Las Vegas was a long way from her tumultuous childhood in rural Wisconsin, or her life in Minneapolis, the Midwestern city where she worked at an insurance firm while pole dancing at night for extra cash.
It was there that she met Julian, who bought her red roses and diamonds, sang her love songs and said he would protect her forever before whisking her off to a new life in Las Vegas. It was fascinating, exhilarating and exciting. It was like my whole world became powerful. Lobert had unwittingly become another statistic in the sex trafficking industry and spent about 16 years trapped in the commercial sex industry before breaking free, now dedicating her life to helping other victims of exploitation.
There are no official estimates of the number of people trapped in slavery in the United States - whether sold for sex, forced to work in factories and fields, or born into servitude. Lobert describes in her book the psychological hold that sex traffickers exert, exploiting low self esteem, a troubled family background and a gnawing hunger for love and affection to capture their victims in a destructive dependency. Slavery was something bad in our past, something embarassing in our heritage and gone.
Lobert escaped from Julian twice, only to return. When she finally made the break she ended up with another man, who locked her up, put bars on her windows, and became her second pimp. She was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes, and underwent surgery and chemotherapy. Her eldest sister died of a heart attack. She became addicted to cocaine and an accidental overdose in almost claimed her life. It was at that point that spirituality entered her life. Visiting Catholic churches in Italy and a Buddhist temple Lobert prayed for the courage to break free and turned her life around, aided by a former client who had fallen in love with her.
Today Lobert, who lives in Las Vegas with her guitarist husband Oz Fox from the rock band Stryper, runs an outreach service and safe house for women seeking to leave the commercial sex industry in Las Vegas. She estimates she has reached 1,s of women and girls in the sex trade and gives refuge to about a dozen each year.
