In a deeply troubling story, a Chinese woman who was brought over to America from her native country on the pretext of a better life was treated like a slave, according to prosecutors.
The Minnesota woman responsible for bringing and treating the Chinese woman as a slave now has a string of felony charges stacked against her , including labor trafficking, false imprisonment, second- and third-degree assault and unlawfully taking another person’s passport, according to CBS.
By all accounts, the case of the Chinese woman appears like a tragedy averted because of some swift action on the part of law enforcement officials and prosecutors who are now demanding that Huang be handed a hefty prison sentence for making a modern slave out of her victim.
Prosecutors: Woman brought to US as nanny treated like slave https://t.co/pHhpTH9Dr1 pic.twitter.com/Ey9NLjrDUX
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 17, 2016
This is what happened.
The victim, whose identity has not been released, arrived on a visa in the United States in March early this year. Lee Huang, the 35-year-old Minnesota woman who brought the Chinese woman over from her native country and promised her a well-paying job as a nanny, turned out to be a malevolent, sadistic employer.
Before she knew it, the Chinese woman was beaten, starved, and made to work 18 hours a day. She cooked, cleaned the house, and took care of the children. Despite this, she was never paid the salary she was promised initially by Huang and was forced never to leave the house.
Working as a modern-day slave who could not even get out of the house, let alone devise a way to get back to China, the victim toiled under Huang. The Minnesota woman kept brutalizing the Chinese woman, beating her in front of the children.
During the more than three months she spent in Minnesota, the Chinese woman was fed a rationed diet of crackers and lost more than 40 pounds, according to the prosecutors.
At one point, the victim somehow mustered the strength to tell Huang that she wanted to get back to China. But Huang, who had no intentions of treating her victim any other way, seized her passport and cautioned her against voicing such wishes.
The Chinese woman told prosecutors that she was beaten so badly by Huang that she could not even manage to stand up straight.
Then, an incident took place which, in retrospect, would become the Chinese woman’s key to liberation. One day after the victim accidentally spilled food on the counter, Huang grabbed the woman’s hair and bashed her head into the table as well as other hard objects, reports the Woodbury Patch .
Huang then came at her with a knife , vowing to kill her if she made any more mistakes.
Woodbury Woman Charged in ‘Slavery’ of Nanny https://t.co/GI8lOonF50
— Woodbury Patch (@WoodburyPatch) July 16, 2016
Although severely disoriented, she somehow managed to flee away in the dead of the night. According to Fox News , the Chinese woman was found wandering in the street, her eyes blackened. When she was asked where she was headed to, she told law enforcement officials that she was trying to find the way to the airport so that she could flee the country and get back with her family in Shanghai, China.
Seeing that she was acutely underweight, the officers took her to a hospital for a medical check-up, where doctors told them that the Chinese woman had many broken ribs, a broken sternum, and numerous bruises on her body. Gradually, she managed to narrate her tale to the officers, who then got hold of Huang and put her behind bars.
Prosecutors later said that Huang had held the woman in a state of “slavery or indentured servitude” for a period of more than three months, with Washington County prosecutor Pete Orput saying that the nanny was in an appalling condition when she was found on the street.
“Human labor trafficking is a crime that no one can believe exists in our community. However, it is here, it is being committed by some of our citizens, and it amounts to nothing less than slavery in the 21st century.”
The prosecutors are confident that Lee Huang will spend a long time behind bars because of her inhuman treatment of the Chinese woman.
[Image via Washington County Attorney’s Office]
