Jacob Trawoly appears in court with black eyes Romanian was sold into sex ring - pic posed by model
A man who admitted his role in a sex slavery ring turned up in court with two black eyes, after being attacked by what a judge called a “sinister force”.
Jacob Trawoly admitted being involved with Romanian sex traffickers who forced a teenage student to have sex with a string of men in a Sligo hotel, after luring her to Ireland with the promise of a job.
This week he arrived for a sentence hearing at Sligo Circuit Court looking battered and bruised.
Trawoly, with an address at Edgewood Lawns, Blanchardstown, Dublin, told Judge Anthony Hunt he had been beaten up two days earlier.
Trawoly had admitted to organising prostitution in room 4120 at Sligo’s Clarion Hotel.
He told the judge he had suffered facial injuries and injuries to both legs and that he had been getting intimidating phone calls since last October.
The Romanian, who has been in Ireland since 2007, said the messages were still on his phone. They warned him to “think about his family”.
The judge instructed Trawoly to immediately provide gardai with details of the attack on him and to hand over the phone to allow them trace the intimidating calls.
Judge Hunt said: “There is a sinister force behind what happened here. There is no doubt about that. There is at least one Mr Big behind this.”
The trafficked woman, who was 19 at the time, was told she owed money for her travel to Ireland from her native Romania and had to work as a prostitute to pay off the debt.
The woman did not get any of the cash she earned from having sex with men while she stayed at a Sligo hotel, according to her evidence.
She was rescued from sex slavery after hotel staff became suspicious and tipped off gardaí, who arrested Trawoly in June 2011.
Another Romanian national, Ovidiu Pop, who lives in Dublin and had originally collected the woman from Dublin Airport, was acquitted of being involved.
During the hearings at Sligo Circuit Court, it emerged the woman had been advertised as an escort on a well-known website. It is the latest case to link sex-trafficking with the website set up by convicted Irish pimp Peter McCormick.
The woman said during Pop’s trial that she had arrived in Dublin in June 2011 after being offered work as a nightclub dancer in Dublin. “I needed money to pay for school and stuff,” she explained.
She was driven to Sligo by Trawoly, who she said told her “there was much more than dancing to it”.
Judge Hunt praised the work done by the gardai and the Ruhama organisation with the young woman.
He said she had graduated to teach English, was now engaged to be married and was moving to America.
