Dear John Oliver,
You once said, “When you’re dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure you know what you’re doing.” Unfortunately, when it comes to your recent “Last Week Tonight” segment on the sex trade — one in which you seemed to welcome turning the Big Apple into a Red Light District — you missed this mark by a mile.
Most of the time, we’re big fans of your show, because you typically look out for the people over the powerful, the wealthy and well-connected. So how can you be a New Yorker who lives and works here, yet who’d happily watch as irresponsible decriminalization or legalization of the sex trade did irreparable harm to the city’s most vulnerable?
We wholeheartedly agree with you that we should not be criminalizing those sold in the sex trade. At World Without Exploitation — the nation’s largest anti-trafficking coalition — we work with hundreds of women and men who’ve survived abuse, rape and immense trauma at the hands of the people who bought them and the snakes who pimped them.
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