The American Red Cross

27 May 2010

Y2K Pimpin'

A pimp that understand brand loyalty

In the following paragraphs my intent is to walk you through a young girl's story. It involves her new pimp, her experiences with sites like Craigslist, and most importantly her disappearance. Stories like this will help us reveal the person(s) really at fault.

She was a 16-year-old California girl looking for trouble on MySpace; he was a 22-year-old self-described pimp who liked the revealing photos she posted to her profile. Three weeks after they met on the social networking site, they were arrested together in real life outside a cheap motel in Sacramento, 50 miles from her home. She was turning tricks. On her arm, a fresh tattoo showed bundles of cash and her new acquaintance’s street moniker in 72-point cursive.

Last week, Marvin Chavelle Epps was held without bail on federal child pornography charges over a video found at his arrest, in which the girl is seen performing a sex act on him while he calls her "bitch" and slaps her in the head with a roll of bills. Though the girl, identified as "S.M." in court documents, denied to police that he was her manager, by his own account Epps is a new kind of pimp — a web-savvy exploiter who uses sites like myRedBook and Craigslist to broker his women.

A review of S.M.’s MySpace profile, which lists her age as 19, suggests she fits that description to a T. When she set up the account last July, the Stockton, California, girl immediately blogged that she was looking for someone to sell her pot and MDMA. A couple of months later, she shared that she’d just been arrested on drug possession charges. "I’m a lot more hood than you think", she wrote one of her 1,000 MySpace friends.