What Fox News Doesn't Want You to Know About the ACORN Prostitution Scandal

Some workers at ACORN offices in Baltimore and Washington DC made some pretty bad choices recently in front of an undercover film crew pretending to be a pimp and prostitute trying to buy a home. They didn't protest when the actors told them they wanted to bring thirteen 15-year-old girls from El Salvador into the country to sell in prostitution, helped them with creative ways to avoid the cops, and even suggested how to claim the girls as dependents on their taxes.  However, there is a lot more to these videos and the media blitz behind them than meets the eye.

Fox News and other conservative media outlets would have you believe this is a story about sex trafficking. It's not. It's a story about race, class, prostitution, tax evasion, and serious ethical and legal concerns.  In the edited versions of the videos, the actors and the ACORN employees discuss activities that could be classified as trafficking only about 1% of the time. The rest of the time they talk about prostitution, which the woman claiming to be a prostitute repeatedly says she is engaging in by her choice and keeping the money she makes (therefore, she is not a trafficking victim herself). The ACORN employees should have taken action when the actors talked about prostituting underage girls; not doing so was reprehensibly unethical and illegal. And since prostitution is illegal in both Maryland and DC, they shouldn't have condoned lying (and in some cases cheating) on taxes to support it.  But Fox and the conservative media have twisted these videos to indicate ACORN as an organization was promoting child prostitution, which was never the case.

The videos are certainly an indictment of four ACORN employees, all of which have now been fired.  But they are also an indictment of the conservative media outlets that push stories like this as a way to discredit and defund liberal organizations like ACORN under the guise of concern about sex trafficking. The sting was orchestrated by conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe who targeted a number of ACORN offices, with incriminating results found in two. It's clear the goal of the operation was nothing to do with preventing harm to children, and everything to do with finding ACORN employees willing to help a prostitute get housing and set up a business. From the perspective of the ACORN employees, they were helping a woman without education or resources set up a business to survive.  From the perspective of we the taxpayers, they were helping a woman cheat on her taxes and earn income illegally through criminal activity.  Had the woman been selling cocaine instead of sex, the legal and ethical implications would be similar.  What the employees did was unethical, but it was about taxes, not trafficking, and it was a lot more complex and nuanced than Fox News is making it out to be.

The videos from Baltimore and DC are here below.  Watch them for yourself, and then take a look at the way some news outlets have been covering them. It's a scandal for ACORN to be sure, but not one that's really about human trafficking.