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'Women have a hard time accepting that I spend my life looking for underage sex slaves'

Aaron Cohen travels the world, rescuing girls sold into prostitution. He tells Carole Cadwalladr why he does it – and how a suburban kid turned heroin addict became a human rights campaigner

Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009

I don't know where to even start with Aaron Cohen. With his day job, springing imprisoned girls out of brothels? With his past life as a heroin addict? Or the fact that he used to be on the payroll of alternative-rock band Jane's Addiction, his job description hovering somewhere between "manager" and "spiritual guru"? Or that he refers to himself as a "priest" and studies the Bible for at least an hour every morning? Or that both Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone have been vying to buy the rights to his book Slave Hunter: One Man's Global Quest to Free Victims of Human Trafficking, and turn his life into a film?

I worry, though, about how believable that would be. There are moments reading the book when I wonder if he's not a bit of a fantasist: the facts of his life seem so incredible. The rock-band antics, the years of Kabbalah study, the infiltration of criminal gangs and consorting with drug smugglers and human traffickers. He's larger than life, and when I meet him this turns out to be literally true: he's 6ft 5in, 44 and has the most unnerving gaze of almost anyone I've ever met. I keep going to the loo just to be able to stare at a blank wall and have five minutes' respite. There's an almost messianic passion that Cohen brings to bear on the subject of human trafficking: it is his life's work and, he believes, part of a divine plan.

I can't help thinking that if he'd been born in a different time, he might have been mistaken for a prophet. This is not a man who is short on charisma: on the day I meet him, he's going on to Reno to talk about slavery to 10,000 people at a music festival, right before the headline act.

But it turns out the book isn't unbelievable enough. Cohen says that he and his co-writer Christine Buckley, a journalist, actually had to tone the story down. "Oh, there's lots we had to take out. The time I was shot. And the time someone attempted to poison me. We just thought it was too OTT, so we simply took it out." The shooting and the poisoning is because of Cohen's very own personal one-man mission: as well the campaigning and advocacy work he does against human trafficking, he also travels the world "freeing slaves". They're often girls and children who've been sold to brothels, and his work involves posing as a customer, befriending them, videoing them giving evidence, and then returning with cash and a paramilitary unit in order to secure their release.

Slave Hunter begins with the account of one of these missions in Cambodia, and he tells the story of the children who were released, including two sisters, Jonny and Jonty, to whom he became particularly close. When I turn up at his house in Costa Mesa, an hour south of Los Angeles in Orange County, the first thing he shows me is a picture of them. Jonny flourished. She graduated from high school and is now the manager of a beauty salon and helps mentor girls in danger of being trafficked. "But Jonty's dead," he says. "She was sold at age 11; I found her at age 13, got her out and got her into a great shelter with the best care you could possibly get. And she had four years of schooling and a high school education."

"But she ran away to do drugs again. The traffickers had broken her with methamphetamine so she ended up hopping the fence and running away from the shelter. She died last year of liver failure. That's the thing," he says. "You never know why some people can rise above it and survive. And others don't."

Aaron Cohen is the surviving kind. You don't have to be a professional psychologist to see links between the events of his childhood and his vocation as an adult. He was a sickly child, asthmatic, frequently off school and picked on by his violent father.

He was never "normal", he says. "I'm the kid who wanted the green shoes. I always wanted things that weren't normal. My brother and sister were happy with ordinary things, but I always felt I was outside the box. I was really ill as a child; I'd stay at home and listen to the other kids play outside. And because of my really severe asthma, I learned to meditate and control my breathing when I was three years old, and it really changed my outlook on life."

Most profoundly, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1969, when he was just four years old. She had a hysterectomy and a double mastectomy, and the rest of his childhood was shadowed by the threat of her death. She lived for another two decades, but it's a shadow that never seems to have left Cohen. She was a religious Jew and very spiritual and it was she, he says, who taught him how "to see the light in people".

"What about men you see having sex with underage girls? Do you see the light in them?"

"I struggle," he says. "But I think it is why I'm successful at what I do because I wouldn't just go into a brothel looking for bad guys and good guys. I go in thinking: 'We're all interconnected, there's light in this pimp, there's light in this child who's in sex slavery, there's light in this bodyguard, this Mafia guy'; and when you look at the bright side, I think that's the key to a lot of things in life."

It's tough, though. Cohen's work takes him to places that most people don't even want to know exist. "I pull back the first curtain and see a naked old man thrusting himself into a girl half his size," he writes. "He is killing her soul." At one point, after a night spent looking for child prostitutes, he reads his guidebook and all the charming sights the city has to offer. It's like he's visiting a parallel "zombie" version of it.

These are the girls that Cohen tries to rescue. There are various methods he uses, but often it's a matter of buying their freedom. And then placing them in refuges where some of them thrive, and some of them, like Jonty, don't.

It was another lesson, he says, that he learned from his mother. "She is what led me into helping victims because I realised that your attitude is everything. Anybody else in my mother's situation would have died in 1969. But my mother had an attitude and a spirit that lent itself towards life, towards healing. As a young child, I was able to learn that from a desperate woman who was dying. And I meditated on it my whole life. And when I found desperate women who were dying, I was able to make them believe they could make it instead of turning away."

The story of how he went from a sickly suburban kid to a one-man anti-slavery army makes perfect sense to Cohen. But narrative-wise, it's a long and twisting story, taking in a water-polo scholarship to Pepperdine University in Malibu, the discovery of the punk grunge scene in downtown LA and the entirely flukish circumstances that led him into Perry Farrell's orbit: Jane's Addiction was looking for a writer to collaborate on a project, and the band's manager read in the local paper that Cohen had won a fiction competition and got in touch.

They hit it off immediately. "I think we each felt we had found a soul brother. Over the course of the next few years, I would play the translator, on-tour road manager, best friend and all-night recording buddy," he writes in the book. "Soon after that, Perry introduced me to heroin."

Cohen lived the rock'n'roll lifestyle. And not any old rock'n'roll lifestyle. Jane's Addiction were notoriously wild drugged-up exhibitionists. The first time he saw them performing, Perry Farrell appeared on stage naked covered in blood.

At one point, when he was producing a film project with them, he found that his job involved scoring sufficient drugs to get the cast "well" enough to film. And in the book, he says that "alongside Perry I saw myself as an addict-artist; a character in a supernatural horror story who needed to experience that kind of transformation in order to feel alive". Later his role turned into Perry's spiritual guru. Their mornings involved going surfing together and then coming home to study the Kabbalah.

Until, eventually, he gave up the drugs. And replaced them with religion. He moved back home, got clean, and chose for his graduate thesis the subject of "jubilee". "Jubilee is something that happens once every 50 years, and it was the ancient law of forgiving debts and freeing slaves. I became really inspired, because jubilee was this sort of divine plan for times of trouble based upon this geopolitical clash of society that was supposed to happen some time in the future. And the year was 1991, the year of the first Gulf War."

It was a concept that Cohen took up and ran with. In 1998, the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, he and Jane's Addiction travelled to the Middle East to declare a jubilee. "And we did a show called Prophecy with the Chemical Brothers and Run DMC. And then in the year 2000, the Pope declared an official jubilee. And a British woman set up Jubilee 2000, a campaign aimed at reducing debt. It included a Vatican scholar, and he happened to have seen an interview with me and Perry talking about jubilee in, of all places, Playboy. And they approached Perry and said: 'Can you recruit musicians for this Drop the Debt campaign?' And I was Perry's executive director, so the request came through me, and I just thought: 'Wow, this is a divine miracle!' So we pulled out Perry's Rolodex and contacted David Bowie and Bono and all these people, and they all came on board."

It was one of the most successful campaigns in history: 27m signatures were obtained, and $300bn of debt was wiped out in a single stroke. For Cohen, though, it didn't stop there. The concept of "jubilee", the forgiving of debt and the freeing of slaves, has gone on to inform all aspects of his life ever since then.

It's hard to really get to grips with Cohen's take on religion. He refers to himself as a "man of faith" and says that Judaism is his favourite religion but Jesus is his favourite religious figure. In secular Britain we have no context for him, and when I ask him about the Kabbalah and the way all these Hollywood celebs "like Demi Moore" have jumped on the bandwagon, he says: "I know Demi Moore, actually. She's a friend of mine. I was at hers on Wednesday night, and she's a really learned woman. She's seeking wisdom. Hats off to her and Ashton – they're leading their lives through study."

But mostly he's simply an old-fashioned humanitarian. He travels constantly, to Burma, to Nicaragua, to Iraq. He's uncovered evidence of a trade in enriched uranium in Burma, and he's trained law-enforcement officers in human trafficking in a host of different countries. And he has an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. "People often make the joke that I'm like Forrest Gump. Ricky Martin doesn't show up, so I spend an afternoon with the Dalai Lama. And who would think that I'd be in Sudan getting evidence on slavery that ends up going to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? Is it chance? I'm a man of faith, so I see it as providence."

The evidence led to the Senate passing the Trafficking Victim Protection Act of 2000. "And that flagship law funded a $100m-a-year infrastructure, and that led to other laws not just in the US but in European countries. Before that, human trafficking wasn't even recognised. Now we're where we were with the war on drugs in the late 60s and early 70s – we're just tapping the surface."

In Slave Hunter, Cohen writes that it's estimated that 27 million people are enslaved today – double the number taken from Africa during the three and a half centuries of the slave trade. Approximately 80,000 new victims are trafficked across international borders each year. And as well as lobbying and campaigning and collecting evidence on victims for various government agencies and human rights organisations, Cohen has also formulated his own hands-on direct response. He calls it "night-frighting", liberating women and children from brothels, a strategy he developed after watching federal agents in action.

"I thought: 'Oh man, there's no way you're going to be able to do this! You're ordering Pepsi!' They looked so out of place there was no way they were going to pass. Whereas I am a party boy and I come from an elite party group. I can look the part."

It's funny, I say, how the skills you've brought to bear have been refined through hanging out with a rock'n'roll band. There's not so many things in life that you could say that about.

"Yeah. I think there's a purpose for everything in life. And there's a reason I sowed my wild oats with the punk rock circus for as long as I did, because I learned skills that would become valuable to me later on."

It hasn't been without its price, though. "Most women have a hard time accepting that I spend my time in brothels looking for underage sex slaves," he writes in the book. "The reality is this: I get close to the women I meet on the job. This might mean that they end up sitting on my lap or hanging on my neck while we're talking in a karaoke bar. Some of them have even stayed overnight in my hotel room – which definitely goes against official rules. I have cuddled and even kissed a few of these women."

It's only by establishing an emotional connection with the girls or women that he's able to get them to trust him, he says. But it reads a little uncomfortably. There's an incident with a woman called Naomi who he admits he was attracted to. "I'm a man, so it can be difficult. I have to tie myself to the mast. But what you have to remember is that there were no models to follow. I was pioneering this field. And I learned that if I'm a little looser than the man in black, I can get a lot more information, and that means more child rescue. So as long as I'm not having sex and I'm not doing drugs, then I'm all right."

What's more, when he hasn't been looking for underage sex slaves, he was back, living in his childhood home, caring for his sick father, who has since died. When I turn up at the house, Cohen is packing. He and his siblings remortgaged the house to pay for their father's care, and it's being repossessed by the bank. When they took out the mortgage, it was worth $800,000. But it's now worth $400,000 and they're in negative equity.

At the house I meet his girlfriend Jennifer, briefly. She works with victims of abuse and understands his work better than most, but it's been an on-off affair. "It was really hard for her, and she broke up with me. But now we have an understanding that when I'm on missions we're not together – that's her way of coping."

He'd like to have children one day, he says, but he's "damaged goods". He describes Jennifer not just as his girlfriend but his "therapist" too. "By grace or goodness I have a relationship with someone who loves psychology and who was a victim herself and has in many ways become my mentor." He worries that his work has dehumanised him. He believes he suffers from something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Most people are able to simply turn away and ignore problems that are not their own. We deal with injustice and desperation by pretending not to see it. Cohen doesn't. He's made it his life's work. It's hard not to reach the conclusion that we're the ones who've been dehumanised. He's the normal one.

• Slave Hunter: One Man's Global Quest to Free Victims of Human Trafficking by Aaron Cohen is published by Simon Spotlight in America.

To read about Cohen's work with Causecast, go to www.causecast.org/leader/aaron-cohen