I've hesitated for years to tell this story. There are many reasons why. For one, I felt too unsettled in its aftermath to discuss it beyond my inner circle. For another, it ended uneventfully. I can't definitively accuse the woman involved of nefarious intentions; things didn't get that far.

So maybe every detail that made my hair stand on end was entirely benign.

But maybe not. All I know for sure is that the experience showed me how easily a person can be lured into a nightmare by a female "friend".

Women make up a sizable percentage of human traffickers: about 38% worldwide — and women are twice as likely as men, in some places, to be perpetrators of trafficking. (See here.) Sex trafficking is just one subset of human trafficking, but it stands to reason that a sizable percentage of sex traffickers are female too, especially given that women are likely to be viewed as harmless, trustworthy, and unlikely to prey upon one another for sex. As Julie Bindel wrote in The Guardian:

"Many of the women and girls who are vulnerable to trafficking rarely believe another woman would abuse them. Yet, without such awareness their vulnerability is only likely to increase." [emphasis my own]

I never knew these kinds of statistics (nor of stories of women trafficking women, like this one) until after my own potential close-call inspired me to read about the phenomenon.

I came of age being taught things like, "Never leave your drink unattended in case a guy tries to drug it" or "Be suspicious of guys who act extra-charming." It's easy to go into a new female "friendship" never even imagining threats to your safety. Rarely did anyone tell me that women could be predatory too, particularly when operating in the service of dangerous men. Even when I learned the whole "stranger danger"/"resist peer pressure" business as a child, nobody ever explained that a woman who posed as a friend can subtly walk you into a stranger-danger trap.

So this is ultimately what compels me to share what I'm about to share: it's a tapestry of dozens of tiny details — some subtle and some not — that looked benign when taken independently but amounted to a terrifying picture when I finally put them into place. I hope to inform and protect. The story is long, because it's important to include as many details as possible; consider it a fleshed-out illustration of all those impersonal-looking bullet points you see in public-safety infographics.

Hopefully then you can recognize some of the warning signs — and extract yourself from a dangerous situation before it's too late.

Some years ago, I was approached online by a woman who'd joined a local women's group in which I was also a member. We'll call her "Aneta" and keep some identifying details vague. (*Remember: she might be entirely innocent, so I don't want to jeopardize her privacy.) One day, when I made a post to give away an item I no longer wanted, Aneta quickly said she wanted the item, and I agreed to meet her.

This wasn't her first contact with me; months earlier, a mutual acquaintance had shared an essay I wrote about relationship abuse, and Aneta had reached out to ask to chat about it over coffee. I didn't jump at her first invite because I wasn't eager to add someone to my life who wanted to gripe about asshole exes; while I sometimes write about old traumas, those topics don't define me. In hindsight, though, the circumstances of her initial attempt at befriending me suggest she might've misread me as a woman with self-esteem problems who takes abuse from men. (Attractive traits in the world of trafficking: see "Targeting the Victim" at this link.)

When we ultimately arranged to exchange this item, though, I did agree to meet for coffee or tea, at a park.

At this first hangout, Aneta was friendly, thoughtful, and supportive. She asked questions about my life, and she complimented and encouraged my writing dreams. The details of her life story didn't exactly compute, but I saw no reason to second-guess her at the time. Instead, all that really raised a question was why she'd joined the women's group that linked us in the first place: she told me she rarely attended events because she didn't like the fact that it was a women's group.

If you're ideologically opposed to the idea of exclusive female spaces, why join one?…

I don't know, but the detail is important — because joining this group, even if only nominally, provided access to its Facebook page.

With dozens, perhaps hundreds, of local women's names and photos.

Towards the end of the outing, some guys who'd been lingering near the park's perimeter approached us. One — with non-native-English and a not-even-REMOTELY-New-York accent (I'm from Pennsylvania just next door, so I would know) — claimed to be from NYC. They didn't ask for our numbers or stay long after introducing themselves and expressing hopes of running into us again, but when they walked away, Aneta subtly inquired as to whether I found them attractive. Did I? No, not remotely. Still, she said something to me about maybe seeing them again by chance in the future and how, hey, you never know, it could be destiny.

I found this also odd:

Why is she acting like these sketchy randos might be Prince Charmings?

But I didn't dwell on it.

Now. All of this backstory was crucial. But before we talk about the night that freaked me the ALLLL the way the fuck out, you also need to know the following:

From this first chat with me (and probably also from Facebook for a few months), Aneta now knew that I was a low-income, housing-insecure immigrant without family nearby, without children or a husband or a boyfriend, without a workplace or coworkers I saw on a daily basis (I freelanced from home), and without many local friends (I was too poor to socialize). On paper, I looked the part of a DEEPLY vulnerable person. This wasn't the reality of my life, but I'd already learned years earlier that this is how predatory people view a self-employed, single woman abroad.

I wasn't thinking that she saw me as a target, though. I was thinking that she saw me as a potential friend — and I saw her as a potential friend too.

Thus, a few days later, when she suggested we meet again, this time for drinks, I said yes.

That's when things got scary.

Aneta and I met at the same train station as before, and she asked me to suggest some bars I liked in the neighborhood. I said I had two in mind. As soon as I showed her one, she asked to see the other. Never even questioning her intentions, I'd just revealed two of my then-favorite night spots to a practical stranger. Maybe not the best idea.

But she was a woman. So I didn't think twice.

At the second place, we asked for a table outside, and she treated me to a glass of wine as a thank-you for the item I'd recently given her. I accepted, but I'm not much of a drinker, so as she moved on to a second, third, fourth, and possibly even fifth glass herself and lightly urged me to drink more, I just stuck to (veeery slowly) sipping my first. Frankly, as the evening wore on, I started to get confused about her spending. Not only had she ordered over €20 or €30 worth of drinks; she was also chain-smoking (an expensive habit), and I think she might've even ordered a small dish for herself.

I'm absolutely not someone who judges poor people for how they spend their money; I've experienced deep poverty and know the importance of small splurges for your mental health. But this was more than I could've dreamed of blowing on a single night, and Aneta had previously emphasized her own destitution too: working an exhausting low-wage job while on public assistance, all because it was somehow impossible to furnish copies of her (supposedly) lofty credentials to the relevant authorities in order to get better work. (In hindsight, that story should've been a red flag.) Her spending might've been entirely innocent: just a woman on hard times who finally had a little extra cash and was eager to indulge in a night on the town… but in hindsight, I'm sad to admit I later wondered whether she'd been given an allowance to wine and dine me.

Aneta kept enthusiastically complimenting my looks. Assuming that effusive praise was maybe just a personality quirk of hers, I wrote this off, but I started to get uncomfortable because I didn't understand why she was so fixated on my face and body that night. She wasn't flirting; we'd both expressed hetero interests previously, but she also started to insist that I, a practical stranger, needed to visit her homeland with her, talked up how sexy its men are, and even briefly proposed fixing me up locally (if memory serves) with a guy from her country. I politely said I wasn't interested in dating at the time, so she dropped the subject. Still, I later wondered how innocent those invitations to travel abroad with her and meet a man really were. (Such invitations — and lavish praise — can be huge red flags too.)

We chatted a bit further about our personal lives, and she looked suddenly shocked and upset when she learned that I talk to my family on the phone almost daily from across the ocean. She even went so far as to low-key shame me for it. It was somewhere around this portion of the evening that intuition kicked in: Do. not. share. much. more. So I shifted into ambiguous mode, deliberately saying very little about where and how I spend my time or anything about the people in my world, since now I had a twisted feeling (based on the abundant, casual negativity and vitriol she was expressing towards people she knew, plus her remarks that belied a penchant for drama…) that anything I shared might somehow be weaponized to locate or (socially) isolate me.

I'm not a fundamentally paranoid person. But I couldn't shake the feeling that something was very off. In fact, I noticed that the air around us — despite the relaxed, idyllic, balmy, summer-patio vibe of the bar — felt non-specifically, coolly… sinister. I'd never had a feeling like this before in the company of a new female friend, nor in such mundane, familiar surroundings. It was confusing.

Then we left the bar. And things started to feel urgently wrong.

Outside on the street, en route to a local square with lots of cheap food options, Aneta abruptly exclaimed that we had to take a picture. I'm not big on selfies, nor did I think of this occasion as particularly scrapbook-worthy, but I obliged, and she snapped one. (Un-fun fact: apparently, sometimes traffickers take photos of intended victims, as per this disturbing story on Reddit. I'd much rather believe Aneta just wanted the photo for her own memories...)

A few minutes later, while we sat at a popular kebab shop, she leaned in from across the table and quietly said there was a man following us ever since shortly after we left the bar (i.e., took the picture) — and now he was behind me in a spot where I couldn't see him. Aneta acted unsettled.

The shop was busy, so I wasn't sure who she was referring to. But when we left, she glanced back and claimed he'd started following us again. She wanted me to walk with her toward the metro station where our evening began. I wasn't sure why, given that there was a stop for exactly the same train right next to the kebab shop, but I assumed she wanted a chance to ditch him before heading home. Hoping for safety in numbers, I agreed to walk with her to the more distant station. (I figured I could simply "lose" this guy in the metro system too when the time came.)

After two blocks or so, Aneta encouraged me to step aside toward a closed-up storefront to see if the man — who was still following us — would pass us by.

He didn't. He stopped too, looking momentarily uncertain about how to keep trailing us without looking obvious. (Apparently, "Give up and leave women alone" was not an option.)

And the twist was:

Now she seemed open to interacting with him.

While Aneta and I waited to see what he'd do next, I informed her that I knew of a nearby police station. I could take us there. That ought to scare him off, and if he didn't desist, well, he'd have conveniently marched himself straight to the cops.

"No, no, don't do that!"

Huh? Why not?

At last, he decided to strike up a conversation. He wasn't from this country (Germany), but he tried German first. Aneta, somewhat more proficient in German than I was, told him I spoke English, which he said he couldn't speak. He asked if we'd join him at a bar — a lounge bar close to the station we were walking to. If I recall correctly, the guy also mentioned something about meeting friends there. I told Aneta I wasn't interested, and I believe this was when Mr. No-English suspiciously offered to pay for a taxi to send me home (likely having heard me say, "I want to go home"). I had NO intention of climbing into any vehicle he provided.

This was about the point where Aneta shocked me with an about-face.

She could see I was adamant about having nothing to do with this man who'd just stalked us for the past 20 minutes — so she stepped aside to ask me:

Why didn't I want to go out with him?

It was just drinks. She knew the bar, she said. Maybe it could be fun.

What the actual fuck. First, this woman is acting like she's scared of this guy, and now she's challenging me on why I won't drink with him?!

I listed the obvious reasons: It's late. I'm tired. I don't want to drink, with or without this weirdo. I don't know him. He's following us around, which is creepy as fuck, so I definitely don't trust him. And, oh — it makes zero sense for me to spend time with someone I can't talk to, and zero sense for him to want to spend time with me.

"If you want to go have a drink with him, I won't judge you," I told her. "You can do what you want. But I don't trust him. So whatever you do, I'm going home."

Aneta mulled this over for a minute.

This might've been when my mind started to connect the ugly dots:

That this was a woman who joined a women's group online — despite supposedly disagreeing with the fundamental principle of the group — and could've browsed all our photos. That she then zeroed in on me when she saw an essay that portrayed me as potentially fragile. That I looked extremely vulnerable besides — and she was visibly upset when she learned I wasn't as isolated as I seemed.

That this woman asked me to show her the places I liked, instead of suggesting one herself. That the details of her life were fishy, and supposedly her income was a pittance, but somehow she had plenty of cash for this night out with me.

That she'd repeatedly said she could introduce me to men and show me her country. That she fixated on my looks. That immediately after there was a photo of me on her phone, some creep crawled out of the woodwork in pursuit.

Not to mention, this was now the second occasion in a row where Aneta and I were approached by suspicious men, in the same general neighborhood, shortly before parting ways.

In fact, on no occasion with her had this not happened.

When I suggested the police station? She instantly declined.

And now she was interested in grabbing drinks with one of these men.

Suddenly, I understood:

Trafficking need not always be an ongoing slavery arrangement. It doesn't always have to involve outright abduction, either. It can be as "simple" as someone paying a woman to lure a new female "friend" into their orbit for a single night — and then perhaps repeating the process with a brand new victim next time, rather than run the risk of holding any given victim captive indefinitely.

I realized how "easy" it would be, too, for no one to get caught: if I went to this bar with this guy and this suspicious new "friend," and if the unfortunate were to befall me, it would've been very easy for her to claim the men were total strangers and that she had nothing to do with it:

Oh, poor Laura. How awful that someone took advantage of her — but I must've been too drunk to notice. I wish I could've helped.

A denial would've been so easy.

How often do we even suspect a woman as an accomplice when another woman gets raped?

And then, the two not-yet-friends could just fall out of touch, to forget the terrible incident — and the next female "friend" would be a clean slate: none the wiser.

(*This is why, if you've found yourself on the wrong end of a traumatic night out, you should report the names of every person you spoke to or spent time with before the assault — any female friend included. Just in case law enforcement starts to see her reappearing across incident reports.)

Eventually, Aneta rejected the guy's offer, and he finally walked away. She no longer wanted me to walk her the remaining block or so to the metro station, so I didn't. Instead, I went back in the direction of the police, quickly running through a mental list of friends I could call at that hour, just to be able to relate the details of my evening and have a "witness" on the phone in case something tragic happened on my way home.

For days — possibly weeks — I worried whether anyone had trailed me, and I felt hyper-vigilant whenever I passed through the area where she and I had been.

Aneta and I never hung out again. I never confronted her about that evening, knowing my fears might've been off-base; I didn't want to offend her by saying she'd scared me. In fact, to this day, I feel self-conscious for so much as imagining the worst. Stories of creepy men are a dime a dozen, but I can count on one hand the number of women in my life who legitimately frightened me. While most of those women had blatant mental health issues that incited them to violence or control, Aneta was the very first woman I encountered who seemed to be very much within her right mind and yet whose behavior left me looking over my shoulder for weeks to come. Perhaps that's what made this story harder to talk about for so long: I had no mental reference for it.

And yet, when I rehashed this story to one of my most naively trusting friends, she exclaimed something along the lines of:

"That's what they do! They act like your friend, but they get money for introducing you to some guys. And they try to isolate you so you can't ask for help."

As if Aneta had been textbook.

I'm not here to give an exhaustive info sheet on how to identify trafficking. In fact, most online resources imply that the process involves weeks or months of grooming, with the aim of enslaving someone long-term. Yet the brief time I spent with Aneta helped me understand that trafficking can also happen very quickly and be made to look like a (series of) one-time misfortune(s), too.

I don't definitively assume, much less insist, that anyone tried to traffic me. I really prefer to believe the best of Aneta. Maybe if we had gone with that guy to that bar, things would've been fine. Maybe she was just out to make a friend, eager to splurge on (and prolong) a summer night on the town, and the fact that strange men happened to keep crashing the final moments of our hangouts was a complete coincidence.

Maybe.

In life, we don't usually get to see what lies behind a door unless we walk through it — but I'm okay with not experiencing whatever might have lay behind that one.

I haven't changed my behavior too much since then. Granted, I'm more judicious now about accepting friend requests from unknown women, regardless of whether we have common friends or interests. I see how online groups — especially women's groups — are way too easy for traffickers to browse for targets. But I was already innately distrustful of behavior like Aneta's (once I got to know her in person): How she seemed a little too interested in things that made me vulnerable, acted bothered by things that made me less vulnerable, had a bio that didn't add up, subtly romanticized weird lurkers (e.g., at the park), and just generally bombed me with flattery and invites (e.g., visit her country, meet a hot man, drink with the creep who followed us). A lonely or more insecure person might've been thankful for such intensive attention, though — and paid a very high price for it.

Stories of scary setups are everywhere, but they fly under the radar because we aren't raised to be suspicious of our female "friends". Like a recent conversation with a friend about a suspicious date rape that someone in his circle experienced, or a memoir I've been reading that involves trafficking and coercive sex — both scenarios starring a conniving woman at the core. That's what ultimately inspired me to write this story: the realization that women tend to trust each other by default when it comes to sexual safety.

And yet, in countless permutations that are hyper-customized to the details of a given victim and a given trafficker's aims… this trust can be a fatal flaw.

Warn the people in your life, especially girls and women, that anyone can be a trafficking victim, no matter how careful, smart, sober, or straight-laced they are. Warn them that sex trafficking can take lots of shapes, too. That it's not just men who can be dangerous, it doesn't always start with a Hollywood-style, snatched-off-the-street abduction (though it can), and it's far from rare for women to do the dirty work of ensnaring victims.

Warn them that what makes some women so dangerous is the simple fact that we don't tend to see women as dangerous in the first place.

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