The Fight Against Human Slavery

After a twenty-year career spent owning and running businesses and defending corporate giants in business disputes, in 2013 Leigh entered the world of non-profit work for the first time as General Counsel and Prosecutions Director for a Christian non-profit that fought child sex slavery and human trafficking. While Leigh was responsible for the entity’s legal affairs, her primary responsibilities actually extended well beyond the normal “in-house lawyer” role, as upon arrival, she was tasked with moving overseas on a part-time basis to assist in opening a southeast Asia office, and to help recruit intelligence assets to deploy into child brothels. While in southeast Asia, Leigh spent much time liaising with foreign governments in order to allow undercover surveillance of child brothels by former US law enforcement assets. She also worked closely with NGOs on a plan to have on-ground investigators amass evidence of money laundering by human traffickers – and then securely relay that data to world banks so they could flag and suspend accounts suspected of criminal activity. In recognition of her extensive knowledge on slavery matters, Leigh was appointed a decade ago to the Congressional Advisory Committee on Human Trafficking, where for the last 10 years she has assisted in identification of these problems and helped formulate US response to same.

Leigh has also devoted significant time to a modern-day “Sodom & Gomorrah” region comprised of 140 child brothels along the Thai-Malay border – traveling in excess of 100 mph to avoid roadside bombers – in order to provide assistance to the children trapped there and embed a film crew to document the horrors of the child-sex trade (until Thailand’s coup d’etat forced a retreat). In addition to being overrun with child brothels, this region sits across a river from radicalized Islamic Jihadi terror training camps which deploy bombs nearly daily in the region.

It is without doubt that her most soul-satisfying work from the last decade stems from the work she has done with a Thailand-based Christian ministry and the girls trapped in this Sodom & Gomorrah region, which work is pictured in color photos in the center of her new book, and which efforts form the basis of much of the discussion in the later chapters.