At 19 years old, she was kidnapped, raped, and transported from state to state for sale as a prostitute.
On Thursday, the Boston-area woman, now 22, faced her assailant in federal court in Boston, calling Darrell Graham a ruthless predator who forced her into selling herself for a fee.
“He took my innocence,” said the woman, who was homeless, trying to work at beauty salons in Greater Boston.
The Globe does not identify the victims of sexual abuse without their consent.
Graham, a 52-year-old, lifelong criminal, was sentenced to 12½ years in prison Thursday and was ordered to undergo sex offender treatment and register as a sex offender after his release. US District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton said it was his duty to hand out the sentence on behalf of victims like the one who stood before him.
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“Most victims don’t have the courage that young woman had in standing up in front of a courtroom full of people to describe the crimes you did to her. . . . She did have that courage,” Gorton told Graham.
Graham, of Hyde Park, who went by the street name Diamond, was convicted of three counts of interstate transportation for the purposes of prostitution. Prosecutors recommended he serve 15 years.
His conviction was among the increasing prosecutions of sex trafficking crimes in federal court, where sentences are often harsher than in state courts. The case, investigated by the FBI, began after the woman first told authorities in 2011 that Graham had brought her to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire to engage in sex for payment.
They had met while she was walking in Cambridge. He gave her his phone number, saying he was a talent scout. He later plied her with alcohol and marijuana. He took her identification cards.
And when she tried to leave, he threatened her, saying he had people on the street who would find her wherever she went, according to court records.
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Graham’s attorney, Daniel J. Cloherty, argued for a lesser sentence, telling Gorton that his client and the woman had a “complex relationship,” that she had agreed at the time to engage in prostitution.
But Assistant US Attorney S. Theodore Merritt argued that Graham had coerced the woman into the relationship and then threatened her if she left.
“It’s a relationship that’s created by the defendant, who used the tricks and trades of a pimp to create this dependence,” Merritt said.
The woman told Gorton that Graham took advantage of her as a homeless woman on the street, a teenage alcoholic.
“I wasn’t anything before he met me, I wasn’t going to be anything after,” he would tell her, she said, dressed in a business suit, her shoulder-length, blonde hair covering her face.
Graham looked straight ahead.
“By definition, I was never a prostitute,” she said. “I was a victim of human trafficking.”
Milton J. Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@
globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @miltonvalencia.