He gave her a place to stay and called her his girlfriend. But then, from her account, he started listing her on dating sites. Men had paid to have sex with her seven or eight times when, she said in a guilty plea, she killed one of them. The teenager said that on the evening of May 31, 2020, she was forced to go to the apartment of 38-year-old Zachary Brooks, where he allegedly poured alcohol and drugs on her and repeatedly sexually assaulted her. Watching him sleep afterwards, something snapped inside her. “I suddenly realized that Mr. Brooks had once again raped me,” Lewis wrote in pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and voluntary injury, “and was overcome with rage.” She stabbed him dozens of times and was arrested on murder charges a day later. Prosecutors did not dispute her allegations of human trafficking, and a Polk County judge said in court documents that there was evidence that appeared to support them. However, in a case paralleled by other teenage sex-trafficked victims who killed their attackers, he faced up to 20 years in prison. On Tuesday, Polk County Judge David M. Porter sentenced Lewis, now 17, to a five-year suspended prison term in a correctional facility in what he called “a second chance.” He deferred Lewis’ sentence, allowing her record to be expunged if she completes probation. In a demand Lewis’ lawyers objected to, she said she had no discretion to avoid her requirement to pay $150,000 in restitution to Brooks’ family. Before the judge issued his ruling, Lewis took the stand. He read from a powerful statement, beginning with: “Today, my voice will be heard.” In a few minutes, she described the trauma she had suffered, along with her efforts to own up to her actions and move on. “I wish the events that took place on June 1, 2020 never happened,” he said. “But to say there is only one victim in this story is absurd.” The man she named as her trafficker has not been charged. A spokesman for the Des Moines Police Department did not respond to The Washington Post’s questions about whether investigators had looked into Lewis’ allegations. Across the country, other teenagers allegedly sex-trafficked and involved in murder have spent years in prison, their abuse in many cases either not reported or dismissed in court. In Ohio, Alexis Martin pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison after prosecutors said she was part of a plan to rob her alleged trafficker, who was shot to death during the crime. In Wisconsin, Chrystul Kizer faced a life sentence for killing her victim. The State of Ohio v. A Teen Sex Trafficked Cyntoia Brown spent 15 years in prison for killing a man who paid for sex with her while she was a trafficked 16-year-old. Then in 2019, after supporters rallied to her side in the wake of the #MeToo movement, her sentence was commuted and she was released. Her story helped draw attention to teenagers with similar stories, leading some authorities to reconsider how they should be treated. Lewis’ case has also sparked attention, outrage and calls for her release. She has been held in juvenile detention since her arrest in June 2020. “No one has ever denied that she was a victim, and yet the way she is being treated is not the way we would expect a victim of human trafficking to be treated, let alone a minor victim of trafficking,” said KellyMarie Meek. coordinator of prevention and public health initiatives at the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault. In the years before she met Brooks, Lewis’ childhood was often marked by trauma, according to court records. Days after she was born, her lawyers wrote in court documents, she returned to a hospital severely malnourished. She was placed in foster care, her parents’ rights were terminated, and she was then adopted by Billy and Leslie Lewis. When the couple split in 2019, Pieper Lewis, then in high school, started acting. Her mother responded with what Lewis’ lawyers called “draconian parenting measures,” removing her bedroom door and forcing her to sleep on a mattress on the floor. The rules posted on her bedroom wall said she could have no contact with her siblings and must stay in her room until told to come out. In her guilty plea, Lewis laid out the sequence of events leading up to the murder. She said she ran away three times in the first few months of 2020 — and for good in March 2020. With nowhere to stay, she bounced from one adult’s apartment to another, sometimes facing abuse. She spent the first few months at the apartment of a classmate’s older sister, babysitting in exchange for shelter, until an argument ended with Lewis sleeping in the hallways of the apartment complex. A 40-year-old man took the teenager inside, but when he became violent, she was back in the hallway. In April 2020, another resident of the complex, a 28-year-old man, moved Lewis to his unit in the building. She began arranging to have sex with men, she wrote in her appeal. Among them was Brooks, who she was forced to spend three days with in May 2020. She said he assaulted her multiple times. “I didn’t want to have sex with Mr. Brooks because I believed that [the 28-year-old man] he was my boyfriend,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to go to Mr. Brooks’ apartment, but I had nowhere else to go.” On May 31, Lewis’ alleged trafficker told her she had to “pull that trick” with Brooks again to get marijuana. She cried and said she did not want to go, according to her plea, but held a knife to her throat. Frightened, she got into Brooks’ car and drove with him to his apartment. He gave her alcohol and told her to undress. She wrote that she hoped he would fall asleep: “I tried to stay calm and thought he would pass out and I would leave his apartment at first light.” He assaulted her five times before she fell asleep, she said in her plea. Lewis was looking for her clothes when he noticed a knife on a nightstand and rage took over. He stabbed Brooks 37 times and then fled in the early morning darkness. “My intentions that day were not just to go out and take someone’s life,” Lewis told the court Tuesday. “In my mind, I felt like I wasn’t safe. And I felt that I was in danger, which resulted in the actions. But it doesn’t take away the fact that a crime was committed.” Prosecutors previously said they might seek prison time, but in court Tuesday, they asked instead for probation and placement in a women’s facility. They said the case required balancing rehabilitation with community protection. While they noted that they had not disputed Lewis’ claims that they were trafficked, they said that by killing him, she had taken matters into her own hands, leaving Brooks’ children fatherless. Chrystul Kizer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court and a landmark sex-trafficking case Matthew Sheeley, one of Lewis’ attorneys, argued that her actions were directly related to her status as a victim of human trafficking. He argued against the requirement to pay Brooks’ estate, telling the judge, “I don’t believe the Iowa Legislature intended to require a 15-year-old girl … to pay her rapist’s estate $150,000.” Placed in a secure, supportive environment, Sheeley said, Lewis would not pose a risk to the community. She pointed out that she had recently graduated from high school while in custody — a year ahead of her class. He said the Pieper Lewis who was prosecuted for first-degree murder “is not the Pieper Lewis we know.” In her court filing, Lewis said she will prevail regardless of what the judge decides. She set goals for herself, like becoming a fashion designer, looking out for other girls like her, and telling her story. She called herself “Phoenix”. “Some days I feel like giving up,” she said, “but again, I’m the light at the end of the tunnel. I tremble brighter than the mere thought of my own future. I have to prevail.”
