My Parents Labeled Me a Price Tag, So I Sold Myself to Traffickers

The Ashford family subjected their biological daughter, Stella, to an “elite education”—where everything at home came at a price. A glass of juice cost 50 cents; a shower cost $1. On her birthday, Stella pulled out the $1 she’d earned from selling bottles to buy a cake, but her mother refused. Instead, she accidentally saw her father transfer $10,000 to his adopted daughter, Evelyn, as pocket money. It turned out that the strict pricing policy applied only to her, their biological daughter. Ten-year-old Stella walked out of the house alone and got into a car with a human trafficker, believing she was heading to a “paradise where food and sleep were free,” but little did she know she was actually being taken to a sinister underground clinic.