It was 2009 when I came across Somaly Mam’s heartbreaking memoir “The Road of Lost Innocence”, in which she described in detail her traumatic early years after she was taken from her family and village by a “family friend” into a foreign city to be first a slave, and then made a prostitute in a nameless brothel. Held for a decade as a sex slave, she was rescued from that hell to find new life through a French physician, and in time she returned to her native Cambodia to try and save girls just like she was who were mercilessly entrapped in that same horrific existence.

Following the release of that book in 2005, Somaly’s power and reputation as an anti-trafficking crusader ballooned, and as a public opponent to sex slavery and a rescuer and harborer of forgotten and forsaken young women, she became an international media darling. She was vocal and unflinching about her work to defy traffickers and to save the slaves they seeded throughout Cambodia’s sex trade stables. She was charismatic and courageous. She was fashionable and fierce. And her foundation, developed in the wake of her book’s popularity, was embraced by celebrities and the media, and she worked tirelessly raising awareness and funds in cosmopolitan centers around the world.

She inevitably became the patron saint of freedom fighters everywhere, and she became the face of anti-trafficking success worldwide.

Heck. I was so enthralled by her and her work, I even made a few donations to her organization. If she was saving little girls from either falling into or being completely destroyed by sexual slavery, she was doing one of the greatest works in the world.

As I grew in my awareness about the deep and widespread international problem of human trafficking, and I ran into others who didn’t know much about it, I’d always recommend to them to Mam’s book. I thought if they wanted to get a sense of what was really going on out there, it would paint them the picture they needed to see. It was honest and uncomfortably graphic about realities in that world.

Or was it?

Consider my surprise then, coming across Newsweek’s feature on Somaly this week, “Somaly Mam: The Holy Saint (and Sinner) of Sex Trafficking”.

In it, much of the riveting and mesmerizing details of Somaly’s terrible early life are called fabrications. Her removal and relocation from her home town? It appears it didn’t happen. Her years of horror in brothels? It was apparently hard for her to do that while also attending secondary school. She is remembered by some as a pretty and happy teen, not forgotten during those years as an abducted and abandoned sex slave.

Through her work in Cambodia, and as an international ambassador against human trafficking, Somaly Mam has done incredible good, impacting a sea of people worldwide who share her struggle, and who want to fight the blight. She herself has had a hand in rescuing thousands of girls from subhuman living conditions and lives of hopeless misery. But apparently the early life history she gave us is largely a lie.

How important is working from truth when we are trying to do good? I mean, really, in Somaly’s case, hasn’t the positive she’s done over the years spoken enough for the quality of her heart?

The back story that Somaly gave the world in 2005 established her as a credible voice for those trying to understand sex trafficking. Her book propelled her foundation forward as a spearhead in the global anti-trafficking effort. And through both mediums, Somaly received an outpouring of trust and support from activists and leaders worldwide. She has used her visibility to bring the realities of trafficking and the sex trade to regular folks all around the world. The problem is, the realities she’s spoken extensively of apparently never were hers.

If trust is the currency of love, Somaly has been loved broadly and emphatically for quite a while. And though having that was never overtly the goal of her life’s work, the change in her back story signals that that was a larger motivation for her than we suspected. If the fabrications about her past are true, then she had a reason for making them, and chances are, the end goal wasn’t simply to save slaves.

I don’t know Somaly. I know she wrote a heck of a book. I know she has truly helped a ton of people- by creating awareness and by creating safe houses and by putting her life on the line for the girls she saves. I know she is an exceptional woman. And I know she is not a perfect person. And I’d love it if these assertions about her biography turned out wrong. But that doesn’t look like the case.

I believe her book remains an important and accurate tale about the realities sex slaves face in brothels today. But it appears it may be just a novel. And I suspect now that something else may have driven her to write her book, besides a desire to help others.

Normally, love doesn’t thrive well upon lies. And normally, lies aren’t the best expression of love.

As far as Somaly’s book goes, I hope the truth comes out about it, and that in the end, her story is right, and the critics questioning her history are all wrong. Including me.

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Somaly Mam Foundation’s Statement on the May 21 Article