A 17-Year-Old Processes Police Sexual Violence in One of the Summer's Most Anticipated Novels

In May 2016, a secret within the Oakland Police Department exploded into the public eye: Multiple officers were under investigation for sexually exploiting the teen daughter of a 911 dispatcher, including trafficking her when she was underage. The news sent shockwaves across the city, as residents learned that department higher-ups had known about the misconduct for months. The teen, a sex worker known as Celeste Guap, told reporters she had sex with more than two dozen cops in the Bay Area—for money, protection from arrest, and tips about undercover raids. In interviews, she wavered between self-blame and acknowledging the abuse. “Thinking back at it, yeah, you know, I do now see myself as being a victim,” she told one reporter. “Because I do feel I was taken advantage of.” (Four of the officers ultimately pleaded no contest to charges; other charges were dropped and Guap received a settlement from the city.)

To Leila Mottley, a 13-year-old budding poet and writer watching the news from her East Oakland home, Guap’s story was a revelation. Since Mottley was 11, she had been dealing with unwanted attention from men on the street—men who catcalled or whistled at her or even cornered her as she walked home from her bus stop in the rain. As she watched Guap say, “These men preyed on me,” Mottley recalls, “I remember being really struck by it as a young teenager, existing in this city where I had experienced the ways that my body was vulnerable, but didn’t often see it reflected back to me, or even acknowledged.”

Mottley, who is Black, had long listened to warnings about cops from her father, who grew up amid the protests of 1960s Detroit. He told stories about being detained without cause, and “all the ways that we can and cannot operate when the police are around, or white people are around.” But “my talks around policing as a kid were never about what policing looks like for women, or sexual harassment,” Mottley says. “No one gets that talk…I think, because, what would you say?”

Six years later, Mottley—now a self-assured 19-year-old with piercing green eyes, a nose stud, and a sprig of lavender tattooed on her arm—has answered her own question with Nightcrawling. The debut novel imagines the inner life of Kiara Johnson, a 17-year-old who becomes a sex worker to afford a rent increase and ends up trafficked by Oakland cops, only to be thrust into a public spotlight when the scandal goes public, just like Guap. Deeply rooted in East Oakland—“where we keep our buildings low to the ground and our feet to the sidewalk”—the novel explores Kiara’s joy and grief and search for belonging in the city she loves. Mottley completed it at 17, immediately after graduating high school early. The Black Southern writer Kiese Laymon has called it “the most compelling book written by an American teenager in my lifetime.”

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/06/leila-mottley-nightcrawling-police-sex-ring-oakland-youth-poet-laureate/

On my TBR list!