MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Police officers responding to the aftermath of a Miami Beach hotel fight found a woman who told them that a man had “brought her from Texas intending to sell her” for sex, police said.
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The accused trafficker in question is now facing five felony charges in South Florida.
Miami Beach police said Michael William Benjamin, 34, of Addison, Texas, was holding the woman against her will at the Sherry Frontenac Oceanfront Hotel on North Beach.
According to an arrest report, officers responded to the hotel, located at 6565 Collins Ave., at around 4:30 a.m. Sunday for a report of a man who was “unconscious and bleeding (and) lying on the floor.”
That man was Benjamin, police said. They said his bloodied, swollen and bruised victim told officers that he was knocked out hitting his head on a dresser as she fought him off during a fight in which he punched and choked her and said he was “going to kill her tonight.”
The report states that the woman initially told officers that the fight with Benjamin, with whom she had been in a three-year relationship, stemmed from “the victim’s inability to pick up women for sexual gratification while they were downstairs at the hotel bar consuming alcohol.”
But, after noticing that their hotel room was full of condoms, lingerie and other “sexual paraphernalia,” police said they questioned her further, suspecting she may be a human trafficking victim.
She admitted she was, the report states. She told officers that Benjamin brought her to Miami Beach to sell her body and said she had “no option” but to have sex for money, it states.
She said he coerced her with alcohol, knowing she has alcohol abuse issues, according to police.
Police said she told detectives “she has been seeing male clients for money for over (one) year in different cities.”
Benjamin, according to police, set up the appointments using an application called “Miami Singles.”
“Next, she stated she was allowed to keep very little cash and (he) forced her to have sexual relations with two clients that very day,” the report states, telling police that the real reason for the fight was “her inability to recruit other girls for prostitution.”
Medics took Benjamin to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and the victim to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.
Benjamin would later be pictured in his Miami-Dade mugshot wearing a hospital gown and a cervical collar.
According to jail records, he was being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on charges of kidnapping, human trafficking, deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution, domestic battery by strangulation and aggravated battery.
A judge, after finding probable cause to charge him, ordered that he remain jailed without bond.