CNN’s Freedom Project series: Following sex trafficking raids with police in Orange County

CNN correspondent Thelma Gutierrez reports on the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force’s efforts to break up an Asian sex trafficking ring as part of a seven-month investigation known as “Operation China Doll” for CNN’s Freedom Project series this week throughout the day on CNN International and CNN/U.S.  In this sting operation, police say the pimps lured women from China and other Asian countries to the U.S. to work as sex slaves. Gutierrez goes undercover with police as they arrest suspected pimps, and rescue several women, at a brothel just across the street from an elementary school in suburban Los Angeles. 

Gutierrez also introduces viewers to “Soo,” who describes her story of coming to the U.S. from South Korea with big dreams of a better life, but wound up a sex slave for six years in a massage parlor in San Francisco. She’s free now, but the emotional scars will be with her forever. 

This special investigation, a part of CNN’s Freedom Project series, continues this week with a two-part investigation by CNN correspondent Martin Savidge, who looks at the manipulations that pimps use to trick women into lives of trafficking and how they keep them trapped in the lifestyle.

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