Warning: This story contains descriptions of rape, including sexual assaults of minors, and suicidal thoughts.

Shaun woke up naked, bleeding, and missing three teeth. 

The memory is hazy, but he remembers feeling as if he were floating above his body — watching as the man raped him in bed. Then his pimp’s enforcers burst into the room at the upscale W San Francisco hotel. 

They rushed him to the hospital.

“I think that dude got his ass kicked,” said Shaun, who asked that his full name be withheld for privacy reasons. He added that the man was one of several who drugged and raped him over his seven years of being sex trafficked.

Shaun, 44, is decades removed from the horrific exploitation he faced in his teens and 20s. But like other survivors of sex trafficking, he continues to struggle with homelessness, addiction, and mental health disorders. 

He belongs to a population of middle-aged San Francisco survivors who say they’ve increasingly found themselves on the margins. Most of the resources devoted to combating trafficking go toward rescuing today’s young victims, according to survivors and the nonprofit leaders who help them.

That has left people like Shaun with few places to turn.

“They’re the forgotten of the forgotten,” said Francesca Gonzalez, executive director of the nonprofit Freedom Forward.

The Standard was unable to independently verify every detail provided by the survivors in this story but fact-checked the background information they provided. Experts say their stories align with those of other survivors with whom they’ve worked.

Shaun never imagined he’d end up a victim of sex trafficking. 

A self-described “Goodwill kid,” he grew up in trailer parks in San Diego and Arizona. An abusive father and strained relationship with his mother made home life difficult, he said.

Things did not improve when he came out as gay.

So in 1999, at age 19, Shaun fled to San Francisco. The city called to him, he said. He waited tables in the Castro and slept at the Hotel Verona in the Tenderloin.

That was until, one day, a repeat customer flanked by attractive young male companions had a proposition: He said he’d pay Shaun $250 an hour to go on “dates” he’d organize through online chats. Shaun declined.

But the man kept visiting — and kept offering — and Shaun’s rent was due. His minimum-wage gig at the restaurant could barely cover his motel room.

“Fuck it,” he told himself. “I’ll do it.”

Shaun was nauseous, shaking, when he saw his first client. He had only recently lost his virginity. The meth his pimp supplied helped him endure the early clients, but when the restaurant cut his hours, he found himself wholly dependent on the pimp’s financial lifeline. 

It went on for years. Shaun would meet clients in upscale San Francisco hotels and homes, sometimes grabbing drinks first, always getting high in the bathroom.

By the time he was 25, waking up bloody in bed was no longer a shocking occurrence. One time, he said, he was roofied and awoke to find a client next to him wearing a latex glove. The work became more untenable than ever.

“The crappiest thing about the whole ordeal was that they didn’t say, ‘Hey, are you OK?’” Shaun said. “It was always, ‘Get ready, you have another client in two hours.’”

“I was shattered,” he added. “I was beyond broken.”

He started looking for a way out — but had no feasible options.

“I was trying to come up with a game plan,” Shaun said. “I had no family that’d take care of me. Where was I going to go? I didn’t want to start over again.”

The decision wasn’t his. He contracted HIV from a client at age 26. His pimp stopped giving him work.

In a city of intractable problems, sex trafficking may be one of San Francisco’s worst.

It is hard to track. It shows little sign of improvement. And it has a pernicious habit of preying on the most vulnerable.

Traffickers tend to manipulate their victims using emotional or financial means, preying on young people in vulnerable financial situations and with few friends or relatives to turn to, said Katie Reisinger, a director at Huckleberry Youth Programs. Often, traffickers are family members or romantic partners of their victims.

The data are notoriously unreliable, but human trafficking in San Francisco does not appear to have receded much over the last decade.

Few cases are reported to the San Francisco Police Department — and even fewer are heard in  court — making statistics from official channels unreliable, a recent city report found.

Experts generally agree that the most authoritative tally comes from the Department on the Status of Women, which aggregates caseloads reported by the city’s nonprofits. 

But because the reports are anonymous, there could be duplicates if victims receive services from multiple nonprofits. Further, the department collects data from a different number of agencies each year, making it difficult to draw conclusions on historical differences.

In 2015, 15 agencies reported working with a total of 499 sex trafficking survivors. In 2017, 22 agencies reported 673. The most recent count was in 2021, when eight agencies reported 165.

Still, social workers say anecdotally that their caseloads have either remained consistent or grown over the last 10 years.

“You’d think that after so many years in this field, these cases wouldn’t surprise you,” said Su Young Jung, an associate director at Asian Women’s Shelter. “But they do. How can this still be happening in 2024?” 

LeesaMaree Bleicher can recall her childhood only in bits and pieces. They come to her in nightmares, sometimes, or at random during the day. The memories are all hazy.

When she was 5, men crowded into her Inner Sunset home. They gang-raped her. 

At age 8, her mother left her with an East Bay biker gang, likely in exchange for drugs or money. They gave her meth and took turns sexually assaulting her.

At age 14, she emancipated and traded sex with her mother’s old boyfriend for a place to live. She said she spent much of her young adult life in court, juvenile hall, or prison, answering for petty crimes.

Bleicher, now 58, appears stable. She lives in Section 8 housing in the Bayview with her cats and is completing an online doctorate degree. She speaks thoughtfully and insists on greeting strangers with effusive hugs.

But for most of her adult life, toxic and abusive relationships have prevented her from holding down a job, she said. She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, complex trauma, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And the foggy memories of her childhood — distorted by time and past drug use — still come to her at random.

Daily life is a struggle.

“I may be able to act like I’m mature, but inside, no,” Bleicher said. “I feel like that lost little girl that doesn’t quite know where she belongs or what to believe. I wasn’t allowed to be a little girl.”

Bleicher attends survivor support groups and has utilized San Francisco’s nonprofit network. She also volunteers with a group that helps other survivors work through their trauma.

But that is little solace.

“I feel like I’m in a constant state of survival,” Bleicher said.

Other survivors also say they continue to struggle, even though they’ve long broken free of their traffickers.

Elizabeth Quiroz taught herself to “disassociate” when a pimp forced her at age 16 to stand on the corner of 20th and Shotwell streets and have sex with men in cars.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen to me next,” Quiroz said. “I didn’t know if these men were going to kill me.” 

Twenty-three years later, she has out-of-body experiences when she drives at night. The affliction poses serious safety risks, she noted, adding that she also has a hard time building relationships because she still doesn’t trust people.

They are relatively small problems compared to what she faced two decades ago: a family of “alcoholics, addicts, and gang members”; a boyfriend who’d collect cash from clients as they rotated through her room; a 12-year meth addiction; and a litany of prison terms.

With the help of a prison pastor, she’s 13 years clean, working toward a Ph.D., and happily married. She co-founded the nonprofit Redemption House of the Bay Area and has written a book about escaping trafficking. 

“And I have a really good credit score!” she quipped.

She’s at a good place now, she said. But that doesn’t mean the effects of being trafficked are gone.

“It’s a lifetime journey,” Quiroz said. “It’s not something that’s going to heal in a couple years.”

There are few places for the city’s most desperate middle-aged survivors to turn to.

A comprehensive directory compiled by the San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking lists only a handful of agencies where men and middle-aged survivors can receive housing services.

But even those services have risks.

Sammie Rayner, co-CEO of Community Forward, said it’s not uncommon to see older survivors go to a nonprofit for a shelter bed, enter a support group, then get connected to permanent housing — only to be sexually assaulted in a co-ed living space or enter an abusive relationship.

That starts the cycle all over again.

Survivors also often need long-term, one-on-one therapy services that they can’t afford and that aren’t offered by nonprofits, said Rebecca Jackson, a Community Forward vice president.

“Older women are falling through the cracks,” Jackson said. “No one’s thinking about the fact that they might not even be able to work. If you’re 58 and chronically homeless and are handling trauma or substance abuse — they’re not that hireable. What we need is permanent supportive care.”

Shaun is nearly two decades removed from the trafficking, but its effects are far from gone. He has never been able to establish a career and continues to struggle with addiction.

He has seriously considered killing himself three times in the last decade.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to be a normal person,’” Shaun said. “It’s a lot harder than I thought. I just have no skill set.”

As recently as September, he was sleeping on Ocean Beach during a monthslong stint of homelessness. He earned money by delivering UberEats orders on his bike and occasionally lived with friends.

A doctor prescribed naltrexone to address his meth addiction, and he’s nearly six months sober — though it’s a “battle” to stay clean. He said he has applied for service jobs around the city but is always turned down. 

In October, with the help of the nonprofit Positive Resource Center, he started receiving disability checks that allowed him to move into an Excelsior apartment.

“I’m going into my mid-40s,” he said. “Something’s gotta change.”

His dream?

“It sounds corny, but my goal is to scrape up enough money to buy a boat, then sail around the Farallon Islands,” Shaun said. “I want to see the whales up close.”

If you or somebody you know is being trafficked, call ​the 24/7 San Francisco Bay Area Human Trafficking Hotline at (415) 907-9911. 

If you or somebody you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Or go here for more San Francisco resources.