On February 8, 2026, the advocacy group World Without Exploitation launched a 40-second public service announcement during the Super Bowl featuring Jeffrey Epstein survivors demanding the full release of federal files related to Epstein’s sex trafficking network.
The Epstein survivors held up pictures of themselves when they were initially abused by Epstein as minors or young women. “After years of being kept apart, we’re standing together,” they said.
The background was pitch black, and the music was haunting.
The PSA ended with the following: “Stand With Us. Tell Attorney General Pam Bondi IT’S TIME FOR THE TRUTH.”
As a longtime advocate for justice in the Epstein case, the PSA felt like a supernova. I felt an eruption of gratitude. But as my elation faded, I wondered how World Without Exploitation could afford the PSA.
The co-founders of World Without Exploitation, Lauren Hersh and Rachel Foster, have certainly generated remarkable fanfare. In fact, they’ve even been hailed as two of Time magazine’s most influential 100 people of 2026.
I’m the director of Epstein Justice, a 501(c)(3), and our raison d’être is an independent congressional commission to investigate the Epstein case. Like many nonprofits, we struggle to find funders. So, I’ve marveled at the success of World Without Exploitation, which was founded in 2016. By 2019, the Atlanta Jewish Times reports, World Without Exploitation was the “umbrella group of 140 organizations.” The landing page of its website states: “Our 175+ member groups are working to end exploitation.”
But I started to hear whispers about World Without Exploitation that were less than stellar. Let’s dive in.
The Strange Case of World Without Exploitation Co-Founder Lauren Hersh
On paper, Hersh would appear to have impeccable credentials to be the director of an organization dedicated to ending exploitation. She joined the Brooklyn (King’s County) District Attorney’s office in 2004 after graduating from Brooklyn Law School, then transitioned to the domestic violence bureau before joining the rackets division, where she ultimately became “chief” of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Sex Trafficking Unit. Yet Hersh’s last case as a Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney would be marred by apparent prosecutorial misconduct. The case involved the alleged trafficking and rape of a young woman by four men.
The Backstory of Hersh’s Resignation from the Brooklyn DA’s Office
On March 31, 2010, a 22-year-old Brooklyn woman told NYPD officers that Damien Crooks took her to a party, where she was raped and beaten. She said that she managed to escape her abusers and phoned her best friend. Her friend took her to the police, and she was then sent to the hospital. A June 2, 2012, New York Times article reports that at 6:30 AM the following morning, the young woman talked to an NYPD detective and filed a formal statement, discussing rapes, beatings, and Crooks pimping her out. She said she was “afraid for her life.”
By 10:45 AM, however, she was interviewed again by a second NYPD detective and recanted her prior statements. She informed the detective interviewing her that she was a prostitute, was not forcibly raped by Crooks, and had had consensual intercourse with him several times over the preceding years. The detective wrote that the accuser promulgated her allegations, because one of the men at the party had sex with her, and he hadn’t worn a condom and hit her. The following day, the NYPD terminated its investigation – a turn of events that would prove integral to Herch’s prosecutorial problems.
But the woman’s allegations were not without foundation. She lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has been a melting pot for both Orthodox Jews and African Americans. Crooks lived in the house directly behind her family’s house.
The young woman said she’d been molested by a family member. She also said her teenage nightmare continued when her brother asked her to purchase marijuana from Jawara Brockett who lived nearby. As her brother waited for her downstairs, she said she was forced to have oral, anal and vaginal sex with three men that included purported perpetrator Jawara Brockett.
The alleged victim claimed that she quickly became immersed in a double life. Women at a neighborhood hair salon remembered a teenager regularly ducking into the salon’s bathroom, where she disrobed from long dresses and slipped into clothes suited for working the streets.
There is a picture of the alleged victim donning a crimson dress – surrounded by black men, including one she named as a perpetrator. Like the men, her hand is rounded into a “C,” which law enforcement asserts is a signal for Crips. One of her alleged perpetrators, Jamali Brockett, would ultimately be sentenced to 24 years in prison on unrelated federal charges for sex trafficking women and minors.
Police records reveal that when she was 13 and 14 years old, in 2004 and 2004, she phoned the police at least four times to report assaults and provided her address. The NYPD said that one arrest was made because of the alleged victim’s complaints in 2003, but the responding commanders didn’t remember meeting her father, who claimed that the police never visited their family home. Her best friend also said that she approached police officers on the street as a teenager, but they had a callous attitude: “You put yourself in this situation, you get yourself out.”
In September of 2004, the alleged victim said a tipping point occurred: a “client” stabbed her. By the time she made it home at 3:00 AM her sweatshirt was drenched in blood. Her panic-stricken parents met her at the front door – and would eventually place their teenage daughter in a psychiatric hospital. She was discharged in 2006, finished high school, and enrolled in John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The young woman maintained that Crooks’ threats against her sister drove her back into a life of prostitution.
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