MARTINEZ — Fifteen years ago, Louis Ray Coleman took a 13-year-old off the streets and forced her to live in his basement for years, while she earned money for him through sexual servitude.

Even more shocking, Coleman, was caught red-handed in 2002 and charged with false imprisonment and pimping a minor less than 16 years old, yet only served 71 days on a probation violation, according to testimony in a kidnapping trial last month.

After jail, he found the young girl — known to the world only as Jane Doe — and she returned to his basement, where she lived out her teenage years. It wasn’t until this year and several victims later, that Doe would get the chance to face her exploiter in court.

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Coleman’s story is one that authorities say demonstrates how our attitudes and laws have changed with respect to the commercial sex trade. Before 2016, Coleman was caught at least four times sexually abusing or kidnapping minors as young as 12 for sex trafficking. His longest sentence was two years, and his most lenient was probation. Every time he was released, he found a new victim.

But now, Coleman is facing life in prison after being convicted of dozens of felonies related to two separate kidnappings in 2016. The victims were an adult and a 12-year-old girl, and in both instances, Coleman attempted to solicit his victims in the sex trade.

Unlike his previous cases, where Coleman was caught committing virtually identical conduct, authorities identified Coleman as a serial human trafficker and child abuser. Those who study human trafficking locally say they’ve seen a societal shift away from victim-blaming in cases involving sexual exploitation of minors or adults.

“The first thing that changed was our language; for a long time we’d call youth involved in commercial sexual exploitation ‘child prostitutes,'” said Alex Madsen, a coordinator with the Contra Costa Alliance to End Abuse. “That assumes they have full agency and they’re consenting to that kind of behavior. Now we view them as sexually exploited youth; we acknowledge that something is happening to them, and they don’t have the ability to consent.”

The crime of human trafficking was introduced to the state penal code in 2005. It refers to cirmes where someone forces an adult into sex trafficking, or when they sell a minor for sex, whether or not the minor agrees to it. The crime of pimping, by contrast, refers to the act of prostituting someone with that person’s consent. Before 2005, people caught trafficking minors in California were typically charged with pimping.

In June 2016, Coleman kidnapped a woman who was new to the area, after she got lost near a BART station. After she eventually escaped from him, he kidnapped a 12-year-old who’d run away from a group home, and raped her repeatedly while forcing her to ingest meth.

Coleman’s defense, that he believed the girl was older and that both women consented, fell apart when it was revealed during trial that he’d kidnapped a 12-year-old in 1995, taken her to his home, force-fed her alcohol, and sexually assaulted her. For that crime, Coleman pleaded to sexual battery of a minor and received a jail sentence of two years in prison, records show.

In 2001, though he was a registered sex offender, Coleman was charged with false imprisonment of a teen girl in San Francisco and sentenced to probation. The next year, Doe flagged down an Oakland officer near a BART station and said that Coleman, her pimp, had kidnapped her, raped her, stolen several hundred dollars, and was forcing her to live in his basement.

Coleman was arrested, ultimately sentenced to 71 days in jail, and ended up back out on the street in about two months. Doe contacted him, which authorities say is common in human trafficking cases, where minor victims sometimes feel attached to their abusers. Before long, she was living in his basement again.

Doe testified about the conduct in Coleman’s 2017 trial, but it wasn’t easy for her. Once while on the witness stand she abruptly blurted out, “I’m sorry!” to Coleman, who replied, “Stop (expletive) lying, then,” and was admonished by the judge. The defense used the incident to argue that Doe was lying about her experiences.

Prosecutor Diana Weiss praised Doe’s “strength and courage” in coming forward, and said it was typical for sex trafficking victims who testify against their abusers to feel like they’re doing something wrong, because they’re often “brainwashed.” She praised Richmond police for putting together the 2016 case against Coleman, and putting in the legwork to find his previous victims.

“It was the hard and diligent work of the officers and detectives of the Richmond Police Department and their ability to put together all the pieces of the puzzle and connect the defendant to these two separate yet similar crimes… they were also able to go back 22 years and find prior victims of the same defendant,” she said.