Paying for sex through prostitution ads is not trafficking, SJC rules

Local News

The Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling comes after five defendants who responded to ads from a sting operation were charged with sex trafficking.

The state’s highest court ruled Friday that responding to online prostitution advertisements does not constitute human trafficking.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s unanimous decision was centered on a 2021 sting operation by State Police. Undercover officers posted advertisements which depicted an adult woman and offered sexual services and set up meetings with five defendants who responded, according to a court ruling.

The advertisement stated that the woman offering sexual services was “independent” and contained a “legal disclaimer” reserving the woman’s right “not to enter any agreement” at her “sole discretion,” the ruling said.

Brendan Garafalo, Brian Dick, Eric VanRiper, James Bi, and Viet Nguyen were all arrested in the sting operation. The charges against Dick were dismissed after he died in January 2024, according to court records.

Two months after the sting operation was conducted, a grand jury out of Plymouth County Superior Court indicted each defendant on charges of human trafficking for sexual servitude and engaging in sexual conduct for a fee, according to the ruling. The defendants filed motions to dismiss the trafficking charges and argued that the facts did not constitute probable cause.

A Superior Court judge allowed the defendants’ motions because the purported sex worker was an undercover police officer, and therefore, they did not attempt to traffic “another person.” The Appeals Court upheld dismissing the trafficking indictments despite disagreeing with the Superior Court’s reasoning.

After the Commonwealth sought further review of the case, the Supreme Judicial Court also upheld the lower court’s ruling to dismiss the trafficking indictments, the ruling said.

“Nothing in the telephone calls or text message interactions between the defendants and the sex worker reasonably suggests any effort by the defendants to allure, to attract, to tempt, or to persuade the sex worker to engage in commercial sexual activity; instead, in those calls and messages, they selected sexual activities from a menu of activities she proposed,” Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote in the ruling. “Thereafter, the defendants each accepted the terms — price, time, and location — as dictated by the purported sex worker. Such responsive acceptance of the terms extended by the sex worker cannot reasonably be found to be conduct aimed to entice or to recruit the sex worker.”

Because the defendants were not attempting to engage in sexual activity with a sex worker who had been trafficked, and because the sex worker was explicitly stated to be independently operating in the offer, the defendants’ actions did not qualify as human trafficking, the ruling said.

The court determined that the sex trafficking statute is intended to “suppliers and purchasers who perpetrate the operation of trafficking” rather than customers who answer advertisements from independent sex workers. The defendants’ conduct was already forbidden by the sex for a fee statute and addressed by increased penalties from 2011, according to the ruling.

Due to the ambiguity of the language in the sex trafficking statute, the defendants could not be prosecuted under the statute and earned “the benefit of the ambiguity,” the court said.

“After a four-year fight, in four different courts, with a five-year sentence hanging over their heads, it’s nice for our clients to have some closure and put this behind them,” Patrick J. Noonan, lead counsel for the accused, told The Boston Globe.

Following the court’s ruling, the case was returned to the Superior Court for further proceedings on the other indictments.