In one episode of Starz’s glossy new docuseries, Magic City: An American Fantasy, a dancer called WifeyBaby describes the legendary strip club as “a gateway for you to be great.” A montage shows her dancing sensually, at one point fanning herself with a wad of cash.
“I honestly feel like I’m closer and closer to my dreams,” she said, turning underneath the club’s neon lights.
Atlanta, long known for its vibrant and unique strip club culture, has more than 20 strip clubs.
But advocates for victims of human trafficking say the city’s many venues can be a gateway to a nightmare: sex trafficking.
Remy, 22, was a teen runaway from Florida when she began working in a southwest Atlanta club at the direction of an older man. At the time, Remy, who asked not to use her real name because of ongoing legal cases, said she considered the man to be like a boyfriend “or somebody that wanted to just protect me while I was working.”
In reality, he was a pimp and knew the owner of a strip club in the area. “He got me in, I didn’t have to have ID, and I started working in the strip club,” Remy told Capital B Atlanta. “I was 16.”
Remy, who grew up in the foster care system, said the pimp knew “that I didn’t have anybody,” which “made him want to control me even more, knowing nobody was going to come looking for me.”
Eventually, working at the strip club “led to other things that I just didn’t think would happen,” she said.
Advocates warn Remy’s story isn’t that unusual in Atlanta.
Glamorizing a dangerous business
Starz’s five-episode docuseries centers on the mystique around Magic City and its 40-year legacy as a tastemaker of Atlanta’s nightlife, and features interviews with Magic City’s founder, Michael Barney Sr. — known as Mr. Magic — his family, and employees — including current and former dancers. It also features commentary from journalists and cultural scholars, who grapple with the tension between what some see as female empowerment and others see as the potential for exploitation.
“I think a place like Magic City is absolutely necessary,” Lynae Vanee Bogues — host of Revolt’s The People’s Brief — said in the series. “I love that women can make bank. I love that Black women in particular can make bank off the fantasies they produce because the economy’s stolen from our bodies for so long.”
Moya Bailey, the feminist scholar who helped lead a protest against rapper Nelly and his infamous “Tip Drill” music video while she was a student at Spelman College in 2004, said, “Two things can be true at the same time.”
“It’s possible to feel empowered and get paid, but it doesn’t mean that the representations don’t still have ramifications,” Bailey said in the docuseries. “What would it look like if empowerment wasn’t also predicated on men’s desire for you? Because it definitely seems to depend on a society that says this is one of the only ways that women are allowed to feel empowered.”
“If I were a trafficker, where the commodity that I’m selling is a human being — for sex — why not go to where inhibitions are already low and coerce someone or convince them that they can make even more money?”
Shea M. Rhodes, co-founder and director of the Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation
The “Tip Drill” controversy embroiled a dancer known by the moniker Whyte Chocolate, who recalls briefly attending Spelman College before she began working at Magic City to provide for her son. Though her quick rise to fame at the strip club led her to become one of the original music video vixens and enabled her to become financially independent, she said that “dancers take risks.”
“We take risks with our health. We take risks with our safety. We take risks with our lives,” she said.
In the Starz docuseries, a dancer recalls the still-unsolved murders of two Magic City dancers — Tarshia “Brown Sugar” McDowell and Tammie “Obsession” Lindley, who were found tortured and killed in an abandoned rental car in 1995. One of the women’s mothers intentionally left her daughter’s casket open.
“She felt like that would scare us from being out there,” Strawberry, a dancer from the club’s heyday, recalls in the docuseries. “But it didn’t affect me — not for me to stop doing what I was doing.”
Officials have not released any evidence that there was a direct connection between their jobs and their deaths.
Shea M. Rhodes, co-founder and director of the Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation at Villanova University, said sex traffickers may go to a strip club for the same reason a heroin dealer might post up outside a methadone clinic.
“If I were a trafficker, where the commodity that I’m selling is a human being — for sex — why not go to where inhibitions are already low and coerce someone or convince them that they can make even more money?” Rhodes said.
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” Rhodes added. “It’s a business model. You want to have people making money for you.”
Capital B Atlanta spoke to Magic City’s attorney Gary Freed and asked him about advocates’ concerns about trafficking in strip clubs.
“Sex trafficking is not a problem at Magic City,” said Freed, who has been the club’s main legal counsel for 25 years.
Freed noted that ACE — the Association of Club Executives, which operates at the national and state level — has trained staff at Magic City and other “reputable clubs” on how to recognize signs of trafficking through its COAST (Club Operators Against Sex Trafficking) program.
“The managers know what to look for,” he said.
Beyond state and local regulations — which include licenses for clubs and their dancers — Freed said it’s in the best interest of the brand to keep would-be traffickers out.
“Magic City is the world’s premier adult hip-hop club. They have no interest in getting involved in any type of degradation of rights of women,” Freed said. “They’re very careful [and] cautious. Their reputation is everything.”
Sex trafficking in Georgia
Sex trafficking is defined as commercial sex acts that involve minors or — in the case of adult victims — force, fraud, or coercion. Atlanta, like other major cities across the U.S., has been cited by the FBI and other national agencies as a major hub for exploitation, with its busy airport, active tourism and easy access to major interstate highways.
Miriam McGee, clinical director at Beloved Atlanta — a nonprofit that helps survivors of sex trafficking rebuild their lives — said there are “many myths and misconceptions” around what constitutes sex trafficking.
“People are just picturing the movie Taken and picturing somebody getting kidnapped and put into a van. Those things do happen,” McGee told Capital B Atlanta. But she cautioned, the reality is often more nuanced, with sex traffickers exploiting vulnerabilities — including poverty, lack of support systems, and drug addiction — in the victims they target.
And when it comes to strip clubs, McGee said, “a lot of people look at it as these are adult women who are making a choice because that’s what they want to do and it pays really well.” But anti-trafficking advocates say strip clubs can facilitate exploitation, with the inherent imbalance of power and lack of agency for dancers.
“We have to understand that strip clubs cater to sexual fantasies of men. They’re [overwhelmingly] run by men, and they’re very gendered in that power dynamic — women are objectified and treated as sex objects.”
Officials at the state and local level have worked to raise awareness of trafficking in Georgia in recent years. In 2019, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced the creation of a statewide Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, which is based in Atlanta but has since expanded to other areas of the state.
At a January press conference on the state’s anti-trafficking efforts, the unit’s chief, Hannah Palmquist, said it had “recovered and assisted nearly 200 victims” and yielded more than 50 criminal convictions. Published reports show defendants faced sentences ranging from a few years to life in prison.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline reported receiving 876 alerts of human trafficking from Georgia last year, with 299 alerts from victims or survivors. Of the nearly 350 cases of trafficking the hotline identified last year, 190 were categorized as sex trafficking; 39 more involved both sex and labor trafficking.
Advocates say it’s those inherent risks that can make strip clubs such a gray area when it comes to sexual abuse and exploitation. McGee said women working in some strip clubs can face physical assault, sexual assault, and verbal abuse from patrons and, in some cases, club management. A stripping job may not start as sex trafficking, but it could “snowball” into it.
“Traffickers are master manipulators. Part of the idea or the crime itself is that manipulation which takes people away from their comfort base or their family.”
Ryan Hilton, assistant special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking unit
“They get recruited for things — OK, now go to a hotel, now go to clients’ homes — they kind of send them out,” McGee said. “A lot of that also happens in the clubs in terms of private dances and VIP [rooms], but it also is another funnel for outside the clubs that women — especially those that are more vulnerable — experience.”
While law enforcement and advocacy organizations maintain statistics around sex trafficking, experts said it can be tough to glean the full scope of the issue because so much of these crimes rely on secrecy and isolation.
“Traffickers are master manipulators,” said Ryan Hilton, assistant special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking unit. “Part of the idea or the crime itself is that manipulation, which takes people away from their comfort base or their family.”
Hilton said the GBI investigates human trafficking cases through a number of ways: through tips and phone calls from the public and advocacy organizations. The GBI also gets requests from agencies around the state — from local police departments to the governor’s office — to look into possible cases.
Police departments in Cobb, Gwinnett and Fulton counties have their own dedicated human trafficking units.
“It’s more of a rare phenomenon that we get an outcry directly from a victim because they are under the control of somebody else who controls not only their movement but their communication,” Hilton added. “Or they’ve been gaslit to the point where they don’t believe they’re a victim.”
Finding a way out
Kasey McClure, a former exotic dancer who founded the nonprofit 4Sarah to help women and girls leave the sex industry, said there can be a sense of safety at “classy, well-established” clubs, where security officers intervene with patrons that get too handsy or fail to pay — but not all strip clubs are the same.
“Not all clubs protect their women,” she said, noting that some clubs are just short-staffed. For dancers without support or resources, “they’re going to seek opportunities to make fast money, and they can easily become prey.”
McClure added: “It could just take one customer coming into that strip club to say, ‘Hey, you can move in with me, and I’ll take care of you.’”
McClure, whose organization was named for her daughter, Sarah — whose impending birth convinced her to permanently leave the sex industry in 2003 — has collaborated with Georgia Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols on the “Unholy Tour,” a grim route of sex-trafficking hotspots, including some nightclubs. While Magic City isn’t an official location on the tour, they do stop at the Greyhound bus depot across the street.
“A lot of the women that we come in contact with, they can’t afford a $400 or $500 airplane ticket, so they will use Greyhound or the Mega Bus as a way to be transported from state to state because it’s a lot cheaper,” McClure said. For runaways or homeless girls, the first thing they might see upon arrival in Atlanta is a strip club.
Remy told Capital B Atlanta that the pimp who who got her the job at a strip club at 16 started forcing her to have sex for money inside the club. But a few months in, he told her there was more money outside the club and began forcing her to have sex at local hotels.
Following an FBI sting at one of those hotels, Remy — at first arrested alongside her pimp — found out she was pregnant. At a safe house for teenage survivors of sex trafficking, Remy began to heal. It was McClure, she said, who “basically nurtured me back to life, to be the person that I am today.”
Through her program, Remy was able to get into an apartment program and pursued legal action against the hotel that turned a blind eye to her daily torture — allowing the teenager to pay for rooms with cash and not checking identification. After winning a significant settlement, Remy bought a house with help from McClure, now a Realtor.
McClure’s program also helped Remy cover the tattoo bearing the name of her abuser. It was a shoddy and dangerous inking that took place in one of those hotels, leaving Remy scarred. She covered it with roses.
Remy, now pregnant with her second child, said she is in a much better place and “trying to follow in [McClure’s] footsteps.” She said she hopes to start her own nonprofit one day to “help other women get off the streets and share their stories.”
For other victims of sex trafficking, “it gives them hope to see where I’m at right now and to tell them that I was where they were at, or even worse,” Remy said. “It pushes them to really keep going and don’t give up.”
If you or someone you know needs help, please contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline immediately. Call (888) 373-7888, text “HELP” or “INFO” to 233733 (BeFree), or visit humantraffickinghotline.org. If you are in immediate danger, please call 911.