Brazilian Instagram influencer jailed for trafficking and slavery – BBC News

By this point, Torres’ life had grown in scale. She was now married to a man called Zach, a 21-year-old she had met in California, and they were renting a five-bedroom house in the suburbs of Austin, Texas.

Repeating the pattern she had begun with Ana, Torres had targeted her most dedicated followers, trying to recruit them to come and work for her. In return, she had promised to help them achieve their dreams, capitalising on the intimate personal details they had shared with her during life-coaching sessions.

Desirrê Freitas, a Brazilian woman living in Germany, and Brazilian Letícia Maia – the two women whose disappearance would go on to spark the FBI-led search – moved to live with Torres. Another Brazilian woman, who we are calling Sol, was also recruited.

Posting on her social media channels, Torres introduced her “witch clan” to her followers.

The BBC has discovered at least four more women were almost persuaded to join Torres in the house but had pulled out.

Some of the women were too scared to appear in the BBC’s film – afraid of receiving online abuse and still traumatised by their experiences – but we have been able to verify their accounts using court documents, text messages, bank statements, and Desirrê’s memoir about her experiences – @Searching Desirrê, published by DISRUPTalks.

Desirrê says that in her case, Torres had bought her a plane ticket from Germany, having told her she was suicidal and needed Desirrê’s support.

Torres is also accused of persuading Letícia, who was 14 when she started life-coaching sessions with her, to move to the US for an au pair programme and then drop out to live and work with her.

As for Sol, she says she agreed to move in with Torres after becoming homeless and was hired to carry out tarot readings and yoga classes.

But it was not long before the women discovered their reality was very different to the fairytale they had been promised.

Within weeks, Desirrê says Torres pressured her into working at a local strip club, saying if she did not comply Desirrê would have to repay all the money she had spent on her: flights, accommodation, furniture for her room, and even the “witchcraft” Torres had performed. Desirrê says not only she did not have this money, she also believed at the time in the spiritual powers Torres claimed to have, so when Torres threatened to curse her for not following orders she was terrified.

Reluctantly, Desirrê agreed to work as a stripper.

A manager from the strip club, James, told the BBC she would work extremely long hours, seven days a week.

Desirrê and Sol say the women in the Austin mansion were subjected to strict house rules. They describe being forbidden from speaking to each other, needing Torres’ permission to leave their rooms – even to use the bathroom – and being required to immediately hand over all earnings.

“It was very difficult to, you know, get out of the situation because she holds your money,” Sol told the BBC.

“It was terrifying. I thought something could happen to me because she had all my information, my passport, my driving licence.”

But Sol says she realised she needed to somehow escape after overhearing a phone call in which Torres was telling another client she must work as a prostitute in Brazil as a “punishment”.

Sol was able to leave with the help of an ex-boyfriend.

Meanwhile, the guns Torres’ husband kept began to regularly feature on her Instagram stories, and became a source of fear for the remaining women.

Around this time, Desirrê says Torres tried to persuade her to swap the strip club for work as a prostitute. She says she refused and the following day Torres took her on a surprise day out to a gun range.

Scared, Desirrê says she eventually gave in to Torres’ demand.

“Many questions haunted me: ‘Could I stop whenever I wanted?’” Desirrê writes in her book.

“And if the condom broke, would I get a disease? Could [the client] be an undercover cop and arrest me? What if he killed me?”

If the women didn’t meet the earning quotas that Torres set, which had risen from $1,000 (£782) to $3,000 (£2,345) a day, they were not allowed to return to the house that night, they say.

“I ended up sleeping on the street several times because I couldn’t reach that,” Desirrê adds.

Bank statements, seen by the BBC, show Desirrê transferring more than $21,000 (£16,417) into Torres’ account in June and July 2022 alone. She says that she was forced to hand over a substantially higher figure in cash.

Prostitution is illegal in Texas and Desirrê says Torres would threaten to report her to the police if she ever talked about wanting to stop.

In September, friends and family of Desirrê and Letícia back in Brazil launched social media campaigns to find them, having become increasingly concerned following months without contact.

By this time, they were barely recognisable. Their brunette hair had been dyed platinum blonde to eerily match Torres’. Desirrê says by this point all her phone contacts had been blocked and she obeyed the influencer’s orders without question.

As the Instagram page @searchingDesirrê gained momentum, the story dominated news outlets in Brazil. Desirrê’s friends even worried she might have been murdered, and Letícia’s family put out desperate pleas for their safe return home.

Ana, having lived with Torres in 2019, said alarm bells rang as soon as she saw the news stories. She says she immediately guessed that “[Torres] was keeping other girls”.

Along with other former clients, Ana began to contact as many law enforcement agencies as possible, including the FBI, in an attempt to get the influencer arrested. Five months earlier, both she and Sol had reported Torres to the US police – but say they weren’t taken seriously.

In a video she recorded at the time for evidence, since shared with the BBC, a distressed Ana can be heard saying, “this person is very dangerous and she has already threatened to kill me”.

Then the missing women’s profiles on escort and prostitution websites were discovered. Suspicions of sexual exploitation, shared on social media, appeared to be confirmed.

Panicked by the media attention, Torres and the women travelled more than 2,000 miles (3,219 km) from Texas to Maine. In chilling Instagram videos, Desirrê and Letícia denied being held captive and demanded people stop searching for them.

But a recording, obtained by BBC News, gives an insight into what was really happening at this time. By now the US authorities were aware of the concerns about the women’s safety. Homeland security had tipped off a police officer who managed to FaceTime Torres to check on the women. But just before this starts, Torres can be heard saying on the video:

“He will start asking questions. Guys, they are full of tricks. He’s a detective, be very careful. For God’s sake, I’ll kick you out if you say anything. I’ll scream.”

In November 2022, the police finally convinced Torres and the two other women to attend a welfare check in person at Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Maine.

The detective who questioned Torres, Desirrê and Letícia – Detective David Davol – told the BBC he and his colleagues had been immediately concerned, noticing a number of red flags, including a distrust of law enforcement, isolation and their reluctance to speak without Torres’ permission.

“Human traffickers aren’t always like in the movies, where you have… a gang that kidnapped people. It’s far more common that it’s someone you trust.”

By December 2022, the two women had been safely returned to Brazil.

Det Davol says, in his experience, human trafficking is on the rise. His observation is backed up by the UN, which says it is one of the fastest growing crimes, generating an estimated $150bn (£117bn) in profits a year worldwide.

He believes social media gives it a platform on which to thrive, making it much easier for traffickers to find and groom victims.