Chloe Ricard went to group fighting child sex trafficking before her death
The director of My Life My Choice wrote about the 13-year-old Amesbury girl in a Boston Globe op-ed.
Chloe Ricard, the 13-year-old Amesbury girl who died after being left unconscious at a Lawrence hospital in May, went to a nonprofit that fights child sex trafficking in the month before her death, according to an op-ed published in The Boston Globe.A 47-year-old Lawrence man, Carlos Rivera, has been charged in connection to the teen’s death, accused of sexually assaulting her and giving her, and other teenage girls, cocaine.Lisa Goldblatt Grace, co-founder and director of the Massachusetts-based My Life My Choice, wrote in the Globe Tuesday that Ricard’s mother had given her permission to share the 13-year-old’s story.“Chloe had been referred to My Life My Choice because her mother and others in her life were worried about her,” Goldblatt Grace wrote. “They were afraid she was being exploited, and she was. Her mentor had also been exploited as a teenager, and she knew how challenging the path to safety was.”The mentor assigned to Ricard was struck by the teen’s “intelligence and insight,” she said.“She loved Chloe’s sense of humor and how much she loved her family,” Goldblatt Grace shared. “But she also remembers the way Chloe’s eyes told a story — the heaviness there. She was afraid for Chloe’s safety.”The director of the nonprofit wrote that her group sees girls like Ricard every day who are “hurting and being taken advantage of.”“The men who buy sex — to be clear, the men who rape children — wield their privilege, power, and access to things that children want or need,” she wrote. “It is their demand that fuels this industry. It is their demand that shatters lives. At My Life My Choice, we wish we had had more time to help Chloe. She left an imprint on our hearts.”Read the full op-ed at the Globe.
