Recently, Robert Kraft, the 77-year-old owner of the New England Patriots (among other properties), who has a net worth of some $3 billion, was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution (i.e. buying sex) after a raid of a Florida "massage parlor" where imported women were being held captive. He was reportedly caught up in a sweeping police sting operation aimed at cracking down on sex trafficking in the area, having been caught on video receiving "paid acts". The owner and staff were also arrested and more than 100 other patrons were charged as well.
For buying impoverished sex slaves (i.e. basically committing rape), Kraft faces such serious penalties as 100 days of community service and being required to attend a class explaining the harms of prostitution because that's how seriously we take sex trafficking in this country. However, it's surprising that he, as a customer, was charged with anything at all. As Paul Callan, a legal analyst for CNN, surmised: "Usually the prostitute gets arrested or the person who's running the brothel. So this is an unusual approach, to round up the 'johns' [men who buy prostitutes]. You see it happening periodically in jurisdictions where there's a major prostitution problem and he just got caught in the net." In fact, until the mid-1960s, it was generally illegal to arrest either johns, pimps, or brothel owners at all in the United States, to which end prostitution was far more common before that.
Arresting prostituted women is a common policy in the U.S. that serves to deter survivors from reporting their exploitation. In contrast, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women calls upon lawmakers worldwide to focus on arresting johns and owners and let prostituted women report without penalty, and also for exploiters to face real legal punishments, such as years in prison, for acts that are basically rape.
President Trump, reportedly a personal friend of Kraft's, commented that "He's proclaimed his innocence, totally. But I’m surprised to see it.”, whatever that means. Police say that Kraft was caught on video.