To hear authorities tell it, Cam Da Le's Garden Grove nail salon buffed more than just toenails and fingernails, as the 47-year-old is accused of pimping out a female worker there.
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Salon manager Le is accused of instructing the 25-year-old woman to perform sex acts on a customer on April 30–as well as only letting the victim collect tips she earned on the job, according to a statement from the Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA). To put it another way, Le paid the worker no hourly wage nor a cut of what was earned as a prostitute.
An Orange Police Department investigation into whether the nail salon was acting as a brothel led to a sting operation where the worker's prostitution services were offered to an undercover cop, the OCDA claims.
Le's arrest is part of what a law enforcement official has described to me as a “paradigm shift” in the way prostitution is viewed in California. Those on their knees and backs servicing johns are now seen as victims, the source says, while their pimps are treated as human traffickers.
It is under California's anti-human trafficking Prop. 35 and the OCDA's Human Exploitation And Trafficking Unit (HEAT) that Garden Grove resident Le is being prosecuted. She faces felony counts of pimping and pandering that, with convictions, could have her buffing nails in state prison for six years.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.