The scientist doesn’t remember much about her—tall, black hair, dark miniskirt. They picked a place that wasn’t much to remember either, a chain hotel outside Long Island’s Garden City. Later, the authorities claimed the suggestive ad in the escorts section of Backpage.com made it exceptionally clear why he had called the number. But the scientist insists all he ever wanted was a massage, which he said was the only thing he asked for when he arrived at her hotel room. “My back really hurts,” he recalled telling her. They settled on the price: $100. “Works for me if it works for you,” he said.

Moments later, the cops burst in to arrest him, and he spent the rest of the night in jail. His lawyer didn’t expect the case would amount to much. The scientist had suspected the same: On top of being a researcher, he had a law degree, too. But all those credentials would just add to the coming ignominy.

The name of the crackdown suggested a cheeky tabloid headline: Operation Flush the Johns. The other news hook was its sheer scale: 104 men arrested for trying to buy sex through the sting. At a press conference in June 2013, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice and Police Commissioner Thomas Dale unveiled the arrests with great fanfare, arraying the mug shots of all the accused men on a big poster board propped up next to the podium.

How could any self-respecting tabloid resist? “Heeeere’s the ‘Johnnies’!” screamed the New York Post: “104 Horndogs Exposed in Prostitution Sting’s Wall of Shame.” Their names and faces made the U.K.’s Daily Mail. ABC News’s New York affiliate and The Huffington Post turned the 104 photos of the men into online slide shows, leaving out the disclaimer that officials had put in small letters at the bottom of the original image: “All are presumed innocent until proven guilty.” As the articles spread online, they begat more stories and links. All of it now swamps the search results for the names of many of the men arrested, regardless of whether they were ultimately convicted.

Rice, who was elected in 2014 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat, says she launched the campaign to save women from the abuses of sex trafficking and achieve “gender fairness” by arresting their male clientele. Officials appear to have designed Flush the Johns to maximize the potential for public attention—and to exploit men’s fear of being found out, not just by the police but also by their own families. “You’re going to be caught, and your mug shot could end up right like these men,” Rice warned during the press conference.