cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37206503
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37204227
“They Told Me: Deripaska Is the Client. Don’t You Want To Sell Your Virginity?” - How a network for selling sex with teenagers was built in Russia - and which of its influential clients managed to escape responsibility
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The meeting between the schoolgirl and the man she would later call Oleg Deripaska was organized by five people: Svetlana Titova, Alexandra Shantyreva, Olga Goncharova, Maksim Nekozyrev, and Anastasia Yakusheva. They became the defendants in the criminal case opened in 2019 in Priozersk, Leningrad Oblast.
The network for recruiting girls operated for at least two years (2018–2019) under the cover of regional, often children’s, beauty contests, modeling agencies, dating sites, and themed groups on messengers.
According to detectives from the Investigative Committee, one of the key roles in this network was played by 51-year-old Svetlana Titova. She grew up in Mordovia, where in the 2000s she founded her first modeling agency, Lel. Later, Titova organized several local beauty contests: Miss Carnival, Miss Bust, and Beauty of Mordovia. In 2017, their participants said that Svetlana recruited them into her agency and promised good income.
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“The men knew I was 17, they asked, as well as where I studied, what city I was from,” Irina recalled during her interrogation about that trip to Moscow. “I answered that I was 17, studying to be an economist, that I was a model, and so on.”
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“They were specifically looking for us. I was found at age 15. They wrote to me on VK under some fake photo,” recalls Alena Yaroshenko, another underage girl from the case files. She is now 23. In 2021, she was summoned for questioning in the case against Titova and Nekozyrev, but she refused to testify. Four years later, Alena agreed to speak to journalists.
“They told me the client was Deripaska and asked if I wanted to sell my virginity. Apparently, I had the kind of face Oleg was willing to pay for. He was supposed to come to an economic forum in Petersburg. At first, I agreed, because I had remembered him since childhood from the story with the pen, and I liked him. But then I imagined what my mother would do to me,” she said.
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