Operationally, The League was small, with just a few dozen members. Contra news reports describing it as operating “across the United States,” the group didn’t even operate throughout Washington, let alone around the country-and nowhere in charging documents do police say it did.
Like TRB and TheLoeg, the site was not a profit-making venture. Unlike TRB, there was no component for commentary-KGirlsDelights merely linked out to personal webpages or ads on other review sites, like a Yellow Pages for Korean-American prostitution.
The only detail that could be twisted into such a claim is that on a few occasions, League members traveling out of town asked others to recommend independent sex workers or escort agencies in their destination cities
But most of The League’s several dozen members had little or nothing to do with the maintenance and operation of either KGirlsDelights or The Review Board. Some members served as moderators on TRB, but it’s no more accurate to say that The League as an entity “ran” these websites than it would be to say a kickball team whose members met on Craigslist “run” that classified-ad site now.
Even the police reports confirm that the group’s activities were largely benign. In , after years of undercover posts on TRB, King County Detective Luke Hillman was invited to join The League and first attended an in-person meetup. He would go on to attend four more over the next several months, the last in late . Hillman describes the content of these meetups as including talking about sexual encounters in “graphic” terms but also discussing “the things they would bring” sex workers, “what kind of food” the K-Girls liked, and “when and how much they tipped.”
Hillman’s reports also indicate that many League members shunned in-person meetups because they prized anonymity. The five happy hours he went to were attended by less than a dozen men each, and even they only shared their TRB handles with one another. Police determined their real identities by surveilling the meetups and running members’ license plates.
Members who didn’t attend physical meetings were identified via “personal email accounts seized pursuant to search warrants,” Hillman reported in Certifications for Determination of Probable Cause against them. Some members were also identified by subpoenaing records associated with their IP addresses. Google, Microsoft, Comcast, and other entities were all forced to hand over private user data.
Criminally Patronizing a Website
Private emails and messages between League members, obtained by police and included in court documents, make clear that while these men enthusiastically embraced prostitution, they did not want to be patrons of sex-trafficking victims and believed (with good reason) that the women they visited were freely engaged in the sex trade. Occasionally, one would acknowledge that some particular provider wasn’t thrilled with the job, but even these instances reveal agency on the part of the women.
For instance, a lengthy review from TRB user “Eash” notes that Thai-agency sex worker “Vicky” didn’t seem very engaged or enthusiastic. “She’d worked giving standard massages in Thailand for a while,” posts Eash, “but…she had to support her whole family, and so she erica for a year to do massages with ‘extra’ because the money is so much better.” Eash allegedly asked what she planned to do “when the year is up” and Vicky replied, “I’ll stop, and do something else then.”
Statements from Zitars, the man who ran TRB, indicate that he frowned on too many Asian sex workers advertising there not because he believed they were being trafficked, but because he believed they attracted law-enforcement attention. According to case summary against Zitars, he complained to undercover King County Detective Mike Garske last fall that President Obama and “the feds” keep giving police money to pursue “human trafficking” that winds up being used against prostitution generally. The government wants to paint all these girls as victims, Zitars told Garske, “when we all know that isn’t the case.”