Jennifer Kempton, a former sex slave who founded a tattoo-removal organisation to help other trafficking victims, has died of a suspected drug overdose in Ohio.
Tributes have been paid to the 35-year-old mother of four, who was described by her former boss Deborah Quinci as “a strong, brilliant woman who loved all the way and gave herself to others all the way”.
“When we help others, in a lot of ways it’s to help ourselves, and Jennifer was a giver – she knew what it meant to be a survivor and it came easily to her to help other survivors,” said Quinci, who employed Kempton at Freedom a la Cart, a catering kitchen that employs sex-trafficking survivors.
“Helping others made her so happy. Every time she helped women get their tattoos changed, she stayed with them through the process, she comforted them. She knew what it meant to have your body branded.
“But sometimes helping others came at a cost of not taking care of herself. She had a lot of demons: she couldn’t sleep at night, she had nightmares, and she was trying to escape from her own hell.”
Kempton, from Columbus, Ohio, survived child abuse, street prostitution and drug addiction. She was also “branded” by pimps to denote their “ownership” over her. But after 18 months in rehab Kempton turned her life around, establishing Survivor’s Ink, a charity providing scholarships that enabled fellow survivors to have such tattoos covered up or removed.
Her charity thrust her into the spotlight, and Kempton quickly became a familiar figure at anti-trafficking conferences, where she was heralded for her bravery and eloquence.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2014, Kempton described how she freed herself from her past by removing the tattoos on her neck, groin and chest that read “Property of Salem” and “King Munch”, the dope gangs and pimps who sold her from boarded-up houses in poor Columbus suburbs.
“Those tattoos to me meant betrayal, because I went from thinking I was in the first loving relationship of my life with a guy who treated me like a queen, to becoming an addict and being sold by him to supply his drug habit,” she said.
“And then he sold me again for financial gain to a known gang that put me on the streets and took me to the darkest point in my life.
“After enduring this, being raped and beaten and abused, and after getting clean of my addiction, every time I took a shower or tried to look at my body I was reminded of the violence and exploitation I’d suffered. I was so grateful to be alive, but having to look at those scars, seeing those names on your body every day, just puts you in a state of depression. You begin to wonder whether you’ll ever be anything but the person those tattoos say you are.”
Theresa Flores, a friend who sat on the National Survivor Network with Kempton, described her as a “passionate woman who struggled with her past”.
“She reached out to women on the streets, women who were addicted and tattooed, and she started this amazing organisation that helped them get those tattoos covered up or changed to something beautiful, to rescue them from the situation they were in,” said Flores.
“But surviving human trafficking is really, really tough, and Jennifer, like the rest of us, struggled with it. She was clean for so many years, and then she lost custody of her daughter, and I think that’s what really devastated her. That’s enough to break any woman, any mother.”
Kempton long argued for greater opportunities for trafficking victims, and told a Trust Conference earlier this year that just being rescued wasn’t good enough: survivors needed opportunities to move forward in life, otherwise there was nothing to work towards.
“Once we escape, there is a whole new hell,” Kempton told the anti-slavery and trafficking event.
“You can rescue us all you want, but what we need is opportunity. We want jobs, we want education, we want choices, we want our children back. There needs to be more startup money for survivors who want to start up their own businesses.”
Kempton’s dream, said Quinci, was to have Survivor’s Ink become an international charity that could help women all over the world. Requests for branding removal had started pouring in from countries other than the US, and last year she was able to help a woman in the UK whose mother had carved the word “whore” into her leg when she was a child and then sold her.
Andrea, a former trafficking victim and Kempton’s first Survivor’s Ink client, said her new, reworked tattoo had changed how she saw herself.
“Every time I looked at that [old] tattoo it took me back there to a lot of bad memories,” she said, referring to a branding of her “owner’s” initials on her chest.
Thanks to Kempton, Andrea now has a flower with her daughter’s name inside. “I’m just so in love with my daughter – she means so much to me. I got a flower because I can see I can blossom into something beautiful now I’ve left that behind.”
- A fundraising page has been set up to raise money for Jennifer Kempton’s funeral costs.