Katie Meyler captivated Americans with the stories of girls she met in Monrovia, Liberia, who she said were so poor that they had to sell their bodies just to buy clean drinking water. Her social media followers gave her money to send them to school. She started a charity called More Than Me, and in 2012 she won $1 million live on NBC to build a school of her own.
Her charity was created to save these vulnerable girls from sexual exploitation. But from the very beginning, girls were being raped by a man Meyler trusted. He was a former child soldier, the charity’s first staff member and, at one point, Meyler’s lover. After a yearlong ProPublica investigation, reporter Finlay Young delves into the question of who is responsible when those who help also cause enduring and irreversible harm.
This documentary premiered at the Double Exposure Film Festival in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 12, 2018. It has been updated since then to reflect new revelations in our reporting.
Read more about this story: propublica.org/unprotected.
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