Melanie Thompson and Taina Bien-Aime

[00:03] TAINA BIEN-AIME: I'm 62 years old. Today is Monday, April 12, 2021. I am in New York and I am recording today with Melanie Thompson, who is a colleague, a friend, and a fierce fellow warrior in our work to end human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. And I welcome her.

[00:30] MELANIE THOMPSON: Thank you, Taina. Hello, my name is Melanie Thompson. I am 24 years old. Today is Monday, April 12, 2021. I'm here with Taina Bien-Aimé who is my boss, my friend, my colleague, my partner in this fight that we're going to get into, I guess. And yeah, let's get this on the road.

[00:52] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Well, thanks, Melanie. And it is a long road, but sometimes fun and sometimes not so fun. So when was the first time I met you? I think it was in June 2013. You were about 16 years old. We were in Albany, New York, the capital of the state, at legislative session fighting for a bill that became law two years later, which was called the Trafficking Justice, Trafficking Victims Justice Protection Act. And there you were sitting on a stoop, looking very young. And do you remember that day?

[01:34] MELANIE THOMPSON: I do. I had like some white button up that was really short sleeved or something. I remember it was kind of warm. It's kind of warm, yeah.

[01:42] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Why did you decide to go up to Albany and advocate for this law?

[01:47] MELANIE THOMPSON: Oh, I guess I can. I guess I can start answering that by saying, like, how I got here and we'll get more into that. But I am a survivor of the sex trade. I was trafficked when I was 12 years old and I've been in the trade for years after that. And I remember I been sent, I went through the court system and was sent to many different institutions, the foster care system, juvenile detention facilities, et cetera. And there was a New York Times editor who had come up to one of the facilities I was in to do an interview with the person who, I guess the manager or the supervisor of the facility. But that supervisor actually had referred me and said, why don't you talk to one of the young people? So once I once I spoke with him and I saw that small column that was posted in the New York Times about my story. It was from that point that I recognized that maybe if I talk more and use my voice more and tell more people about the things that I've seen and been through, it can be impactful. So the first time that I ran into an organization, I can't remember which one it was first that one of my social workers had introduced me to this and said, hey, there's some press here that may Want to speak to you. Are you interested? And from that point on, it was just like advocacy was my calling. I said, any laws? How can I help? How can I change the system? So I believe, I want to say that might have been the first time I was in Albany when you met me. So I guess, I don't know, I was young, I was still a child, but I definitely wanted to use my voice somewhere more powerful than just an interview. And I think that that, for me was the biggest eye opener in my advocacy experience.

[03:27] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Yeah. And you're one of many, many children, and from what I know, all of them are brilliant, more one than the other. And you obviously are in that category. It's not, I mean, knowing, hearing, reading about what a life in prostitution does to an individual, to the person's psyche, health, outlook on life. To me, when I work with you every day, when I hear you speak, it's almost as if I see a miracle happening every day. Because I always wonder, like, how can people survive? What you've encountered? What do you think are the ingredients that make someone a survivor or not?

[04:18] MELANIE THOMPSON: No, absolutely. Thank you for that. It is definitely a struggle. So it is not easy, trust me. I think that if you've gone through any type of trauma, really, but in this, for this particular conversation, when you go through exploitation and you come out of it on the other end and you make a conscious decision to try to move forward and in a different direction with your life, I feel like that in and of itself makes you a survivor. But I do recognize that it takes a certain drive or level of motivation or some type of resiliency, that push that continues to push us forward. So some people, unfortunately, you know, they. They make it out of the sex trade and then they don't know how to get a grasp back on their healing journey or their healing journey is. Is extremely difficult. Some people still commit suicide afterwards. Some people can't regain. Some people relapse back into the sex trade. And I don't harbor any negative feelings towards anybody who's gone through that. I know for me, relapse was on my mind for years after I left. But it takes a certain level of. I want to use the term power, I guess here, for lack of a better word, for us to have to get up every day, look at ourselves in the mirror, try to tell ourselves that we are beautiful or handsome despite what pimps and sex. Sex buyers have told us about how we're ugly and how we're not strong. So for me, I really, I don't know what the secret ingredient is. But I do know that there's a. An innate power in all of us, I think. And I think that tapping into that and recognizing that you are not your story and you are not the things that other people try to label you as, I think that's where that's the resilience that comes out of that. It just keeps pushing you to remind yourself every day that you're not what you were 5, 10, 15 years ago.

[06:12] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Yeah. So just for the listeners, it would be good to just have a little bit of background on what's human trafficking and how does prostitution fit into it. Obviously, people are trafficked for a number of reasons for labor servitude or exploitation, for organ removal, and for exploitation of prostitution, which is a legal term. But yet now a lot of people just kind of separate, you know, they say, well, there's horrible human trafficking on one end or sex trafficking on one end, but then there's this thing that's called the sex trade that should be accepted.

[06:51] MELANIE THOMPSON: Yeah. So this is absolutely true. So you would know better than me in terms of the legal jargon of what the definition of human trafficking is federally. But in this case, I know I was, I was a victim of sex trafficking. So I was trafficked for the purposes of sex. I was kidnapped at 12 and I was put into the sex trade and was sold to sex buyers for the profit of the person that was exploiting me, my trafficker, my pimp. And in sex trafficking, you can be exploited for the purposes of, excuse me, by fraud, force or coercion. It includes the harboring and transporting of the physical body. And what a lot of people don't focus on is this idea of exploiting up the power and control and exploiting someone's vulnerability. So a lot of people, when they hear the term trafficking, when they think of sex trafficking, they think of movies like Taken. They think of the most extreme cases where there are children, usually under 18, that are smuggled across international borders, or they think of somebody that's smuggled to Russia or China. And it's not to say that those types of cases don't occur, because they do. But the reality is, especially in a place like New York, where I'm from, where everything is so busy and there's so much, there's a huge population of people, trafficking doesn't necessarily look like that. So for me, trafficking on the street here in New York City is just like me blending in with the average person going to work at 6:00 in the morning. But A lot of people, when they think of trafficking, they think of children thrown in white vans. That does happen, but that's not the only way that trafficking looks. So now what a lot of people, what I find in my advocacy, and you would know this just as, as well as me, when we talk about trafficking and people automatically think children, it's accepted that this is wrong, this is not okay. Nobody should exploit or rape a child, nobody should kidnap anybody. But the minute that that 14 year old child turns 18 on their 18th birthday, now all of a sudden society switches their lens and says, this person is no longer a trafficked child. This is a quote, unquote, sex worker. This is somebody who chose to be in prostitution. They're making a valid choice. So the issue, and this is why, going back to what you just said about that separation, this is why people separate the two. They don't see how the two are interconnected. So you can be in prostitution never having been trafficked, but you're in, when it comes to sex trafficking, you're always trafficked for the purposes of prostitution. That is the end goal. So I like to say that trafficking is the vehicle and prostitution is the destination. And that's just the most simplest way that I can make that visual. But what a lot of people don't recognize, when it comes to individuals in prostitution that are adults currently on the surface, what people see are people over 21 or people over 18 making a choice to be in a strip club or making a choice to go and quote, unquote, sell themselves on the street or online or whatever have you. What people don't recognize is that those same individuals were one usually exploited as children. According to our statistics, many of us that are in the sex trade after 18 were either trafficked as children or have some type of sexual abuse history or foster care experience or immigrant status or LGBTQ identifying labels, whatever have you, all of these oppressions and isms and vulnerabilities that made us susceptible to prostitution in the first place. So on the surface, one might say this is somebody that chooses to do this and she likes it. And that's, I'm just gonna, you know, throw some dollars at her and call it a day, which in turn relates to misogyny. But we can, we can talk about that. But what they're not seeing is that three days ago they had no place to stay. Or what they're not seeing is that they had a pimp from when they were a child that forced them into a strip club that is now standing in the audience Making sure that they don't run off, they don't see those things. They, people are just coming in. And because it's so much, to me, I think it's easier to accept that there's a separation quote, unquote, that prostitution is one thing and trafficking is another, because the reality is it's harsh. And a lot of people don't want to hear about harsh things. A lot of people don't want to take accountability and a lot of people don't want to recognize that this is in your backyard. So you had, you can potentially have a role in helping the solution and stopping this. But people don't want to acknowledge that because this is portrayed as more fun as, you know, the quote unquote, happy hooker narrative, the Pretty Woman and the Hustler movies, they show these things as if this is something that we like even down to our TV shows. You have the girlfriend experience, you have the client list. All of these things that portray these women as empowered and getting all this money and feeling sexy and all of these different things. But what they're not recognizing is one, that's, that's a fabricated and sensationalized story, two, that only focuses on one form of the sex trade. And three, they're not showing the harsh realities with a girl on the street with a bloody nose and, and her pimp taking her shoes away from her. They're not going to show that on tv. That's just too sad. You're not going to get that much viewers. Right. So the media, and I know I'm like jumping, but the media does. It's either they show the extreme, the very extreme form of exploitation where you're taking somebody from Saudi Arabia and bringing them to America, or they show this very happy, happy, high end escort narrative. So because of that, and because, you know, the average Joe is not in the work that we do every day, they're not having these conversations. They don't see that. So they go off of what's portrayed to them. They see this and that as two separate things when really they're interconnected.

[12:34] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Yeah. You know, on Twitter, somebody posted once, to the right, oppression of women is called. What does it say? Oppression of women is called nature. But to the left, it's called empowerment. And so right now, what we're seeing, which really breaks my heart, you know, I've been doing this work since the early 90s. And yes, there were always battles among even feminist groups as to whether prostitution was work or not. At the time, there was not even a legal definition of Human trafficking. Right. Because legally you have the international definition of trafficking that is found in the Palermo protocol, which is 2000. And the trafficking Victims Protection act that also finally decided that human trafficking was a crime was also enacted in 2000. So the concept of human trafficking legally is a relatively new one. And yes, there were always battles because there's always been this force to try to commercialize violence against women, to normalize violence against women. And I say women, and obviously there are trans women and trans girls who are also acutely vulnerable and overrepresented in the sex trade being purchased by the. By the same men. Right. It's just men with different sexual fantasies. Right. But I don't. I don't. I've never seen it this vitriolic. And it comes mostly from the left. And what I don't understand is. And this, when I say it, I mean really pushing toward seeing prostitution as a form of work, seeing the system of prostitution as needing to be legalized or decriminalized. And it's so ahistorical. Right. You and I both have ancestors who were sold on the marketplace. It was because of our foremothers that slavery was able to continue. Right. Because even after the abolition of slavery, black women produce slaves from rapes. And so for us to see that our brothers and sisters and other colleagues not recognizing the link between our history and what is happening now is very, very, very disturbing to me and sad.

[15:14] MELANIE THOMPSON: Yeah.

[15:14] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Why? Why do you think this is happening?

[15:17] MELANIE THOMPSON: You know, honestly, it's funny because a lot of people in our society still think that. That slavery and racism is over, that it doesn't exist anymore, and that we're all big, one, big happy, you know, America's melting pot of things. But the reality is when it comes to black women in the sex trade, black girls in the sex trade, it's right at the crux of racism, Misogyny, patriarchy, capitalism, all of that comes together and what we find all the way back in the ages, as I call it, because, you know, I'm still kind of young. So all the way back in slave times when we had slave masters and we were chattel slavery and we were trafficked and brought across seas on a boat, we saw the way that black people were treated in general. But even more than the black men, black women, and how we were raped and used for whatever it is that they wanted, that only translated to us now. That translates to us now. And in the sex trade, I've seen firsthand how black girls are treated differently than the white girls that are Doing the same thing as me, the same, the same street walking the same dancing in these underground strip clubs, the same ads online. But there's this racism and that idea that one, women altogether are inferior, but two, that black women. There's this. There's this unspoken notion in the sex trade, usually at the hands of sex buyer or the minds of sex buyers that believe that black women deserve to be there. That's where we're supposed to be. If you think back on slavery, we were used to. To be raped and to breed slave masters, children or, or bastard children, whatever have you. And in the sex trade, we still see sex buyers say the black ones are the ones you could beat the most, and the white ones are the ones you pretend to be your girlfriend. The black ones are the ones and excuse my vulgarity, but the black ones are the ones that gets on their knees and has to kneel on rice and sit on carpets and make sure she gets rug burned. And the white girl can go in the back of your car. They're both really messed up and disgusting. But the reality is, even when you think you're at the bottom, there's always a place for black women underneath that, especially in the sex trade. And it's disgusting even. Even to the point where I've seen me and I. And there was a time that I was in the life with a white friend of mine. We were both young, we were both 14, but we both were still in the life. And a cop picked us both up, gave us the proposition. As most police officers do in the sex trade. They say, if you take care of me, I'll take care of you. If you don't want to go to jail, you do this to me. Usually a sexual gratification of some sort. We both do this thing to this man, thinking that we're going to be able to go home. They send me back and they. They take her back to her mom, right back to wherever her house was.

[17:59] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Why?

[17:59] MELANIE THOMPSON: Because of that idea that black girls deserve nothing but being beaten or abuse or any type of trauma. And that stems back all the way, like you were saying, back into slave days when we were still viewed as property, as, as. As capital, as physical property. And now more of a. Of a. Emotional is not the word, but more of a. I guess emotional property. We're still seeing that way. It just looks a little different. And they have different clothes on. And we may not be paying the same taxes, if they were even taxes in the slave times. But regardless, it's this notion that we don't belong and being in prostitution of any race or color is already marginalizing, Right. It puts us down and it's oppressive and it keeps us here. But then in that there's still this hierarchy when it comes to color, when it comes to race, when it comes to who's more inferior, then it becomes a fight between the people that are being exploited because we're all trying to get this equal opportunity at the very margin of what the system of prostitution likes to ride on. So it's really disgusting. We know that racism is definitely its own pandemic in this country. But to see, even within the fight against racism and things of that nature, to still see that. And you know what, let me jump back on this, right? It's either you're treated horribly because you're black in the sex trade or you are fetishized because you're black in the sex trade. And we don't talk about that enough when it comes to sex buyers, plenty of them, for obvious reasons, like to rape us and beat us and leave us with bruises. I've had a sex buyer and I'm not even the darkest skinned black girl that there is, but I've had a sex buyer, a white man, tell me once, I wonder if I pinch you, would you turn purple? And that, you know, a lot of people think that the sex trade is only about intra vaginal sex. A lot of it is about power and control. And when it comes to black girls and black women in the sex trade, that power and control level for the sex buyer just heightens because we are exotic to them. We are not what they're used to seeing. They don't have these in their families. Our hair is different, our skin color is different. You know, our sunburns look different. So to them, it's like this, this jewel that they just found that's so unbeknownst to them that they want to keep it for themselves and they throw money in our faces. Well, I'll pay extra if you bark like a dog or do this, right? So it's really interesting to see how racism has played this major, how it's really transferred from slavery into modern times and seeing what that looks like for us that are in the life.

[20:37] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Yeah. And I mean, the UN has established that human trafficking is a very gendered crime. Like most people who are trafficked for labor are men and boys, and most people who are trafficked for sexual exploitation are women and girls. So overall, 71% of detected trafficking victims for both sex and labor are women and girls. And 94% of detected sex trafficking victims are women and girls. And so when you just look at that, I always say if a Martian came down and he knew nothing about trafficking and he knew nothing about the sex trade, and you just explained to this Martian person like who's getting bought and who's doing the buying. And race aside, which we know this X rate is highly racialized, but race aside, if you just look at the sex and gender component of it, on one side you've got 95, probably globally, 99% women and girls. And here in the U.S. i would say the remaining percentages are trans women and trans youth. And then on the other side you've got 99.9% of the sex buyers are men. So what's wrong with this picture to start with? And why? I mean, we're not the only ones who see it, obviously, but why is it that now mainstream media and so many, you know, progressive groups who do amazing work cannot are totally blind to these facts?

[22:18] MELANIE THOMPSON: I don't even, I couldn't tell you, I couldn't tell you why now it's such a hot topic. I can't tell you why they don't see it. I just know the factors that contributed to that, like the media, like misogyny. And that goes, that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years of how women have been treated and how girls have been treated from prehistoric ages. If you look at, if you look at it from a biblical perspective, how women are supposed to obey. If you look at it from a historical perspective, women are weaker than men, quote, unquote weaker. It's all about the physicalities. The patriarchy deemed women inferior from God knows how many years before me. So that just translated over and now because, and I, and I always say, this is my personal opinion, I think that our society has developed this if you can't beat them, join them mentality. So because women have been deemed inferior all these hundreds of centuries, and because the patriarchy, even to today still shows and proves superior, and still as much as they try to make spaces and things inclusive, still keep women at, at a margin, I think that we, and we, not you and I, but we as a society have, have adopted, well, you know what, let's make the best of what we have. Which is why, and when I think about that in relation to the sex trade and prostitution, I think there's this idea, I know, and I, and I say this often when you're in the life, it is so brutal and gruesome and disgusting and all types of different things. That you have to literally tell yourself that you are in control and you are in power. So as somebody that's in the life, you have to train your brain to pretend like you're the one calling the shots. And I think that when you think about it like that, it relates back to what I'm saying about this. Us as a society, we are not winning so far. We have not successfully over overthrown the patriarchy. We're still inferior to them. So because of that, we say, well, you know what? Let's claim back our power. And because our society is so gendered and is so racialized because of that, it's. It's predominantly us women who are like, well, what's the one thing that we have power over that other people, the patriarchy doesn't? Now, granted, men and boys are trafficked. I'm not going to negate that. But the majority are women and girls and trans women and trans youth. And because of that, we say, well, no, we can, we can fight. And that's why there's this big issue in. In not just feminism, but with a lot of feminists on the issue of prostitution, because they're fighting over the little things that we have that we can call ours, that we can have in power. When you compare that to the patriarchy, we're still inferior. But the problem is because we don't. We haven't reached that. That status yet. We haven't reached that playing field where the men are. We take the things that belong to us. Our vaginas, our periods, our menstruals, you know, childbearing and all these different things. We take those things and start to make controversies and debates and divides over that, because those are the things that we can control. Now, that's my personal opinion. It's not proven by science, but it makes sense, because why else are we fighting? I just passed. I just came back home before. Before I logged on to this interview. And there's a strip club two blocks away from my house. It is one of the few left in New York state that are 18 and over to get in. There's no alcohol served there. And they're open at lunchtime now. And they make it very known that they are now open at lunch and on as soon as you pass it, it's a big purple sign that says girls, girls, girls. Why do I not see the same saying boys, boys, boys. There's a reason for that. There's this issue of this gender lens in our society. There's always been this idea that vaginas are to be capitalized. There's always been this idea that a woman's body is supposed to belong to man. And because. And that again, both biblically and scientifically. So because of that in our society and because we have yet to overthrow this patriarchy, we're still at this place where everybody wants to make women's issues a hot topic, because we're not making the men's issues a hot topic because they're the ones in power. So the men said, no, let's not talk about our tax brackets. Let's not talk about our income. Let's talk about their breasts. Let's do that because we can control that. So that's. I think, to me, that's where the two come together. I could be very off, but I feel like in my heart, that's what it is.

[26:43] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Yeah. No, no, I mean, you. You kind of summed it up. But we're. We're fighting, right? We're fighting against this. Sometimes it feels like it's a tidal wave over our heads. But, you know, we believe that the people are with us. We've got, if you follow the money, you know, who's behind all of this noise and cultural narrative and political force behind the dehumanization and commodification of human beings, especially women of color. But we're also fighting for it. Right. And so you want to talk about what we're doing now in New York?

[27:25] MELANIE THOMPSON: Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are advocating for a bill. I do not know the bill number off the top of my head, but I will provide that eventually. And I call it the equality model. Legally, it is called the Help Me.

[27:41] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Out, Taina, New York Sex Trade Survivors justice and Equality Act.

[27:46] MELANIE THOMPSON: It's a mouthful. And what the equality seeks to do is partially decriminalize the sex trade. So right now, for those who may not know, there's a huge debate, specifically in New York, on whether or not we should fully decriminalize prostitution Constitution or leave it criminalized, as is everybody that. That has an opinion on this bill and on this issue, all agree that full criminalization is not the answer. That is what we currently have enacted in New York state, where all parties that are caught doing anything related to prostitution get a criminal, get a criminal record, go to jail, get arrested. We recognize that for many people who are exploited in the sex trade, criminalizing them for their exploitation is not the answer. So now a lot of people or a group of people have tried to say, well, the alternative to that is the exact opposite, which is fully decriminalizing the sex trade and prostitution. Now, a lot of people have jumped on that narrative and said that that must be the best way, because what full decriminalization does is decriminalize the person who's exploited in the sex trade. And when people hear that, they automatically think this is the, this is the right way. We need to not make people that are vulnerable or people that are in the life criminals. The problem with full decriminalization is that in addition to fully decriminalizing the one exploited, it is also decriminalizing the people who perpetuate it. So sex buyers and pimps at the end of all of this get no penalties and at the very most, a slap on the wrist to probably, so you know, myself, other survivors, colleagues of mine, we said, well, that's not the right way either, because if you take, you can take me out of the situation, but if you also decriminalize pimps and sex buyers and leave them out on the street, it's just going to continue to happen, just with no penalties. So we came together and we said, well, what's the right way? The right way is to take us that were vulnerable in the first place out of that situation. Do not give us jail time, and instead refer us to services that we need to reverse what made us susceptible to prostitution in the first place. So mental health services, housing, all types of different things, victim services, whatever have you, while simultaneously keeping the penalties that we already have in place for those who perpetuate it. So pimps, traffickers, sex buyers, those individuals would keep, would still have the same penalties that we have in place now under full criminalization for them. So that's why we call it the equality model and the partial decriminalization model. What I love about this model the most is that it focuses on aftercare. So not only does it take us out of the situation and say, you're not the criminal, not only does it keep the penalties in place for those who want to continue to exploit people in the sex trade, but it also says, okay, now that you're out, what do you need so that you don't go back? This is the only one of the three proposed legislature or the three legislations that we have, this is the only one that focuses on that. So, yeah, full decriminalization sounds nice, but if you can take the person off the street, but then where do they go after that? You didn't, you didn't refer them to a job, you gave them no vocational training, you didn't teach them that they need to go to mental health services. You didn't refer them to a therapist, any of that. So nine times out of 10, that person that was removed is going to go right back to what they know and that's being in prostitution. But with the equality model, this puts an emphasis on our well being. The people who are exploited, the people that come from poverty, the people that have a lack of resources. And because of that, I don't see how there is any other way that is considered. I am biased, I am a survivor. So for me it's always going to sound like the best way. But in reality that's what we need. Nobody wakes up and says prostitution is my dream job. You get into it because you were either exposed to it or you had a need. And I want to say less than 2% of the world is in it because they were truly just curious. But that doesn't represent the majority of us. The majority of us come from poverty, we're black and brown, we're marginalized, we don't have money to eat, we don't have a place to stay, we're kicked out because of our sexual orientation, we're undocumented, and so on and so forth. So if we can reverse what made us vulnerable in the first place, which I think it starts to me with instilling the equality model, focusing on, for lack of a better word, rehabilitating us who were exploited in the sex trade and working on trying to build a better person and therefore a brighter future.

[32:13] TAINA BIEN-AIME: And it's a model that's been proven to work in a number of countries around the world. It started in Sweden in 1999 and seven other countries have followed. And you know, we always say if one woman has a dollar bill on her body, every woman has a dollar bill on her body. And that's why it's called the equality model, because if you're sold on the market like any other goods, then never going to be deemed as a full human being, regardless of you being in prostitution or not. You know, that would be for any female, walking, working, trying to enjoy life. So we only have a few minutes left. I just wanted to go back maybe to your childhood. What were your dreams when you were a little girl before you turned 12 and your life went upside down?

[33:10] MELANIE THOMPSON: I always thought that I was going to be a hip hop dance teacher. I was very set on being a choreographer. I looked up all these dance schools and then I Remember auditioning for LaGuardia High School of Arts, which is like a very known performing arts High school here in New York, and I was rejected because ballet is not hip hop. So I remember feeling really discouraged, and I turned to poetry, and I started writing a lot because in these detention facilities, you need to talk to somebody. And social workers was not who I wanted to speak to. So I ended up writing a lot of my journal. And then I started making poems. And then I realized, like, these are good poems. I like these. So I started doing that. So then I was like, maybe I can be a writer. Then I was like, I don't know if I can type that long. So here I am now doing advocacy, and really, this is. I feel like this is where I belong. I don't see myself ever leaving as an advocate and going to something menial or any of that. I feel like my heart and my passion is here, trying to make sure that my daughters and my future grandkids don't have to go through this.

[34:18] TAINA BIEN-AIME: And also, your siblings, right? You have a lot of siblings, including sisters who are younger than you, and I know you're worried about them as well. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't know if she's outside of the danger zone, but. And you're still a beautiful writer, and you could be both a writer and an advocate at the same time.

[34:38] MELANIE THOMPSON: I definitely plan to do that, hopefully. Yeah.

[34:41] TAINA BIEN-AIME: So do you. We have to have hope, right? We wouldn't be doing this unless we had absolute faith that regardless of where the pendulum swings, that, you know, it'll swing the right way. How do you think we can invite more people to join us in this movement?

[35:03] MELANIE THOMPSON: Really, it's just about education and spreading awareness. But talking to people one on one, talking to people in the media or people who have access to, you know, TV and, like, documentaries and cameras, spread, having these conversations at your dinner table, spreading these into schools, and just any way that we can just get people educated. Because what I'm from, what I'm finding, a lot of people don't even know that this is going on. And for those that do, they don't know all sides of the story. So I think that if we can just get people in a room and hear from people like me and hear from any other person who has lived experience, then I really think that I have hope in my heart that the majority of people will understand what's right and wrong in this particular situation. But it's a step forward, and I don't think that it might happen in my lifetime. I think it might be after I pass and maybe in the next generation. It's hard to undo 400 plus years of some type of oppression. But while I'm here, I want my legacy to be that I fought the entire way through. And that's what I and you and all of us in our team intend to do.

[36:11] TAINA BIEN-AIME: Well, I'm so, so proud and humbled and honored to be walking this path with you and I do hope that at least in lifetime will see some level of equality for women in particular especially for women of color. It's a very, very long road. But you know, we're part, it's part of the long haul game, right? And we stand on the shoulders of so many brave women from Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman on down. And so we know that we're just small cogs in a very, very big wheel. But I'm so proud to be your friend and your mentor if I dare say that. And it's just such an honor to know you.

[37:00] MELANIE THOMPSON: Well, likewise. Thank you.