Taylor said.

Feride Castillo, co-founder of ECLI-VIBES, a nonprofit that works with trafficking victims, said it was common for traffickers to “showcase their girls. They used to call it ''The Players' Ball.' "

Sometimes, the horrors of her life were too much — seeing a friend overdose on drugs or watching another one beaten, or worse, for stealing — that she ran away.

“I learned really, really fast that that’s the stupidest thing you could do,” she said.

Newsday is declining to name Taylor’s trafficker, who currently is not incarcerated and lives on Long Island, out of concern for her safety. Court records show that he has been convicted previously of attempted petit larceny and assault. 

When Taylor was 14, she said, her trafficker had her branded with her first tattoo. It was good for marketing her online on sites like SugarDaddy.com. Later, the tattoos became a way of covering scars from beatings.

Outwardly, her life seemed normal. She was attending Central Islip High School. But because her pimp wanted her to travel to appointments with johns, she dropped out in the ninth grade. On Long Island, she remembers being taken to hotels and houses in Syosset, the Hamptons and Montauk.

Behind the doors of the house where she lived with other teenage sex workers, life was anything but normal. “You would think everything was fine. But I was living in a trap house full of prostitutes, and they were all like 12 and 11 and 14 years old,” she said.

“I was scared. I cried every time. I cried every time, and you know what they did? They covered my mouth,” Taylor said.

Felt invisible

Taylor wondered what outsiders thought when they saw her. “Like you can clearly see that I’m a child, and I’m walking into a market with an older man full of grays — barely can walk — and he’s got his hand on my [rear end]. No one stops to think, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” she said.

She felt invisible. “Everyone wants to be blind. Or they see the truth, [but] they're just not brave enough to do anything about it,” she said.

She can’t shake the feeling that people who were in positions to help her instead exploited her.

Taylor said she regularly went to the home of a judge, whom she declined to name. She had sex with him and lawyers and did drugs with them. He is retired now, and they no longer have sex. Instead, he pays her to come to his house, take a shower and have drinks. It’s easier work, but she hasn’t forgotten the past, she said.

Once she got beyond her teenage years, the beatings intensified. Customers preferred younger girls. Her trafficker tried to get her to recruit younger girls. She didn’t. There were more beatings.

Then in 2015 a man she thought was her friend raped her. She did not report the rape — rapes, after all, were commonplace to her, she said. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. She said she tells the little girl that she has no father. She lost custody of her after her DWI arrest because her daughter was in the car. The child lives with Taylor’s grandmother.

The aggravated DWI arrest is one of nine criminal cases against her over the years, including three separate assault charges, criminal trespass, criminal contempt, petit larceny, grand larceny and a probation violation. She has served 480 days in jail as a result. She has been fairly reliable about showing up for court dates and complying with court orders.

Her first stint in the Suffolk County Jail was for 60 days in 2018, after she was charged with assault after throwing a brick through the window of her pimp’s car. She said she was furious that he had bought the car with money she earned.

Jail felt like a refuge. She was housed and fed and safely away from her pimp.

“They were nicer to me. I didn’t have to have sex with anybody,” she said.

“It saved my life. If I did not go to jail, I would have been dead by now. I would not be here … and I don’t think anybody would’ve cared. He was, he was hurting me, really bad. Really bad,” she said.

Her saving grace, she said, has been staying away from injecting drugs with needles and crack and heroin, drugs “that literally consume you.”

She believes God protected her, she said.

“He's blessed me a lot, and I have to say like if I don't believe in anything else, like I have to believe that at least he protected me enough to be like, ‘Yo, bro, I didn't let you like fully go, I didn't fully let you go, I'm letting you get hurt, but I'm trying to teach you something like,' and I'm praying that he's teaching me something.”

Today's struggles

Unable to hold a regular job since leaving jail, Taylor turned to the places she knows to earn money: strip clubs. She would buy lacy lingerie — she prefers one-pieces because they’re harder to rip off — and clear platform shoes with 6-inch stiletto heels, her “moneymakers.”

She danced three times at the pole and then sat at the bar — near a security camera as a measure of safety. She said she was making $600 to $700 a night without having sex with men, though she acknowledged she sometimes worked out an arrangement with a regular client when she was desperate for money.

Taylor worries about the other dancers because she said she has seen strippers as young as 13. They seem drawn by the glamour of rap music, money and drugs. But she was sure she knew how they really felt.

“There's no woman in the world who's going to sit there and tell you that they're happy about their lifestyle and what they're doing,” she said. “There's no way … I don't care how much money you're making. At the end of the day, you're very, very unhappy.”

More recently, she said she has given up dancing because she finds it too upsetting. She has gotten and quit at least two jobs. It's unclear how she is making money to live.

She hopes that once she finds a stable place to live, other things will fall into place.

For nearly a year, Taylor rented a room from a man who is a nudist, but things deteriorated after she had violent encounters there with people she knew. Her landlord evicted her. She lived in a car and slept on friends' couches until she found another room to rent.

But once again, she is having trouble. Her current landlord has called the police on her four times since Dec. 2, according to records. She said he makes her uncomfortable by coming into her space. She has stopped paying rent. Her landlord said she is destructive. He is trying to evict her.

She said she's trying to save money for the first time, but even that simple act reflects the contradictions of her life. She has failed to pay thousands of dollars in child support, but said she has opened a bank account for her daughter.

“Before I die, I just want to make sure that I leave something behind for her. You know? If there's anything I do right? I gotta do it for her, you know. So I'm trying. I am, I'm trying,” Taylor said.

She tries to focus on her delight in the small freedoms she never had before, like picking out her own clothes, holding on to her phone, using her own name. “It’s like a newborn baby taking everything in,” she said.

She dreams of opening a women’s shelter or a full-service salon that would also provide personal therapy. Mostly, she dreams of having a home with her daughter, but she’s terrified her former pimp will see her daughter and try to sell her. And she knows she can’t take care of her right now.

Taylor hopes her struggles will lead to something better. “Something good has to come out of all of this 'cause I can’t see God being that merciless,” she said, tears rolling down her face.

“I can't do this for nothing. It can't be for nothing. It just can’t. It just can’t.”