WASHINGTON — Courtney Litvak says she was a junior in a Katy high school, traumatized after she was sexually assaulted by an older boyfriend, when she met the people who groomed her for sex trafficking.

She was taking drugs, in a downward spiral. When her parents took away her phone, her new friends gave her one to use.

“I just thought that was incredibly flattering and that they were serious about helping me,” she said. But the phone was also their key into her life. “It’s emotional and mental access to you … A constant, consistent line of communication to me, to be able to reach me at all times.”

By the time she was 18, Litvak says she was brainwashed.

She walked out of her parents’ house, ran down the street and got in a car with the sex traffickers who would control her life for several months, moving her from Katy to Houston and across the country before she could get free.

Now 21, Litvak is headed to the White House on Friday as the Trump administration touts its efforts to curb human trafficking, something President Donald Trump has long cast as a top priority, though some advocates have questioned his commitment.

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Litvak, who with her mother Kelly now runs a nonprofit, ChildProof America, aimed at helping people like herself, wants her story to be a wake-up call: Sex trafficking isn't just a problem in big cities like Houston, but in suburbs across the nation.

In Texas alone, there were more than 300,000 victims of human trafficking in 2016 — that number includes both sex trafficking and labor trafficking— a University of Texas at Austin study estimated at the time. The same study found there were almost 79,000 youth victims of sex trafficking in the state, costing more than $6 billion a year in law enforcement, criminal prosecutions, social services, and caring for them.

The issue has become an increasing concern for Texas Republicans, who last year passed legislation giving authorities more tools to go after online sex traffickers, increase victims’ access to specially trained nurses, and seal the criminal records of sex trafficking victims. The state has put up billboards to raise awareness of the issue and is training troopers and highway workers to spot it.

“It’s in suburbia,” said U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who has worked with the Litvaks. “We’re seeing this epidemic hit high schools, like Westlake High School in Austin to Katy High School in Katy. Traditionally you would not view these as at-risk schools.”

Litvak says that’s where her journey began, and she’s ringing the alarm bells.

‘People are going through this right now’

"People can’t relate to the life," Litvak said. "But people can relate to what happens before that. People are going through this right now, here in Katy, on a daily basis.”

At 17, Litvak says she was a “wholesome person,” proudly wearing a purity ring her father gave her. But she started dating an older guy, a senior, who she says gave her drugs one night and sexually assaulted her.

“In a matter of months, not even one year, I went from saving myself for marriage in a very safe relationship with someone … to have that taken from me all in one night,” Litvak said.

SPECIAL REPORT: Sold for Sex

Litvak said she blamed herself for the assault, unable to see herself as a victim.

“During this free falling season of my life, I was trying to grab onto anything,” she said. “My moral compass, I would say, was shot.”

Litvak says she quickly developed a new reputation at school, which attracted a new crowd — new friends with easier access to drugs and alcohol. They connected her to people on the outside as well — former students who were working as traffickers.

“They knew exactly what to say to me and what I was looking for and my vulnerabilities,” Litvak said. “They said if you’re really serious about wanting a better life and to get money and independence … we need to introduce you to the higher-up people.”

‘Five hundred dollars for my life’

Litvak’s parents were concerned about her increasingly erratic behavior. They were “taking up my phones left and right,” trying to regain control, she said. So one of the pimps gave her friends at school an old iPhone for her.

Soon she was getting comments on Instagram posts from men she didn’t know. They were often in code — emojis she didn’t understand at the time.

“I thought it was someone showing interest in me as a boyfriend,” Litvak said. “It didn’t cross my mind this was terminology.”

The pimp, meanwhile, was pretending he had romantic interests.

“I was like, ‘This is going to be my boyfriend, they’ll be my person,’” Litvak said. “He will give me a successful future, why do I need school?”

At one point, her parents sent her to a rehab facility out of state. She faked her way through and came back more determined than ever to break away.

“Days after I turned 18, I was gone,” she said.

Though she had never met him face to face, she said, “I’m thinking I’m going to be a girlfriend to this person … this person was saying they love me, I’m saying I love them back.”

Litvak walked out of her house, down the street to the car where he was waiting. But when she got in, there was another man in the car, as well, “very intimidating looking, seems very rough around the edges.” As soon as she got in the car, they asked for her ID, birth certificate and social security card.

“I’m in the car and at that moment, I knew I had lost control,” she said. “The time they invested was to get me in that car.”

They dropped off the man Litvak had been talking to and took her to an apartment complex in Houston where she met her first trafficker, a woman whose real name she said she never learned and who she was taught to fear from the moment she met her. She found out later the man she thought she loved was paid a finders fee of $500.

“Five hundred dollars for my life,” she said. “All that work for $500.”

Training for officers

“These professionals are very good at what they do,” said McCaul, a former federal prosecutor. Litvak’s mother, Kelly, contacted his office while her daughter was being trafficked, hoping he could help.

McCaul has kept in touch with Kelly and Courtney Litvak as he’s pushed federal legislation to combat trafficking, including mandating training for homeland security personnel. McCaul is behind another effort to expand training developed by the Texas Department of Public Safety — which teaches state troopers how to spot trafficking victims — and offer it to federal law enforcement agencies.

In November, McCaul introduced the Litvaks to Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser who has led his administration's anti-trafficking efforts and organized Friday’s summit.

“It was incredibly humbling to meet with Courtney and Kelly Litvak,” Ivanka Trump said. “The scourge of human trafficking does not start at the waters’ edge, it’s affecting people in our own neighborhoods and throughout the United States. This administration is deeply committed to ensuring that Courtney’s experience will never be repeated.”

Among other things, the Trump administration has restricted aid to the governments of a slew of countries it says aren’t doing enough to combat trafficking.

But several prominent anti-trafficking groups, are reportedly boycotting the event, protesting portions of the administration’s immigration crackdown that they say endanger trafficking victims. At issue is the administration’s increased scrutiny of visas granting temporary legal status to immigrants who can prove they’re trafficking victims.

Litvak says she was lucky to get out. At the end, she said, she was in the worst physical condition of her life, “literally lying on my deathbed.”

“I need to do something with what has happened to me. That is what drives me,” Litvak said. “Not just learn how to survive, but to learn how to live again. There’s proof you can do that, you can come out a better and changed person.”

ben.wermund@chron.com