Survivor, sex-trafficking activist, author of the autobiography The Road of Lost Innocence, and one of Time’s Most Influential People in 2009; the once-illustrious Somaly Mam claimed to have rescued thousands of women and children from sex trafficking.

On May 28th, 2014, Mam resigned from The Somaly Mam Foundation after an exposé by Newsweek accused her of deception.

“Somaly Mam saved countless girls in Cambodia,”

writes Newsweek’s Gerhard Jörén.

“Does it matter if her campaign is built on a web of lies?”

Once boasting over 400,000 followers on Twitter, Mam is now down to just under 3,000. In the modern world, this is a pretty obvious measure of how much public opinion has changed about Mam since the Newsweek article.

Mam made sex trafficking victims into stars, sharing their harrowing stories in graphic detail as a way to get publicity for her organization.

Jörén investigated these stories and found many inconsistencies and embellishments.

One of Mam’s biggest “stars” was Meas Ratha, who described being sold to a brothel on French television in 1998. Ratha later admitted that she had never been trafficked, and was sent to AFESIP due to her parents being unable to care for their seven children.

Long Pross, who was said to have had her eye cut out by an angry pimp, actually had the eye removed due to a tumor. Multiple eyewitnesses also allege that there are falsehoods in Mam’s autobiography.