Survivor of Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking, Survivor Services Coordinator at
the National Center on Sexual Exploitation
Teresa Helms
As one who was groomed by Ghislaine Maxwell and then sexually assaulted and trafficked through Jeffrey Epstein's network in the early 2000s, Teresa Helms knows all too well the horrors of sexual assault and trafficking, and has joined other Epstein survivors calling for the release of federal documents pertaining to Epstein's systematic and decades-long trafficking and abuse of young women and girls. As a brave lived-experience expert who has fought hard to bring justice to other survivors of sexual exploitation, Ms. Helms is uniquely qualified to serve as Survivor Services Coordinator at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). In this role, Ms. Helms helps survivors bring civil lawsuits against those who have profited from and facilitated their abuse. She also provides guidance on legislative proposals to address and help remedy the harms of sex trafficking and exploitation, as well as corporate policies that promote human dignity.
“I really urge everyone to focus on the commitment, the intention, the effort and energy expended by Epstein survivors as they bravely strive to bring about accountability and justice while also trying to heal, and less about political weaponization. At the end of the day, that's all that we're trying to achieve. We're talking about people's lives, and we should not be weaponized either way in any administration, no matter who's in control at the time, who did what, when, who's doing what now. Transparency is key, because we cannot move forward as a society and as a culture without these fundamental changes of doing the right thing and holding people accountable. It's degrading our society to continue to allow predators and perpetrators to get away with harming so many people. We survive because we have so much hope, but hope tends to get shattered often, and the onus is on us to pick up the pieces and try to get louder and louder. We're tasked with rising back up, fighting bigger, fighting louder, screaming from the mountaintops. We have to get to the point where we are survivor-focused in the justice system. We have to stop politicizing everything and listen to the survivors; listen to the ones that have the lived experience. You cannot take the lived experience away from us, not that we wanted it in the first place, but here it is. It lives with us. It remains with us. We're fighting for justice.”