On October 11 of last year, the US Marines stationed aboard the USS Peleliu got their first night of liberty after their Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship docked in Subic Bay, on the Philippine island of Luzon, for joint military exercises. Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton, a 19-year-old former professional boxer from New Bedford, Massachusetts, eagerly disembarked with his battle buddies Bennett Dahl, Daniel Pulido, and Jairn Rose. They headed for the Harbor Point mall in nearby Olongapo, part of the former American Subic Bay naval base, which closed, in 1992, after a massive volcanic eruption that coincided with a wave of Philippine nationalist sentiment. The group ate a late lunch and shopped at the mall before heading for the narrow streets and looser rules of Magsaysay Drive, half a mile outside the former base.

At Ambyanz Night Life, the men found what some of them had been looking for that night. The club was a frequent hangout for sex workers known as Pocahontases—a riff on pok-pok, a Tagalog term for slut, which also alludes to the former colonizers who often patronize them. The most dogged of these women—those who quickly latch on to the arms of the men pouring off the ships—are usually transgender, but the foreign soldiers rarely learn that. "Filipinos are more used to us, so they can sometimes tell," one trans Pocahontas told me. "Sometimes they try to expose us to the foreign men. So we run."

At the top of the club's blue-lit staircase, whose walls were lined with mirrors hung askew, Pemberton met Jennifer Laude, a statuesque trans woman with heavy-lidded eyes who had been a Pocahontas on and off for about six years. Laude was out that night with a group of her trans sex-worker friends for the first time in months since becoming engaged to her German boyfriend, Marc Sueselbeck. Laude had planned to already be with her fiancé in Duisburg, a town near Düsseldorf, but Germany had denied her an entry visa. Though Laude didn't need the money the way she used to—Sueselbeck sent her a regular allowance—the thrill of competition was part of what it meant to hang out with her friends. According to her roommate Jamille, if she was out she thought she might as well take customers, "just for fun." The women had been working since the soldiers went on liberty that afternoon, and by 10:45, when Laude met Pemberton, she'd already been with three clients. "Jennifer was exhausted," said another friend, Charis. "We work as hard as we can when the soldiers are here."

Within a few minutes of meeting, Pemberton and Laude left for the Celzone Lodge, a motel across the street, accompanied by Laude's friend Barbie Gelviro. "She never went with a guy alone," Gelviro said. "She always asked one of us to come with her so we knew where she was." At the motel, Pemberton and Laude booked some time in Room 1, right next to the reception desk. The room, with walls painted the color of a mango's flesh, was not much more than a bed to do business on and a television to drown out the noise. Gelviro stayed with the couple for a minute to help negotiate a rate. Laude suggested 5,000 pesos, but Pemberton only wanted to pay 1,000 (about $25). Laude, nervous that Pemberton might discover the girls were trans because Gelviro didn't have implants, quickly agreed to the lower rate and rushed her friend out of the room. "Please safe my friend," Gelviro told Pemberton in stilted English as she left.

On her way downstairs, Gelviro met a man checked into Room 5, two floors above Laude. She flirted with him, and asked him whether he wanted her to join him for an hour or so. He knew he'd be expected to pay; men in Olongapo assume as much when a girl is forward on a Saturday night. They made an arrangement and went back to his room, where she took off her clothes, except for her tight underwear. Then she turned off the light.

About 30 minutes after the group had arrived at the motel, Pemberton casually walked out of his room alone, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him. He seemed unperturbed as he passed the front desk and walked down the steps into the night. His curfew was rapidly approaching, and he and his shipmates needed to return together. Dahl, Pulido, and Rose were frantically looking for him, but to no avail. Pulido eventually made the call to take a cab back to the ship without Pemberton. They arrived at 12:10, and the supervising officer, Corporal Christopher Miller, chewed them out for being late. He got even angrier when he saw that Pemberton wasn't with them. Pemberton showed up in the middle of the conversation, and the soldiers explained that they were late because they were looking for one another. Miller, who would have known full well the kinds of activities the group could get into when they went off ship, chose not to discipline them that night and dismissed them for bed.

As they were about to go to sleep, Pemberton approached Rose and asked to talk to him in private. They walked over to the front of the ship, far from human ears, with only the ocean and the sky to listen. Pemberton told Rose that he had met two girls at Ambyanz and gone to a motel with them. After one of them left, the girl he was still with started to undress. Pemberton said that he saw "it" had a dick.

He told Rose he got so angry that he choked "it" from behind. When the body stopped moving, he dragged it into the bathroom and left. At first Rose thought he was messing around, but Pemberton assured his friend that he was serious.

"I think I killed a he-she," Pemberton said.

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Laude met Pemberton
at at Ambyanz Night Life in Olongapo City. All photos by the author

At the motel, the bellboy and receptionist, Elias Galamos, waited a few minutes after Pemberton left to go clean up the room. Inside he discovered Laude's limp body, wrapped in the motel's beige blanket and slumped over the toilet bowl. Not knowing whether she was dead or unconscious, Galamos went to find Gelviro upstairs and then ran a block and a half to the local police station. By the time Gelviro cleaned herself up and came to the room, the local police had arrived, followed shortly by a team from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), who seem to have been informed that an American service member might be involved even before Pemberton made his confession to Rose.

Shortly after midnight, police drove Laude's body the half mile to St. Martin Funeral Home. Gelviro texted Laude's middle sister, Michelle, who happened to be out with her own friends at Ambyanz. Together they went to the morgue, and Michelle tearfully identified Laude's body. The police conducted an autopsy before releasing the body to the family the following evening: The cause of death was ruled asphyxia by drowning in the shallow water of the toilet bowl.

Pemberton was immediately identified as the prime suspect: Surveillance footage at the nightclub showed him leaving with Laude, and Gelviro spoke to police at the scene and later picked him out in a photo lineup. "He was the one," Gelviro said as she pointed to Pemberton's picture. "He was in my dreams." Filipino authorities claimed to be building a case against Pemberton, but they didn't bring him in for questioning or receive an affidavit with his account of the night. The Americans, citing their rights under the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which regulates US military activity in the country, refused to release him from their custody on the USS Peleliu. Jennifer's mother, Julita, who had boarded a 24-hour bus from the family's home province of Leyte to join her two surviving daughters, Marilou and Michelle, was incensed by the lack of government action. She feared that Pemberton had fled the country while the authorities dithered and kowtowed to American demands.

Pemberton assured his friend that he was serious. "I think I killed a he-she," he said.

The invocation of the VFA and Pemberton's perceived immunity immediately brought long-lingering resentments to the surface for many Filipinos. Only one American service member had ever been tried under the VFA. In 2005, Daniel Smith, a lance corporal in the Marines also stationed in Olongapo, was accused of raping a Filipina named Suzette "Nicole" Nicolas. He had allegedly carried her into a van while she was drunk, assaulted her as several other soldiers watched and cheered him on, and dumped her on a nearby pier. A civilian trial was held, but press was banned from entering the courtroom, and the Americans maintained custody of Smith at the US embassy throughout. In December 2006, Smith was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, but he remained at the embassy as he appealed the case. Although the Supreme Court ruled two years later that US soldiers convicted of a crime should be detained in Philippine facilities, Smith never returned to prison. In April 2009, Nicolas recanted her testimony and left the Philippines for the United States with an American residency visa and a settlement, from Smith, of 100,000 pesos (about $2,260). The appeals court immediately reversed Smith's conviction, and he left the country less than 24 hours later.

Anger at Americans was already heightened on the eve of Laude's murder: The two countries were in the middle of negotiations to approve a deal to allow the US to construct new military facilities and to position defense assets in various locations around the Philippines, including in Olongapo. Transgender activists, ordinarily marginalized even by the left, rallied around the case, demanding justice for Laude by tapping into the rage at the Americans' overreach. Outside the US embassy in Manila, Filipinos called for the eviction of US troops and burned a mock American flag. Naomi Fontanos, co-founder of the transgender-advocacy group GANDA Filipinas, was struck by the organizing power of Laude's case. "Her murder brought together many liberation movements that are all clamoring for justice," she said.

Four days after Laude's death, in the absence of any meaningful reassurance from the government that they were building a case, the family decided to file civil murder charges themselves. Many organizations were eager to provide representation, but the family chose Harry Roque, an activist attorney, and Virginia Suarez, a lawyer aligned with the Movement for National Democracy (KPD), a party that is strongly opposed to the American military presence. Suarez, KPD's secretary general, set about a strategy that used Laude's plight to give a human face to the ways that Filipinos are subjugated by the country's alliance with the United States. "Anyone who looks at this case has to see it not just for itself but for the way the VFA treats Filipinos as second-class citizens in our own country," she said.

The coalition of Filipinos sympathetic to Laude continued to grow, but supporters struggled to understand and be sympathetic to her status as a trans woman. The Filipino media and public consistently described Laude as a man or bakla, an indigenous identity that fuses concepts of gender and sexuality. The word bakla is used to describe people who are assigned male at birth and desire men but have many feminine characteristics. Because bakla constitute a socially integrated third gender in the Philippines, many observers didn't recognize Laude's identity as a woman, repeatedly using her given name and identifying her as gay. Even activists were confused and ambivalent. The notion that someone considered male would identify as a woman instead of being content to live as bakla struck many Filipinos as a fundamental lie—an attempt to fool people into believing that a trans woman is someone she is not.

The notion that someone considered male would identify as a woman instead of being content to live as a third-gender person struck many Filipinos as a fundamental lie.

When I first heard about Laude's murder, I felt a kind of identification with her. I also grew up in the Philippines and was assigned male at birth; it wasn't until I left for the United States, at 15, that I decided to become a woman. I have often felt as though I would have been bakla had I stayed behind in the Philippines, not recognizing the possibility of a trans identity. Laude, 13 years younger than I am, was among a generation of trans Filipina women who have led much of their lives online and have been deeply influenced by American media. Although Filipinos did not understand her desire to be recognized as a woman, she learned on her own that it was an option for her and chose to pursue it. "Filipinos generally see people like Jennifer as the most extreme form of bakla," Fontanos told me. "The best thing that has come out of the Laude case has been that it has forced the country to confront the existence of transgender women."

The murder of Jennifer Laude exposed to the Philippines both the reality of trans women and the violence that they face daily. Although trans visibility is on the rise in the United States, violence against trans women remains a crisis here as well. This year alone, at least six trans women have been murdered in the US, in many cases by intimate partners and family members. All but one of them were women of color. Despite the prevalence of trans discrimination, Americans expect their legal system to fairly try these cases. But the behavior of the Americans in the Philippines following Laude's death is not uncharacteristic of the response that these crimes receive at home: blaming the victim, sweeping her death under the rug, and resisting accountability.

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Pemberton allegedly choked Laude after finding out she was transgender, then dragged her into the bathroom, where she suffocated in the shallow water of the toilet bowl.

The events that followed the family's complaint against Pemberton made many Filipinos even more distrustful of the American military. When Pemberton didn't show up to the first hearing in the civil trial, the Laude family threatened to sue the government for not gaining custody of him and compelling him to appear. "The Philippine government turned down the entire nation when it did not insist on custody," Roque told a Filipino news source. "That is a gross dereliction of duty." The next day, nearly two weeks after Laude's murder, Pemberton was transferred from the Peleliu to Camp Aguinaldo, the general headquarters of the Philippine military, in Quezon City. He was to be held in an air-conditioned 20-foot van that he would share with US military guards. Although the perimeter would be secured by Philippine soldiers, a spokesperson with the Department of Foreign Affairs described the situation as only "joint guarding"; the United States ultimately maintained custody.

It took another month for the government to formally arrest Pemberton. On December 19, the Olongapo City Regional Trial Court, Branch 74, issued an arrest warrant. "It's murder," Emilie de los Santos, the city prosecutor, said after filing the charges. "It was aggravated by treachery, abuse of superior strength, and cruelty." Four days later, Pemberton appeared in public for the first time after Laude's death. He entered a courtroom in Olongapo at 5 AM, through a cut-down portion of a metal fence at the back of the facility. Pemberton did not speak or enter a plea in the case. His lawyers simply motioned for a delay while they appealed to the Department of Justice to dismiss the charges, and he was quickly ferried back to Camp Aguinaldo. The United States continued to deny the Philippines' requests to transfer custody, even after charges had been filed, and the Philippines announced that it would cease trying to retain custody of Pemberton while the trial was ongoing.

The presiding judge, Roline Ginez-Jabalde, accepted the defenses' request for the delay, but the Philippine Department of Justice ruled that the charges were legitimate and Pemberton should stand trial. An initial hearing date was set for February 23, when Pemberton would at least be expected to enter a plea. In the meantime, the prosecution asked the judge to reconsider her ban on press in the courtroom and her decision not to demand Pemberton be put in a Philippine jail. Ginez-Jabalde was a law-school classmate of Pemberton's defense attorney, Rowena Garcia-Flores, but she has refused to recuse herself from the case even after prosecutors said that they saw her conferring privately with Pemberton and Garcia-Flores. In a country where there is no trial by jury, even for criminal cases, Ginez-Jabalde will be the lone decider of Pemberton's fate. Her endorsement of the 60-day delay and February 23 start date may prove consequential, as the prosecutors have only a year to obtain a conviction before Pemberton can go free under the terms of the VFA.

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Subic Bay, in the Philippines, began to host US ships on a semi-permanent basis in 2012, two decades after the American naval base there had closed. The USS Peleliu, carrying Pemberton, was docked there last fall.

"I knew she was a girl when I saw her with her sisters and she didn't move like a boy, but I never scolded her," Julita Laude told me over a meal at Gerry's Grill at the Harbor Point mall, the same spot where Pemberton and his friends had gone out the night of her daughter's murder. Julita returned to the family's hometown of Matagok, in Leyte, a few weeks after the funeral, held on October 24, but she went back to Olongapo in January to check in on her daughters. Julita's appearance is at odds with her surroundings in Olongapo, a town that caters to a local population deeply influenced by the longtime American presence. While her daughters rarely go out in public without makeup and are wont to dress in foreign brands, Julita wore no makeup or jewelry and donned a simple dark shirt.

According to Julita, Jennifer started dressing in a feminine manner all the time once she hit puberty, wearing tight jeans and women's blouses. After finishing high school, in 2006, she moved to Olongapo to attend college, but her studies were delayed while she sought a school that would allow her to wear women's clothing and grow her hair out. Eventually she enrolled at the Asian Institute of E-Commerce as a human-resources major, but she quickly lost interest.

"She started spending all night on the internet and wouldn't go to her classes," her sister Marilou told me. "I don't know what she was doing, but foreign men started to send her money." After deciding to drop out of school, Laude started working as an assistant at a hair salon, where a British customer named Joop became smitten with her, not realizing that she was trans. During their courtship, Laude came to realize that foreign men tended to view her differently than Filipinos did, seeing her not as third-gender but as a full-fledged woman. Joop continued to pursue Laude even after she explained that she was not a "real woman," identifying herself in a way not uncommon for trans women in the Philippines. Joop was undeterred and supported Laude with money and gifts. But he refused to be seen with her in public, which eventually became unbearable for Laude. Their romance fizzled, and Joop moved away.

By the end of 2007, Laude had saved enough money to get breast implants from a local doctor. She started to support her family, using income made from webcamming, gifts from foreign boyfriends, and local sex work. Around this time, Laude met a Korean businessman who regularly traveled to Olongapo for work. He had a family back in Korea, but he started to date Laude and found himself wanting to build a life with her in the Philippines. Throughout their courtship, Laude claimed to be religious and refused to have sex with him so he wouldn't find out that she was trans. When he pressured her to sleep with him, she pretended to slash her wrists using fake blood, a tactic she may have learned from the Mexican telenovelas she loved to watch. Finally, Laude ended the relationship when the man started talking about leaving his family in Korea and having children with her, never having learned that she was trans.

Julita acknowledged that her daughter's associations with foreign men made her family's life materially better. "We added more and more rooms to our small house because of the money Ganda gave me," she said, referring to Laude by her nickname, the Tagalog word for beauty. Julita lost the roof of the family home during Typhoon Hagupit, last year, and Laude paid for the repairs. She also lent money to other people in the area affected by the storm without asking to be paid back on any kind of timetable.

"She made my life more comfortable, but it's not her money I miss," Julita said. "It's her love. It used to be that, when I was sick, the thought of her made my body lighter. Now I feel heavy, as though I won't recover."

Laude met Sueselbeck, her fiancé, on an online travel board in November 2012. They communicated using just audio on Skype and formed a strong enough bond that Sueselbeck announced within a few days that he had bought a ticket to the Philippines for Christmas. Sueselbeck had still not seen a picture of Laude, and she nervously sent him one right away. "I know it maybe will prevent you ever to talk with me again," she told him, "but I am what people call ladyboy or shemale. But I am just a girl for those people who see. Accept me as the girl I am or don't. It's your choice. But I am me and will be proud of who and what I am if just the right guy shares it with me at my side."

Sueselbeck decided that her trans status didn't matter to him and went ahead with the trip, meeting Laude for the first time in the parking lot at the airport. Their romance was swift, and on December 22, barely a month after their first interaction online, Sueselbeck proposed on a stage at an Olongapo mall in front of hundreds of people, to publicly demonstrate that he was not ashamed that she was trans.

"They're banning me from the Philippines for disrespect and gross arrogance," said Laude's fiancé. "Yet they're protecting the man who murdered my wife just because he's American."

Over the next two years, he spent every vacation day he had in the Philippines, usually visiting once in the summer and once in the winter. Sueselbeck applied for a German visa for Laude in the summer of 2013, but her application was denied "because of the prejudices the German embassy had against her," he said. The couple continually appealed the decision, and on October 1, 2014, ten days before Laude died, Sueselbeck received a call from German authorities informing him that they were ready to give Laude a visa after a pro-forma interview in December. They made plans to get married this spring, and Laude bought a wedding dress. Sueselbeck felt that Laude's insecurity about her true womanhood, which fueled a fear that her life wouldn't actually work out, was the only reason she could have been with Pemberton that night. Nonetheless, he said he bears no resentment toward her.

What Sueselbeck did resent was the difference between how he and Pemberton were treated by the Philippine government. On October 22, Sueselbeck scaled a fence at Camp Aguinaldo and shoved a military officer while trying to determine whether Pemberton was really being held there. Sueselbeck claimed that the camp commander, Brigadier General Arthur Ang, assured him there would be no repercussions, but the military decided to pursue action after US Ambassador Philip Goldberg called the incident "very disappointing." The Bureau of Immigration claimed that Sueselbeck agreed to a "voluntary deportation," which he denied, and placed him on a travel blacklist that prevents him from returning to the Philippines. He had planned to be in the country on March 13, the date on which he and Laude were supposed to get married. "They're banning me from the Philippines for disrespect and gross arrogance, yet they're protecting the man who murdered my wife just because he's American," he said.

"I am only happy about one thing," Sueselbeck told me, speaking of the time right before Laude died. "I know at that point in her life, she was at the maximum happiness."

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Harry Roque, Michelle Laude, Marilou Laude, and Virginia Suarez prepare for a hearing on the transfer of Pemberton into Philippine custody

On the morning of January 14, the Laude family and their lawyers arrived at the Olongapo city courthouse, hoping Judge Ginez-Jabalde would lift the ban on the media and reconsider her decision to allow Pemberton to remain in US custody. The motion was typical of the tenacious Roque, whose gentle movements and soft-spoken manner belie his aggressive focus. He has extensive experience in international human rights law and was the first Asian attorney admitted to practice before the International Criminal Court. "We don't expect her to change her ruling," Roque said, "but the motion is a necessary step before the matter can be heard by the Philippine Supreme Court."

The private prosecutors sat at a long table in front of the judge's bench, between the government's prosecution team and the defense lawyer, Garcia-Flores. While Roque looked over his notes, Suarez and Garcia-Flores exchanged barbs. Both women are diminutive but forthright in manner.

"I've been training in mixed martial arts," Suarez, a fitness buff, said. "I'm learning how to punch and kick people into submission."

"I was a member of the rifle team in college," Garcia-Flores replied, with a wide smile. "Before someone tries to kick me, they'd already be dead."

The hearing itself was swift. Ginez-Jabalde entered and acknowledged all parties without expression, perhaps a response to the prosecution's charges of partiality. She granted Garcia-Flores four additional days to submit her reply and dismissed the group. The continual delays in decision-making have made it difficult for the Laudes' lawyers to prepare their case. Additionally, the court proceeding was conducted in English, as they almost always are in the Philippines. This is another instance in which Pemberton had the advantage as an American. The Laude family has limited English comprehension.

After the hearing ended, Garcia-Flores walked out of the courtroom, continuing to chat with Suarez. When the lawyers reached the flight of stairs that led to the lobby, where media awaited them below, Garcia-Flores delivered her final salvo. "I don't understand why we have to fight," she said, with a short laugh. "Let's just talk about visas."

Garcia-Flores's oblique reference to the Suzette Nicolas case seemed to indicate that the defense's strategy would involve trying to buy off the family of the victim. It is widely speculated that the US only granted Nicolas an American residency visa on the condition that she recant her account of being raped by Smith. Classified American embassy cables published by WikiLeaks in 2011 show that the US pressured the Philippine government to release Smith into their custody during a brief period, after his conviction, when he was held in a Philippine jail. The Americans also deferred granting credentials to the Philippine ambassador to the US and threatened to cancel joint military exercises between the two countries.

The Laudes had the infuriating feeling that the United States was attempting to keep the trial from ever happening while the defense kept Pemberton from speaking to authorities about the case. "We don't need money or visas from the US government," Marilou said. "We don't need our sister to die so we can have a better life."

Marilou cited numerous instances in which she felt she had been mistreated and Pemberton had been given priority. When Pemberton had come to the Olongapo city court for his arraignment in December, rows of his friends wearing white uniforms filled the courtroom, while her family had to sit in the back and her cousins were unable to enter because it was too full. Pemberton had his own spacious trailer with air conditioning, while Filipino prisoners were not housed in such cushy conditions.

"What I want is for Pemberton to serve the same sentence as anyone in the Philippines would for this murder," Julita said. "If we allow America to pay us, it's as though Pemberton can kill Jennifer as long as he can pay for her."

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Michelle Laude, outside the courtroom

If the past is any indication, the just treatment of Filipina trans women in cases against American soldiers may not be forthcoming. Julie Sionzon, who was outside the courtroom after the hearing, has lived in Olongapo for more than 20 years and has worked for a Manila-based television news station for the past eight. As one of the most outspoken lesbian women in Olongapo, she took a specific interest in the Laude case.

While the family was speaking to the local press, Sionzon told me about an experience that reminded her of Laude. In 1989, when she was a 19-year-old field reporter for a local radio station covering the Olongapo police department, a woman came into the station with a swollen lip and a black eye, claiming that a US Marine was responsible. When the man was brought in, he said that he had beaten the woman because she was really a man, citing her flat chest and boyish build. The woman, who had come from the Philippine province of Masbate only a few days before, insisted that she was not a man.

"There were no women police officers at the time, so they asked me to check if she was really a woman," Sionzon said. Sionzon took the woman to the bathroom, where she pretended to examine her body parts, even though she didn't ask the woman to undress, and declared through the partly open door: "She's a woman!"

The American was incensed, but Sionzon stuck to her story. "It's a lie I will never regret telling," she said. The woman then asked Sionzon to interpret for her as she negotiated a settlement with the Marine's commanding officer. He offered $300, and the police encouraged the woman to take it, reminding her that even if she wanted to press charges she didn't have the money to hire a lawyer. Then they informed her that she would only get $100, as $100 was earmarked for the police department, and another $100 was for a local government official.

"I personally witnessed this," Sionzon emphasized. "Then I found out later that this was their standard arrangement—$300, with only $100 going to the victim. And she had to take care of her medical expenses herself." She argued with the police until they agreed to give the woman all the money. Sionzon then escorted the woman to the bus station, where she bought a ticket back to her home province.

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Michelle, Julita, and Marilou Laude with a picture of Jennifer Laude

On January 23, Laude's family traveled four hours to the Philippine Department of Justice in Manila, where they were met by Roque. Upon arrival, two men led them through a courtyard and a set of hallways to a small room where Barbie Gelviro and Elias Galamos—the key witnesses in the case, sequestered by the state until the trial— were waiting. Julita, Michelle, and Marilou had wanted to meet with the witnesses to thank them for their commitment to testifying for Jennifer. "We're OK, but it's really boring," Gelviro said.

Though the main purpose of the meeting was to visit and thank the witnesses, Roque also used it as an opportunity to go over Gelviro's and Galamos's accounts. Worried that the government would try to turn the witnesses while they were sequestered, he wanted to make sure their stories hadn't changed. Gelviro began her account but hesitated when Roque asked her why Laude and Pemberton decided to go to the Celzone Lodge.

"Am I allowed to say?" Gelviro asked as her hand crept up her delicate face. She had gotten heavier while in witness protection, though it's unlikely she weighed more than a hundred pounds. Observing her fragile frame made the rumor, popular among locals, that she was the true killer seem even more remote.

"Are you OK, Nanay?" Roque asked Julita, using the Tagalog word for mother, noting that what she might hear could offend her Catholic sensibilities.

"I'm fine as long as it's the truth," Julita replied.

Gelviro turned to Roque and told him that Pemberton and Laude had gone to the Celzone Lodge to have sex, but that she had not been present for any financial transaction with Pemberton, countering the sworn testimony she'd apparently given the NCIS. (Gelviro's inconsistency lent some credence to an alternate version of events that a person close to the family told me—that it was Gelviro who had promised Pemberton he could sleep with Laude, tricking her friend into going to the motel with him.) The rest of her account was punctuated with questions and interruptions. She was eager to testify and wanted to know how soon the trial would be.

After Roque went over Galamos's account and found it satisfactory, he left the room, and I stayed behind with the witnesses and the Laude family, along with Gelviro's father, who had been keeping her company in witness protection. Like Julita, he is unperturbed by his daughter's gender, saying that she had been that way ever since she was a kid.

A few minutes later, two new visitors came in, and Marilou introduced them as Jamille and Charis, two of the women who were with Laude the night of the murder. Their last companion that night, Gorgeous, was unable to come because she recently had fistula surgery in her anus. "She was overworking," Charis said diplomatically.

"She's the reporter from America I was texting you about," Marilou said, introducing me. "She's trans too." The three women instantly peppered me with questions. Gelviro, who up to that moment had not said a word to me, led the group with queries about my transition and surgery history. Jamille and Charis, who had been unwilling to speak to the media up to that point, took turns asking me whether I had a boyfriend, whether he knew that I was trans, and when I told him. "Sometimes our boyfriends don't know for months," Charis said. "If ever."

A female officer from witness protection came by a few minutes later and informed us that we should finish the visit. Gelviro had been given shopping privileges at the mall that afternoon, and she invited her friends and me to come with her. The officer told us that we couldn't be with her in public, but we could trail her at a distance as she shopped.

I spent the next 20 minutes following Gelviro around with Jamille and Charis, who asked me more questions about my life. Charis asked whether I only had boyfriends or had clients too. It took a few attempts for me to clarify that I had never done sex work, and that I had no expectations about people I date supporting me financially. I was left with the impression that Charis had never met a trans woman who has not had sex for money.

They'd both had close calls with clients who found out about their status. "Most of the time they just laugh and don't want to have sex," Jamille said. "But sometimes they threaten to beat us and we run."

Jamille focused on my unadorned appearance. "She doesn't even have to try to be a woman," she told Charis as we walked together. "It's because she's had the surgery. No one is going to doubt her."

Unable to speak to Gelviro, we eventually motioned goodbye as she shopped at a Payless shoe store. The girls needed to get ready for a booking that night. Charis wanted to pay for a motel because they hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, but she hesitated because their clients weren't a sure thing.

I told them they could shower and nap at the hotel room where I was staying with my partner; we had two beds. In the cab on the way there, they told me they were meeting some Chinese businessmen at the airport that night. The men didn't know they were trans. "They go away if we tell them," Charis said. They'd both had close calls with clients who found out about their status. "Most of the time they just laugh and don't want to have sex," Jamille said. "But sometimes they threaten to beat us and we run."

Charis joked that Jamille is attracted to Filipino men who, because they see her as bakla rather than a woman, expect her to support them in exchange for their affection. While foreigners pay for the pleasure of Charis and Jamille's company, masculine Filipino men are the ones who expect compensation, because they are thought to be debasing themselves if they admit to engaging in what is perceived as homosexual activity.

The two women talked about feeling lonely and having no one to meet their emotional needs. They have to pay for the company of Filipino men yet are unable to find foreign men who are willing to accept them once they discover their trans status. They admired Laude because she became the exception, which made her death even more unbelievable. "She was the most confident out of all of us," Charis said.

They didn't learn until the morning after Laude's death what had happened to her. Jamille, who was closer to Laude because they were roommates, also found out that Jairn Rose, the friend that Pemberton confessed to, had been her customer that same night. "He was really kind to me," Jamille said. "The weight is still so heavy. I can't believe his friend killed my friend."

Laude had wanted to have sex-reassignment surgery even though her fiancé thought her body was fine the way it was. Jamille and Charis also looked to surgery as the solution to their problems, as it would allow them to live as women without needing to hide any body parts. Yet the procedure, which costs about $10,000, is far beyond the means of these women, who normally earn around $40 per encounter.

As afternoon turned to evening, the two women began preparing for their clients, putting away their casual clothes in favor of skimpy dresses and lightening their skin with makeup. While Charis seemed secure in her femininity, having had one of the men as a customer on a previous visit, Jamille expressed concern that her skin would be too dark and her face too masculine.

"It's not like this is the life we wanted," said Jamille as she lined the borders of her eyes with dark pencil. "But it's the only way we can live."

She went off to go meet a man who didn't know she was trans, taking the same risk that had ended her friend's life. After that man, she planned to meet another, and then another, praying she wouldn't end up unlucky. In the meantime, she hoped that Pemberton would be held accountable for Laude's death. But she knew that he would be tried for murder under American protection and away from media scrutiny—behind closed doors, the way Laude died.

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Photos courtesy of Sydney Freeland

Writer and director Sydney Freeland was born and raised on a Navajo reservation in Gallup, New Mexico—dubbed "Drunktown." The disconnect between her experiences and the media's portrayal of reservation life compelled her to create last year's Sundance success, Drunktown's Finest. The narrative feature offers not one, but three harrowing interwoven tales of loss and triumph at or around a reservation in Drunktown. Felixia, a trans woman, pursues a spot in the "women of the tribe" calendar. Sick Boy confronts violence and drug abuse. Nizhoni seeks out her past, well after being adopted by a white family. At its core, the film represents the ongoing search for identity and Freeland's desire to more honestly portray reservation life.

A Fulbright scholar with an MFA in film, Freeland workshopped the film through a series of Sundance labs before it screened to an audience. It has continued to transform since. With a run of limited-distribution screenings in New York, and the rights inequalities of the trans community gaining further attention, Drunktown's Finest has taken on new life and meaning. And with that, Freeland has begun to share insight on her own trans identity.

VICE: In the film, you use interwoven stories to portray life on a Navajo reservation. Why did you choose these three specific characters and crises?
Sydney Freeland: On a basic level I wanted to tell a story about the people and places I knew growing up. However, the reservation is also a very diverse and dynamic place. I wanted to try to tap into some of that, but it was difficult to do with one character. It was around this time that I first saw Amores Perros. That film had a big effect on me and it led to the creation of the three main characters in Drunktown. They all represent different extremes in the community, and they all interact and intersect with each other.

Felixia is a rare character in the world of cinema. Why was she chosen to represent LGBT issues on the reservation?
Well, the short answer is because I'm trans myself. I felt like I had a familiarity with the struggles that character was going through and I felt like I had a good jumping off point. In addition, I met Carmen Moore fairly early in the writing process. When I saw her for the first time I was like "That's Felixia!" From that point on I knew that character had to be in the film.

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Transgender awareness is reaching a new level of media attention. You recently shared with a broader audience that you identify as trans. Did you share this with others beforehand? In what way did the film impact your want to share this with a broader community, or are they linked?
Things have reached a level I never could have imagined. I actually transitioned over ten years ago and if you would have told me back then that trans awareness would have the level of exposure it has now I would have said you were crazy. But as far as sharing with others, it was kind of tough. Obviously my family knew, but the struggle has always been how/when/if to tell people. I still don't think I've quite figured it out, but my hope is that the more that LGBT issues are discussed and publicized the less of an issue it will become.

You address the third and fourth gender belief of Navajo culture in this film. When were you first exposed to this concept?
I was born and raised on the reservation, but I didn't know about this part of the culture. When I moved to San Francisco I met a trans woman who, when finding out I was Navajo, was like "Wow, it must be like paradise for trans people." I didn't know what she was talking about at the time but that led me to find out. I guess it's kind of ironic that I had to leave the reservation to learn about my own culture.

How did you choose to draw the line between your own experiences and narrative fiction?
There are only two things in the film that I took directly from my own life. One is a story that Sick Boy tells and the other is a scene involving a meth head and a dead horse. The rest of the story is fiction.

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How does this film defy the traditional perception of life on a reservation?
That's a tough question. It was never a goal to try and change anybody's perception. My goal was to be as honest as I could with the story and its characters.

It's been a year since the film premiered at Sundance. What's happened since?
From a personal standpoint, I remember going into the festival last year with this feeling like I didn't have a frame of reference for what I was going through. But so much has changed even in the past 12 months. I think the biggest events for me were seeing Laverne Cox on the cover of TIME, and watching Transparent for the first time. I found both of those experiences to be incredibly empowering.

What do you hope people take away from the film?
It may sound off given the subject matter of the film, but I hope people enjoy themselves.

Drunktown's Finest will run at NYC's QuadCinema twice daily for one week, starting February 20, 2015.

Follow David Graver on Twitter.

The Academy Awards turns the streets of Los Angeles into a ghost town. Almost everyone is inside huddled around TVs watching the show—everyone aside from the mob of people standing outside on Hollywood Boulevard. People start lining up outside Dolby Theater as early as 5 AM, sticking their cameras through the chain-link fence and attempting to catch a glimpse of some celebrity far, far in the distance. Even if you squint, you can barely see the red carpet.

This year, there were a few thousand people stretched out. There was a bomb threat. When it started pouring, people still didn't disperse—they just put on ponchos and soldiered on. Here are a few scenes from the crowd yesterday.

See more of Michelle's photography on her website and on Instagram.

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Barry and Natalia in 'Resident Evil Revelations 2'

I don't know. You wait three years for a Resident Evil game, and then two come along at once. Neither being the one you really wanted, but both scratching the itch that the Class of Generation Seven never truly reached.

Resident Evil needed the break. 2012 drained the franchise of what relevance it had left as a legitimate survival horror experience with a sixth main entry that aimed for "greatest hits" appeal but left many cold with its three intersecting campaigns. It wasn't intimidating in any way—a problem that the series has arguably suffered since the Terminator-like persistence of the Nemesis in sequel number two, and that came out over 15 years ago.

Resi 6 featured several scenes of pure lunacy—oh, my, Jake's entire motorcycle getaway—and what it lacked in frights it compensated for with utterly stupid action. The same year's Operation Raccoon City, though? An abomination of a game, mailed to the press in bundles so that reviewers would try its multiplayer modes with their friends. I tried passing my "spare" copies along, and I lost friends.

But right at the start of 2012, there was the suggestion that Resi had rediscovered its macabre mojo. Resident Evil: Revelations came out on Nintendo's 3DS (and was subsequently ported to consoles and Windows), its ghost ship setting evocative of the first game's Spencer Mansion, all tight corners, claustrophobic corridors, and immoveable cardboard boxes. It aimed for survival horror over action and adventure, and through using an episodic structure managed to maintain tension over short timeframes with some success. It was far and away the best Resi of 2012.

It's no surprise that Capcom has returned to Revelations for a sequel, which this time is released in downloadable weekly installments (for Sony and Microsoft consoles, and Windows), giving players a TV series-like fix of zombie-brain popping. There'll be four in total, commencing on February 24 in the US, and the 25 in Europe and Japan, with a retail compilation version available once episode four has been released into the wild. At a preview event in London, I got my hands on a modest slice of episode one's campaign, which is split between two playable protagonists, both series veterans: Claire Redfield, around since 1998's Resident Evil 2, and Barry Burton, who appeared in 1996's original game. I play as Barry, and first impressions are disappointing.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/RdwbyAnujVE' width='560' height='315']

'Resident Evil Revelations 2' trailer

Armed to the teeth, Barry shows up at an island to rescue his daughter, Moira. But the first friendly face he meets is that of the (actually rather creepy) Natalia Korda, an orphan girl aged maybe nine or ten, eager to hop aboard Bazza's boat and get the fuck away from this scab of land in the middle of watery nowhere. Like the first Revelations, the implication is isolation, of inescapable horrors: surrounded by the sea, would you rather face those dark depths or sustain the dread that creeps through the halls of this abandoned (or, as it turns out, still rather populated) experimental facility?

Almost immediately it's clear that Bad Shit has happened here, and scattered notes tell of tortured kids having limbs removed—one of the reasons why presenting itself at the climax of the preview. And it's clear that Capcom has been paying attention to critical hits released between its Resi entries. When Barry's hunkered down, slowly and silently making his way past vacant-eyed science projects gone zombified, backpack bobbing and child companion by his side, the game is positively screaming: we really like The Last of Us. You can take control of Natalia to spot trinkets and ammo, and squeeze her through small openings in order to unlock doors for Barry. You know how this kind of gameplay goes—we've seen it hundreds of times before.

Revelations 2 feels as fresh as its decaying nasties, then, and spending 40 minutes in the company of Barry and his frequently wandering colleague is deadening. It's exhausting, for all the wrong reasons: trite and tired, and on PS4 it's doing nothing whatsoever to push the hardware. After navigating some gentle puzzles and beheading a slew of shuffling unfortunates who just want a lift off the island too but have a bad habit of asking with a bite, Barry comes face to face with a Revenant, the game's headline ugly and the result of all that documented dismemberment. It's barely a boss fight, though—a speedier, freakier monster than what we've seen before, but offering little threat from a distance and soon dispatched with an assault rifle.

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The original 'Resident Evil' is out now in shiny HD

That marks the end of the campaign preview, but Revelations 2 carried over its predecessor's Raid mode, challenging the player to take on a series of small missions, the success of which depends on meeting certain objectives. So it's into that we go. It's fast and—get this—fun, albeit of strictly shallow appeal. Pick your arsenal and upgrade your perks between stages; eliminate a designated amount of varied enemies (and stages) plucked from the Resi archives; and collect medals based on how well you did. More medals mean more levels. I played six missions in all, and none lasted longer than ten minutes—a perfect length for blowing off steam. Unless you run out of ammo, as I did right at the end. Then, it just blows.

I refuse to write Revelations 2's campaign off just because I didn't click with Barry—if it ultimately builds on the first Revelations, it'll be worth the opening tedium I played through. And Raid mode's generally great, with some ripping music that recalls 90s highs from Sega's Sonic Team. I'm cautiously hopeful, but the biggest handicap the game faces is timing: quite perversely, it comes out immediately after an HD remaster of the GameCube port of the first Resi. Which, let's be fair, is the Resident Evil you're getting if you're either a survival horror purist, after some gaming history, or someone with common goddamn sense.

This column original appeared in Volume #22, Issue 1 of VICE magazine (UK), details here.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Artwork by Nick Scott

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

About two years ago I moved in with my boyfriend of three years. We were gross—the kind of couple you hate standing behind in a line. I couldn't walk down the street without being attached to him in some way. He was my first love, and I'll never forget or be able to fully explain the feeling of wholeness just walking around with him brought me.

Moving in together felt amazing. One Sunday afternoon we made a proper IKEA trip in a rent-a-van, and hurtling back along the dual carriageway to our new flat with loads of bed sheets, plants, and a massive Expedit in the back might be the happiest I've ever felt. The radio wasn't tuning properly, but we kept getting crackly snippets of "Alone" by Heart. It was ace. We weren't just playing grown-ups—we were grown ups.

He went out loads. He always did. In the beginning I thought it was really fun and would tag along with this exotic, curly-haired creature, desperate to share his energy. I'd go halves on wraps with him to try to stay up with him and his friends, despite being ready to go home at about midnight most evenings. I didn't want to be the geeky, lightweight new boyfriend—I wanted to be part of his crowd. It made my bones hurt I loved him so much. We fucked several times a day, and I remember him saying once, after we'd finished and were still lying on the floor, "If I could stay like this 24/7, I would."

We both had day jobs, but his stamina was unearthly. He'd go out seven nights a week if he could, whereas I'd be happy going out only a couple of nights. Eventually I stopped tagging along, with his reassurance that it was just something he "needed to get out of his system" before he "got old." We were both pushing 30, but I tried not to be judgmental, and for about six months he totally calmed down. It felt really promising.

Everything was great until, after about a year of living together, he went through this mad going-out phase again. He'd cut back on the coke in a big way, but I kept noticing that, when he came in late, he'd fall asleep with his jaw grinding. I grew to hate him on the stuff—it made him defensive and righteous and, for days after, really depressed. He couldn't handle it like he used to, and the comedowns got worse.

We stopped having great sex about a year after moving in together, which was awful, because sex was always our "thing." We did cursory, urge-satisfying handjobs every few days but didn't really kiss when we did it. The spark had gone, and it was purely perfunctory. I asked him if he was fucking anyone else, and he said no. I believed him—I'd always been completely faithful, and we'd always made a big deal of monogamy. We hated seeing gay couples around us having "open" relationships that ultimately ended in jealousy and constant guilty trips to STI clinics.

Turns out I was stupid to believe him. I found out from a friend-of-a-friend that someone had seen him with another guy at a house party I knew nothing about. When I confronted him one evening after we both got back from work, he was initially indignant, screaming about how "fucking cynical" I was and how he'd never jeopardize what we had. Eventually, though, he came clean and said he'd "messed around" with someone a few times. My stomach dropped to my knees, and I said I'd had enough. I loved him, but he couldn't grow up.

Still, he promised to go and see someone—about the drinking, about coke, and about us. He begged me to change my mind, but in my heart I knew we'd run our course. The beautiful, hedonistic boy I'd fallen in love with wasn't going to change for me, nor should he have to. After one of our final arguments I told him to leave. We went to bed that night in tears, but I felt like a weight had shifted—I didn't have to pretend to be OK with a lifestyle that had become so alien to me.

In the middle of the night I woke up to him pressed right up behind me, gripping my chest. I held his hands and said, "It's all right, you'll be OK," thinking he was upset, and felt him breathing hard into the back of my neck. His breath smelt of Red Stripe and toothpaste, and he was really hard. What happened next was a bit of a blur. He reached around to touch me, and every time I pushed his hand away, he just kept trying. I'd not felt his need for sex like this in so long, so it was a massive jolt. I got hard, but mentally knew it was wrong to do anything—he'd be leaving in a few days, and it'd only get complicated. I told him to stop.

He started scratching at my stomach, to the point where I shouted out in pain, and then flipped me onto my front. He was 6'2" and a lot stronger than me. I was shouting at him to stop, that I didn't want to do it, but he overpowered me, holding my arms by my sides and forcing the backs of my thighs down with his knees—something I used to love him doing, ironically. I stopped struggling—there was no way I was going to get him off me. Then he raped me. He must have lasted less than a minute—if that—but it was incredibly painful and made me scream. Then he pulled his boxers up, put his clothes on, and left. I knew that I hadn't wanted him to penetrate me and that what had just happened was wrong, but I just fell asleep, face down in the bed. I was exhausted.

My friend urged me to go to the police, but I never did. I didn't want to go to court and talk about what happened, nor did I want everyone knowing.

I woke up about 12 hours later and immediately called him. He didn't answer. I must have called him 100 times, leaving voicemails and sending texts saying, "Call me. We need to talk about what happened last night," and eventually he texted back, a few hours later, saying, "Well, we needed to do it one last time, didn't we?" I called again, and he didn't answer. So I texted back: "'We' didn't do anything. You forced yourself on me, hurt me, and then left." To which he replied, instantly, "I'm so, so sorry I hurt you, but you used to love having sex with me and I just couldn't stand the idea of not being like that with you again before I left. I thought you wanted me?"

In the coming weeks, I tried to put it to the back of my mind. We used to be so in love, I thought—maybe I was overreacting? We also used to be quite rough with each other during sex, so maybe the fact that I was hard made him think that I had wanted him to do that to me?

Months passed before I told anyone. I would forget about it sometimes, to be honest, but when a female friend came round to watch TV one night I ended up telling her, setting it up with the, "I don't know if I'm overreacting, but..." line. She looked horrified and said, "Danny,* he raped you." I sort of shrugged and said, "Nah, it wasn't violent, per se—he was just really horny." She persisted, saying, "No, you told him to stop and he didn't. He raped you. You have to tell someone about this," at which point I burst into tears. I hadn't really cried for him with anyone—I'd cried alone, obviously, but this was the first time I'd broken down in front of a friend. "Fuck," I said. "My boyfriend raped me."

My friend urged me to go to the police, but I never did. I didn't want to go to court and talk about what had happened, nor did I want everyone knowing. I also had no idea how the police would deal with a sexual assault that happened between two men who'd previously been in a loving relationship. What language would two young policeman in an East London police station have for that? What if they were quietly prejudiced themselves? What conversations happen at a constitutional level about rape within gay relationships? Certainly none that I've heard.

The one friend I told promised, after several heated arguments, not to tell anyone. I have no idea if she did or not, but, to this day, there's only a very small handful of people who know—including my mom, who respected the way I wanted to deal with it, despite saying she'd support me whatever I decided to do.

Sexual assault is unforgivable. It is gender-less and orientation-less, a violation of another person's body. Just because you're a man, and you respond to the touch of someone you love, doesn't make assault any less serious.

The issue I have with going to the police is: at what point will someone say, "This happened a long time ago now—what do you want us to do?" And I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. I have no screaming urge for my ex-boyfriend to be locked up, and I don't want to have to give evidence or talk about something that, to an extent, I've come to terms with. I don't want to be labeled as "The Boy Who Was Raped by Another Boy" for the rest of my life.

I have a new boyfriend now and told him pretty early on about an "incident" that happened with my ex that made me weird about having full sex again, but we're getting there. He didn't pry too much but has said that if anything severe happened I should have gone to—or should go to—the police. That he'd always be ready to listen.

My ex-boyfriend eventually answered my calls (I tried a couple of times a week) recently and agreed to meet me. We met in the park on a freezing day and sat on a bench. I just blurted out, "We need to talk about you assaulting me," and he burst into tears. Massive, loud sobs. He said he'd thought about it a lot and realized that, even if for a split second he believed I wanted him to do that to me, he shouldn't have got "carried away" and should have just stopped. He said again and again how sorry he was, swore on my life that he'd been safe with the other guy he had fooled around with, and that he couldn't believe my last physical memory of him was such a forceful, painful thing, and that he would regret it for the rest of his life.

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Artwork by Nick Scott

When I told him that I should probably go to the police he looked like he was about to gag. "Do what you need to do," he said. In that minute I could feel his remorse. He was never violent to me throughout our relationship. I never feared him. Our sex was pretty on-the-edge, until we stopped doing it, and I genuinely believed that he was sorry. He said he had no idea what came over him to do what he did. I agreed and, after he got up from the bench, said I never wanted to see him again. He just kept saying, "Whatever you want, whatever you want," and eventually got up and walked away. I knew that unless I bumped into him, this was it.

I told the friend who made me confront what happened that I'd made the only peace I was ever going to make of what had happened, that I'd seen "him" and that it was enough for me. She was incredibly angry, telling me that he shouldn't get away with it, that I should press charges to set a precedent. She's almost certainly right, but selfishly, I suppose, I just don't want to be defined by what happened, and that is my right. I dealt with it and actually feel OK now.

I haven't spoken to my ex since that day in the park and deleted all trace of him from my life on social media, etc., but I know him, and I know what happened will be imprinted on his brain forever. Maybe on some level I am doing wrong by whoever he might end up with in the future, but I have owned my experience the best that I can. I had some private counseling sessions at the beginning of my new relationship, and that's enough for me. For now. I don't know how I'll feel in the future.

As it stands, I am comfortable living my life without the ghost of what happened haunting me. I'm pretty good. I know I have the power to go to the police if and when I want to, but for me, the idea of going into a court room to face something I have more or less psychologically dealt with is not what I want at the moment. And that is my right.

Sexual assault is unforgivable. It is gender-less and orientation-less, a violation of another person's body. Just because you're a man, and you respond to the touch of someone you love, doesn't make assault any less serious. If anyone—gay, straight, whatever—says "no" in a sexual encounter, it has to be enough to make it stop. If it's not, and the person carries on, that is assault. There are no gray areas.

The reason I wanted to speak about my experience on a public platform, though, is to urge anyone who has experienced anything similar to tell someone—a friend, a relative, anyone you can trust. I'm fortunate that I had the means, psychologically, to deal with it in the way that I did, and to talk to my ex-boyfriend about it face to face. But not everyone will be able to do that.

I would plead with anyone who's been sexually assaulted in similar circumstances to tell someone you trust, and don't ever, ever pretend that it's not a big deal. Context is irrelevant if you've said "no." These things might happen in the dark, but they should never be kept that way.

*Names have been changed.

If you think you or a loved one has been victim of a sexual assault, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline.

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For the past few weeks New England has been hit with a deluge of snow—about 100 inches, if you're counting—and it looks like the region will remain a giant icebox until March. The series of storms and the resulting accumulation of snow has led to collapsed buildings and deaths, and though for most people the weather hasn't led to catastrophe it's altered their day-to-day routines in serious ways.

We asked photographer Irina Rozovsky to take pictures of how her town of Boston is dealing with the weather, so she spent the weekend walking her dog Gosha around and taking pictures on her iPhone. This is what she came back with:

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Irina Rozovsky is a photographer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. See more of her work on her website.

[body_image width='866' height='619' path='images/content-images/2015/02/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/20/' filename='leaking-the-swiss-leaks-body-image-1424432346.png' id='29397']Photo via Wiki Commons.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This month, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a report titled Swiss Leaks: Murky Cash Sheltered by Bank Secrecy, which alleged that the private Swiss subsidiary of British bank HSBC had been knowingly profiting from the tax evasion of wealthy clients.

Since the BBC reported that HSBC pressured certain British media partners not to report on the scandal, the investigation has sparked a few public spats. Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, resigned over the incident, claiming that the Telegraph had suppressed reports of wrongdoing in order to maintain advertising income from HSBC. The Daily Telegraph made it clear they "make no apology," before launching an attack first on the Guardian, then publishing a "vile and unjustified" story trying to link two suicides within the Times' commercial department with "pressure to hit targets."

In case you were wondering how such an enormous investigation—which involved more than 130 journalists—started off, evolved, and was published, we talked to Gerard Ryle, head of the ICIJ offices in Washington, DC, and one of the coordinators of the leaks.

VICE: What can you tell us about how an investigation like this starts out?
Gerard Ryle: For the Swiss leaks investigation, it started thanks to raw information. Many reporters around the world have been aware for years that the former HSBC employee Hervé Falciani had stolen information from the bank. He had publicly claimed this material was of enormous public interest. Just like others, we followed his story and watched as first France and then Belgium and then Argentina launched inquiries, based on his information after he turned whistle-blower. Many journalists approached Falciani to get access to the material, but they were always rebuffed.

How did you finally persuade him?
Through a contact, we found out two journalists from Le Monde—Gerard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme—had got access to a version of the data. We have worked with Le Monde many times in the past, so I naturally approached Le Monde asking for access to the material. The negotiations took several weeks, but eventually we were granted access.

It was then that the real work began, at least at our end. Gerard and Fabrice came to Washington to give us the material and to explain what they had discovered from looking at it. We agreed on the terms of cooperation with Le Monde editors.

What did you do next?
Our first task was to scour the material and determine if it was in the public interest to reveal it. The material was organized by ICIJ's data team into a searchable format—a tool that could be accessed by selected reporters around the world, using encrypted methods. After further weeks of work, we decided that we had seen enough in the material to warrant public interest.

At that point, we took several further steps. We began inviting selected reporters to Washington to look at the material, to get further opinions on its public interest. That process began with a reporter from the BBC's Panorama program. Then a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, etc. Each reporter, in turn, found the material to be of public interest.

At the end of that stage we reached out to dozens of media partners and invited them to a meeting, at their own expense, at Le Monde's offices in Paris. The group discussed the issues the material threw up, and we decided by the end of the day that we would publish the following February.

How do you get in contact with sources, and how do you protect your source?
Depending on the level of secrecy needed, we use different methods. If at all possible, we meet sources in person. The source of this material was a source of Gerard and Fabrice, from Le Monde. As a general rule, it is best to meet a source early so that you can help them protect themselves. All too often sources are discovered by actions they take well before they reach out to journalists.

How do you investigate while maintaining the secrecy of your work?
The big misunderstanding about obtaining leaked material is that people think it's easy—that all you have to do is report on the documents. Nothing could be further from reality. The documents are just the beginning. ICIJ undertook old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting in multiple countries. It pored over public records to provide context to the documents it saw, including corporate filings, property records, financial disclosures, and documents produced by lawsuits and regulatory and criminal investigations. All of these things can be done without disclosing what triggered your inquiries.

Are you ever afraid of the consequences of such investigations?
We weigh up very carefully all consequences, but we always proceed by what we believe is in the public interest.

Are you happy about how investigations into HSBC's alleged wrongdoings are developing?
We just concern ourselves with the story. It is now up to authorities to act, if they decide to act.

Has the ICIJ or have you ever been threatened after you came public with an investigation?
Never personally, no. We have received legal letters, as any media organizations do, and our lawyers deal with legal complaints if we get them.

What is the most dangerous situation the ICIJ has ever been confronted with?
It is a rather boring answer, but the truth is, our only danger is in making sure our stories are correct. We employ American magazine-style fact checking for each story. That means footnoting every fact and employing a professional fact checker to go through every fact before publication. We also go far beyond most media in reaching out to people we intend to name to make sure we put those facts in the correct context.

Do you collaborate with authorities of the countries you are investigating in? If not, why not?
The long-standing policy of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—and our parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity—is not to turn over such material. The ICIJ is not an arm of law enforcement and is not an agent of the government. We are an independent reporting organization, served by and serving our members, the global investigative journalism community, and the public.

The Swiss leaks, the Luxembourg leaks, the investigation into the global offshore maze—your investigative projects always aim at big targets. Can you hint at what's coming next?
We're about to reveal a major story in March that has nothing to do with tax havens. It concerns global aid program that are aimed at helping poor people. We found they, in fact, often do the opposite. All of our stories have to be global. They have to cross borders.

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Darold Treffert thinks we all possess repressed talents. Via YouTube.

Jason Padgett never displayed any interest in math growing up. In fact, he hated the subject in school. But in 2002, the futon salesman was mugged while leaving a karaoke bar in Tacoma, Washington. As a result of a severe concussion he suffered during the incident, he started seeing everything in fractals and began talking incessantly about pi. He's one of about 30 known cases of "acquired savant syndrome"—a condition in which people become geniuses after getting bonked in the head.

Darold Treffert, a researcher with the Wisconsin Medical Society, has devoted his life to studying savants, with a significant portion dedicated to Padgett and other people who have mysteriously developed Rain Man–like qualities following trauma. His latest article on the subject was just reprinted in a collector's edition of Scientific American, so I called him up to discuss what's new in the field of savant syndrome research.

VICE: How did you get into studying savants?
Darold Treffert: I met my first savant in '62. I had just completed my residency in psychiatry, and I was assigned the responsibility of starting a children's unit in Wisconsin. There were about 800 patients there and about 20 or so of those were under 18 and so we gathered them again and started a unit for autism. And in that unit of the first 20 patients, there were three that caught my attention. One lad had memorized the bus system of the city of Milwaukee, and if you told him the bus number and the time of day, he would tell you what corner you were standing on in Milwaukee. Another guy was mute and severely impaired and yet you could put a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle on the table in front of him picture-side-down and he'd put it together. The third guy was sort of a walking almanac of "What happened on this day in history?"

What, neurologically, makes a savant?
What happens is that there is an injury to one part of the brain—most often the left hemisphere. And there is what I called a recruitment of still-intact brain issue elsewhere. The brain seeks to correct the imbalance and will find an undamaged area, most often in the right hemisphere. There is then rewiring to that new area and then there is the release of dormant potential, which can be at sometimes an astronomical level. So it's the three R's: recruitment of still-intact tissue, rewiring, and the release of whatever capacity is there.

Most savants have abilities in music, in art, in something called calendar calculator, lightning-quick calculating, or visual/spatial skills. In the case of what I call the congenital savant, which is when the abilities surface in childhood, which is most often the case, that the damage is during pregnancy or early childhood.

In brain scans, what separates a savant from a "normal" genius? Or a prodigy?
It turns out that prodigy and genius and savant syndrome are very close together. The difference being that by definition a savant has some neurological damage with a compensatory skill. In the genius, you don't find the neurological damage or any kind of tradeoff. Nowadays there seems to be a tendency when you see somebody who's exceedingly bright to think, "Oh he must be a savant." No, prodigies and geniuses are separate [from savants].

The problem is that savant syndrome is very rare, and they're scattered around the world instead of in one place. So I think we need to have what I call a savant institute to which savants, prodigies, and geniuses could come in large enough numbers so we could really compare and contrast them and find out what exactly what the difference is neurologically, if there even is one. If you look at the difference between a genius and a savant in a CT scan when your'e looking at anatomy alone, there really are no differences. The differences are gonna show up in functional MRIs. I guess the answer is, we'll find out and we're looking.

Assuming we all have a dormant capacity [to become savant-like], which I think we do, how can we tap that without having a concussion or a stroke or some other kind of brain injury? I think we can make ourselves smarter based on dormant capacity, but the question is how to do that without having some sort of central nervous system incident. And that's where I'm spending most of my time now.

How far are scientists from making all of us geniuses?
I don't know if you're familiar with Allan Snyder's work in Australia, but he uses whats called RTMS, which is a rapid pulsation that you can apply to the scalp and actually immobilize an area of the brain with electrical currents. It's used in neurology to discover the source of epilepsy, so it's an accepted procedure. What he said was based largely on the work of Dr. [Bruce] Miller, who who studied 12 patients with dementia and discovered some of them developed some astounding abilities as their dementia proceeded. They tended to have lesions in the left temporal area. So Dr. Snyder said, "What if we took a group of volunteers and we immobilized parts of the left hemisphere temporarily? Would we see any special skills emerge?" He found subjects actually increased their abilities. So he's developed something he calls the Thinking Cap, which you can put on and use. So there may be some technological approaches to enhancement.

What other ways can we bring out our inner geniuses, besides newfangled contraptions?
In the long run, I don't think we're gonna have some striking technological solutions, although other disagree and feel there will be a capacity to turn on and turn off some of our abilities by using technology. Meditation is another method to access different circuity in the brain. And somebody wrote to be recently indicating that his idea was that the reason that a lot of people when they do retire pick up new skills is not just because they have the time, but the aging process itself is producing "brain damage" which is leading them into new areas of ability. And I think that's probably true.

If everyone became a genius through a medically-induced process, would the world descend into chaos?
I think the more that we access our hidden potential the better. We're not gonna all be Picassos or Mozarts or Einsteins. So I don't think that it would be a huge avalanche of new abilities in everyone. To the extent to which we are able to mobilize that would be very manageable and a good thing. I think we would still be a balanced society.

Wouldn't it at least defeat the point of art if everyone could put on a thinking cap and become a master pianist, for example?
The difference between before and after is evident, but it's not always as a prodigious level. Steven Wiltshire is a congenital savant, and he can spend 45 minutes flying over London and a week drawing it building by building and window by window. But that's rare, even among savants. I think that our differential endowment is gonna spare us some of that. Plus the trade-off. We'd have to come up with some kind of mechanism or a way that did not have a downside to it. And we're not there yet.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 outside of the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario. Photos by Desmond Cole

Under the Stephen Harper government, a person awaiting deportation from Canada is increasingly likely to end up in a medium or maximum security jail with hardened criminals rather than in an immigration holding centre. Tens of thousands of those migrants have been detained for non-criminal immigration issues, their main crime wanting to live in this country. And since Canada places no limit on the length of such detentions, those caught up in the system can languish in jail indefinitely.

Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 gave speeches expressing solidarity with all inmates at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario, but they came specifically to demand the release of nearly 150 migrant men who have been detained in the medium to maximum security jail, for months and even years at a time, as the federal border agency tries and fails to deport them. Many of the Lindsay detainees are from Toronto and the surrounding area, and families travel hours to see them for 20 minute visits behind glass walls. While immigration detentions spanning months and years are not the norm, they appear to be increasingly common; according to a report by the End Immigration Detention Network, which sponsored the rally, the federal government released only 15 percent of the migrants it jailed in 2013.

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Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 outside of the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario.

"Today is Family Day—I miss my Dad," said Melika Mojarrab, the teenage daughter of Masoud Hajivand, who has been detained in Lindsay for the past eight months while the government attempts to deport him to Iran. Hajivand, who publicly converted to Christianity from Islam, says he fears imprisonment, torture, or even death if he returns to Iran. "If Canada deports him to Iran, I will not be able to see him again. His life is in extreme danger." The federal government acknowledges that Iranian emigrants may face state persecution and torture if they return home, and our courts have reversed some recent deportations to Iran over safety and human rights concerns. For example, the feds halted the deportation of Iranian Fatemeh Tosarvandan in 2012 over fears she might be stoned to death over accusations of adultery. But Ottawa continues to pursue deportations to Iran and other countries that the United Nations and human rights groups consider unsafe.

The Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) enforces Canada's immigration rules, and detains migrants who lack the proper documentation to remain in Canada. In addition to concerns about sending migrants back to unsafe countries, the government is often unable to deport people because it cannot identify them, or because a migrant's home country refuses to acknowledge their citizenship and grant re-entry. Increasingly, people in these circumstances are being detained not in immigration facilities, but in costly jails. Families are split up, and Canadians pay to indefinitely detain migrants who have never even been charged with a crime. CBSA says the average cost of detaining one migrant in Canada is $239 a day—overall, the agency spends $54 million annually to detain migrants for non-criminal immigration matters.

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Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 outside of the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario.

Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 outside of the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario. Despite the fact that they couldn't enter the facility, organizers made contact with detainees through creativity and sheer volume. The parking lot rally included a call from inmates inside the jail—organizers amplified the call through a speaker and amplifier, and demonstrators hushed and leaned in to hear an inmate named Eric say, "We're happy that you guys came here today to support our solidarity... Keep doing what you are doing."

The group then marched along a path around the perimeter of the jail, in the shadow of a five meter barbed wire fence. They smashed pots and pans and drums, and lifted their voices towards the prison walls. When the demonstrators fell silent, they heard inmates banging on the windows and walls of the jail. Marchers chanted back, "We can hear you!" Several of the narrow windows contained the silhouettes of men with fists raised, jumping and saluting the crowd.

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Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 outside of the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario.

One of the men jumping with demonstrators was Martin Sisay; he was released from the Lindsay jail in February 2014 after more than three years of incarceration. Sisay, a native of Gambia, came to Canada from the United States in 2011 and was soon arrested for impaired driving. "I was sentenced to 15 days in prison, and I ended up serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence," said Sisay. Canada wanted to deport him to Gambia, where he has not lived since he was 12, but the country refused to recognize Sisay's citizenship.

The former inmate described the conditions inside the jail as "hell," with frequent lockdowns and poor access to health care and books. "I mean, you're incarcerated without a crime, so imagine that," he laughed. Sisay said he didn't expect special treatment, but couldn't understand why he needed to be separated from his wife and daughter over an immigration issue. "If you have criminals and murderers that are from this society, born and raised in Canada, that do time and get freed into society, I don't see why migrants cannot be."

Among the demonstrators were high school students from nearby Peterborough like Alecia Golding, who helped organize the rally after learning about migrant detentions. Golding, whose parents immigrated from Jamaica and England respectively, said a lot of her peers don't understand why she would brave the cold to fight for detained migrants. "They don't believe what I do is valid, because they don't know what it's like to suffer."

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Demonstrators at a Family Day rally on February 16 outside of the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario.

Golding said the amount of support at the rally was reassuring. "I hope that the rest of Canada will get educated that we elect governments that allow this system to exist."

End Immigration Detention Network, a group that has been advocating for the detained migrants since 2013, issued a statement on Family day demanding "an end to maximum security detention in provincial jails for migrants; a limit of 90 days that migrants can be held in detention pending deportation as per international best practices; and overhaul of the detention review process." EIDN maintains that the government is exploiting racist and xenophobic public sentiments to justify migrant detentions. "We all know who's in those jails: it's a lot of people from different parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America," said rally organizer Mina Ramos.

Demonstrators turned back for their cars and buses as the sun set on a -15 degree afternoon. A few stayed for hot soup and tea in the bone-chilling weather. As people finally retreated to their vehicles, Ramos encouraged them to stay connected with the Network's efforts. "This shit ain't over—it ain't over till everybody's free!"

Follow Desmond Cole on Twitter.

(We're putting the second season of our Emmy-winning HBO show online. Watch all the episodes that have gone up so far here.)

In the finale of our second season, we go to Camden, New Jersey—one of the poorest and most drug-ridden cities in the country. In an attempt to curb the spread of crime, the state of New Jersey has installed an experimental security apparatus equipped with futuristic technologies. Then we investigate the genocide that is still raging in Darfur, even though the global community has mostly stopped paying attention.

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Follow Gilbert Hernandez on Twitter and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly.

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The Health Centre in Roka. All images by the author

Roka is a rural village in Cambodia's northwest Battambang region nearly 200 miles from the capital of Phnom Penh. Like much of rural Cambodia, Roka often suffers from the outbreaks of various diseases, but a recent and mysterious wave of HIV cases has drawn the attention of international authorities. In December, a total of 1,940 residents were tested, and 233 had HIV—that's 12 percent, or about 30 times the national average.

As you'd expect in a predominantly Buddhist area, most of Roka's residents deny engaging in activities that are usually associated with HIV. The only constant between those infected is that many had received injections from a local unlicensed doctor named Yem Chrin.

The World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology, and STD investigated this correlation in January, concluding that "the percentage of people reported receiving an injection or intravenous injection as part of their health treatment was significantly higher among the people who tested positive for HIV."

The study also looked at other risk factors such as unprotected sex and injecting drug use, and found "no significant difference between the two groups."

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Yem Chrin's house remains locked up and empty since he was arrested

Chrin was distributing intravenous injections of what he described as "serum," but were found to be mostly glucose. After the report linked these injections with Roka's outbreak, Chrin was preliminarily charged with murder and detained. I found his house locked up and empty. His family had also left town, which is something the local chief of police attributes to stigma. "I've been told that villagers were very angry," he told me. "But I tell the infected villagers to take their medicine and avoid violence against the doctor's family."

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In another part of the village I met with 53-year-old Som Tan, who tested positive in December. As a construction worker, he earned five to eight dollars a day but is now incapable of providing for his family of five. "I am too weak," he said. "Even walking is difficult." He also explained that his friends no longer visit because they don't understand the disease. "They're scared and don't know what I have. They relate it to karma and think it's a bad sign so they stay away."

Next door to Tan is another man whose family has been tragically affected. 31-year-old Som Sokha's mother died but Sokha admitted that he's still not sure why. "She was infected a year ago," he told me. "She felt sick and went to see the unlicensed doctor for a serum injection, but the more she took the HIV medicine, the weaker she became. Soon she couldn't walk and wouldn't eat anymore."

Sokha explained that after battling the disease for a year she succumbed in early February. He and his wife, as well as two of their four children—an eight-year-old and their ten-month-old baby—have all tested positive for HIV.

Since Chrin's arrest, the Roka Health Centre has vowed to root out any other unlicensed doctors. "I have reported four unlicensed doctors," centre director Dr. Beng Sora told me. "The authorities had them sign a paper promising they would stop, and they did."

Despite this, Sora admitted he still wonders how their former doctor spread HIV intravenously. "The police say Mr. Chrin intentionally transmitted the virus to the villagers," he said. "In my heart, I believe the infection was caused by the injections he did. But I do not see why he'd do it intentionally or how the HIV virus would have survived more than 15 minutes without appropriate storage."

Indeed the leader of the World Health Organization's investigation team, Dr. Masami Fujita, told press recently that although the needles are "a major suspect," it's still unclear how so many people were affected.

While it's unknown how many more cases will be uncovered, NGOs on the ground are confident that most have been identified. Local organizations such as Buddhism for Development are now paying the travel costs for infected villagers to visit provincial hospitals while others educate villagers on transmission prevention.

Names of HIV sufferers have been changed

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Documents sent to VICE reporter Justin Ling

"We neither confirm nor deny that the records you requested exist. We are, however, advising you, as required by paragraph 10(1)(b) of the Act, that such records, if they existed, could reasonably be expected to be exempted."

Translation: we're not telling.

In January, VICE filed an Access to Information (ATI) request, asking for a slew of financial reports from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The specific documents we're after are invoices for thousands, if not millions of payments made from various law enforcement bodies to Canada's telecommunications companies.

For a decade, up until a surprise 2014 Supreme Court ruling, Canada's investigators made informal requests to the country's cellphone and internet providers for their customers' personal information. They never had to go to a judge to make those requests. As an incentive, police paid nominal amounts of money per request—$1.50 here, $10 there—that they wouldn't normally pay for requests authorized by a warrant.

A VICE investigation published in January revealed that Canada's federal police made hundreds of thousands of those requests, costing taxpayers some $1.6 million.

Canada's top court shut that down in June 2014, ruling that those searches were unconstitutional and that if police want information from telecommunications companies, they need to apply to a judge.

Police and the Harper government contended that the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or, PIPEDA, gave them the authority to do so. The court ruled that it did not. But they also argued that the searches were minimally intrusive, and that they were only ever requesting "phonebook information"—name, address, phone numbers.

However, VICE revealed last May that the searches weren't that simple: law enforcement was obtaining users' passwords and GPS coordinates, among other things.

CSIS was one client of the program, so VICE requested information on how much they paid out to cellphone and internet companies while citing its authority under PIPEDA.

They refused.

Citing sections of the Access to Information Act that allows departments to withhold information that they feel could be injurious to ongoing investigations and/or "the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities," CSIS refused to acknowledge if the documents VICE requested even exist.

CSIS pointed to three different sections of the act to bolster its refusal to fork over the documents, but did not explain how disclosing financial documents on a mass warrantless access program could feasibly harm its investigative abilities. It's also unclear why the RCMP could disclose the information but why CSIS cannot.

Under the act, "subversive or hostile activities" are defined as espionage, sabotage, terrorism, hijacking, spying for a foreign state, or violent activism." As guidelines set out by the Treasury Board state, "the exemption may be invoked only for the specific activities listed in the definition."

The guidelines also state that, for a department to claim that releasing information could hurt an investigation, the information it is releasing has to have come from that investigation—that is, CSIS could refuse to hand over information it obtained from the cell phone companies but not, seemingly, documents relating to the general program.

VICE did not ask for any documents about specific investigations.

CSIS is the spy agency that is about to be given broad new powers by the Conservatives' new anti-terrorism legislation, C-51. Critics of the bill have underlined the fact that there is a complete lack of adequate oversight of the spy agency. The spooks' review body, SIRC, has frequently been frustrated by a refusal of the agency to hand over various documents. Last year's annual report dropped words like "intolerable misrepresentation" and "disturbing," in referring to CSIS' refusal to provide documents to the high-security-clearance committee.

Vincent Gogolek, Executive Director of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, says that "CSIS seems to respond to everything that way right now."

He adds that, if the information requested directly pertained to an investigation—like a receipt for a hotel booking with a CSIS agent's name—it's reasonable for the agency to exempt the information. But, he says, "it normally would have to be just that specific."

The exemption that CSIS is requesting here, however, appears to be too broad, he says.

Gogolek points out that the RCMP is using the same excuse to avoid releasing its case files on former NDP leader Tommy Douglas, citing those documents as "operationally sensitive."

VICE has filed a complaint to the Office of the Information Commissioner, who has the power to investigate and mediate cases where the government is obfuscating their duty to release information. They have, in the past, even sued the federal government to get documents released.

The Commissioner's office, however, is drastically under-funded.

Speaking before a committee in December, Suzanne Legault, the Commissioner, told Members of Parliament that she had just $37,000 in funds left for the rest of the fiscal year (another four months.) Legault told the committee she has a backlog of 2,200 complaints, while the influx of files to her office is rapidly increasing.

Meanwhile, the minister responsible for the Access to Information regime, Tony Clement, told VICE in January that everything is a-okay.

"Canadians' right to access is healthy right now," Clement said.

"I'm quite willing to take credit for that. Our government is willing to take credit for that."

When an independent group graded Canada's ATI system, it got an F.

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Big Daddy's is a popular Bourbon Street strip club. Photo via Flickr user Fuzzy Gerdes

It's 3 AM on February 12, the Thursday before Mardi Gras. Rick's Cabaret, an upscale strip club on Bourbon Street, isn't busy, but it's not exactly dead, either. Camilla, a tall brunette in her early 30s, is smoking and relaxed. She isn't trying to sell me a dance, having already had a good night, including a half-hour in a private room with the genial contractor my friend Kate is currently toying with.

"It's usually OK until Saturday. Sunday's very hit or miss," Camilla tells me. "Girls who've worked Mardi Gras before know not to work Monday or Tuesday. It's dead in here. Everyone's outside."

While we're talking, a girl is clenched high on the pole doing crunches. "She's bored right now, she's just working out," Camilla says. I'm surprised. The street is crawling with men drunk enough to run into me, hard. "Rick's is businessmen, the conventions, the Microsoft guys. During Mardi Gras, the crowd is very different," Camilla says. "Guys aren't paying $1,000 for a private hour. It's more of a party crowd."

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the party around which the rest of the year rotates. It's bigger than Christmas, and bigger than New Years. New Orleans has an estimated population of about 380,000, and typical Mardi Gras attendance is 1.4 million. For a week, the city is a Carnival island. New Orleanians joke that there could be a presidential coup and no one here would know or care. The streets are filled with people in meticulous costumes walking around next to half-naked partiers. There are parades for families, parades for dogs, parades for gutter punks and hipsters, not to mention the gauntlets of tourists trading beads for boobs along Bourbon street.

Tulane University estimated the financial impact of last year's festival at $465 million, but what I wanted to know is whether the city's sex economy feels the same boost as the rest of New Orleans.

Helena,* the founding member of the New Orleans Sex Workers Outreach Project (who gives her age as "none of your beezwax") says it depends who you're asking.

"People don't come alone to Mardi Gras to find a hooker," she tells me. "And same with any big special event. [During the] Super Bowl, nobody works—I mean hooking, that is."

She's painting her nails on my porch on Monday morning, or Lundi Gras as it's known during Carnival. It's the calm before the storm: the parades start around noon.

"You come down and get a hooker when you're alone or on a business trip or at a convention," Helena says. "People are more interested in the parades, 'cause that's what they come to Mardi Gras for."

She knows you can make money dancing: "Stripping's another story, I'm sure they make a lot of money. Actually, I know they do, 'cause I know people who don't even dance anymore who were dancing last week. So it's worth it."

Where you work is important, which explains why Camilla doesn't feel the same bump. "If you're wasted enough to go to a strip club when you wouldn't normally, you probably aren't going to go to one of the nice fancy ones," Helena continues. "They're expensive to get into. You're going to go wander into Big Daddy's, 'cause it's about just being at the strip club, not about, I need the highest in quality. I only want girls without ANY tattoos who wear floor-length gowns before they take them off."

Big Daddy's is on Bourbon Street, next door to its original location, which was famous for the swinging legs at the entrance. Like all strip clubs on Bourbon, a single woman is prohibited from entering. One doorman explains why he won't let me in: "What if you're a jealous wife and you hit someone with a bottle?"

The day I can't talk my way into a naked lady club while wearing a sequin jumper is the day I hang it up. In a stroke of luck, I recognize the flamboyant suit of someone I saw earlier that evening at uptown club Tipitina's . He's a doctor from New Zealand. After a bit of flirting, he escorts me in.

But he and his friends leave soon after, citing the prices. "A lap dance is standard $20, in Vegas, anywhere, and here it's $40," he tells me. "It's not an increase in service, it's because they think they can get it. It's outrageous, but because it's Mardi Gras, people will pay it."

I buy a dance from Molly, a pretty, curvaceous woman of 36, who works every Mardi Gras. That day, she had sold about eight dances and four champagne rooms. There are about 30 girls on, where normally it's 12 to 15. I look around, only seeing ten on the floor. "The rest are up in the private rooms," she says. Private rooms are where a dancer makes her real money. Carnival is a different crowd, which is challenging. "Single guys are better, 'cause groups of guys are cock blockers," Molly says.

Though the money is good, the week carries risks. "It's hard to get home, there are no cabs," Molly says. The year before, she was almost robbed. "A girl grabbed me by my hair and asked for my purse. There was $1,200 in there, my whole night. I tried to get away but her boyfriend was there too. All of Bourbon Street was watching and no one did anything about it." Friends of hers from a different club eventually came to the rescue.

Trudie, a blonde wearing a vinyl nurse costume and beauty queen hair, is counting her money. It's almost time to go home. She confirms that safety is a concern, but says that the city has responded to the dangers.

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Photo via Flickr user Miguel Descart

"They beef up security. They bring big football lights so Bourbon Street is lit up. State troopers in from all over. There are more undercovers with beads, plastic cups—you can't tell, but they're cops. They've been really good about keeping it safe with the guns and the drugs." She mentions that the club security is good, too, making eye contact with the floor manager sitting five feet away.

For her, the bigger issue is the hours. Shifts are longer during the season, from one in the afternoon to six in the morning. "You can make more money, but it's so long. We're pulling 17 hours, so you just get body-tired. By the end you definitely feel it." She likes the pageantry, though: "It's good to take your beads even though we're all from here. And it's a break in conversation. No matter how thin, fat, old, young, what country you're from, Happy Mardi Gras!"

Molly enjoys it too, on balance. "Last year me and another girl were making guys show us their penises for beads," she tells me.

Extraordinary alcohol consumption affects all sex work during Carnival. Helena used to dance, but dislikes the dishonesty. She says, "When people are next-level drunk, they can be convinced to part with their money. It isn't like they're willing to spend, which is sad. I don't like having to do that."

She tells me about the one time she took an escort booking on Mardi Gras.

"It was a couple—the woman hired me. It took me forever to get there because it was across the parade route. By the time I got out there I was well over an hour late and they were trashed and I realized it was a surprise. She kept yelling. I got you! I got you motherfucker! You didn't think I was going to do it! I got you! and he was like, Ooohh—OK? And she was like, Fuck her, Fuck her! And I was like I'm here, hey... And he was like, No, I just want to see y'all... do it.

"They were cute, but it was more trouble than it was worth."

*Names have been changed.

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This weekend, about 50 people protested the February 10 shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Washington, by shutting down traffic on a bridge. Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old homeless Mexican immigrant who may have been mentally ill, was initially confronted by the cops after allegedly throwing rocks at police and passing cars, but he was otherwise unarmed and may have been fleeing when he was shot. The last moments of Zambrano-Montes's life were captured on cell-phone video by a 21-year-old college student named Dario Infante Zuniga.

Zuniga's recording certainly appears to show officers Ryan Flanagan, Adam Wright, and Adrian Alaniz firing at Zambrano-Montes right after he starts toward them before chasing him across the street and finishing him off. (The cops reportedly tried to use a stun gun, but it didn't work.)

Local officials have an explosive situation on their hands. Hispanics make up a majority of the population but are barely represented on the police force. And this incident represents the fourth police killing in the past year. But since Zambrano-Montes reportedly struck two officers with rocks—and had a history of bizarre confrontations with cops—the legal argument that he was a threat to life and limb is likely to carry the day in court.

Garner vs. Tennessee (1985) restricts the use of deadly force on a fleeing suspect, yet because Zambrano-Montes turned back the toward police right before the fatal shots, they might be deemed justified. Certainly, if the victim actually had a rock in hand at the time of death, that would help police argue that they had probable cause to see Zambrano-Montes as a threat. But how big does a rock have to be to constitute such a threat? How far away must the suspect be? There's a lot of gray area here, and no good reason to think the cops will be criminally punished.

In 2012, Officer Flanagan was involved in a $100,000 lawsuit against the Pasco police that alleged the cops there weren't properly trained in using force. All three officers are on paid leave pending the investigation into Zambrando-Montes's death. The victim's widow and children initially filed a $25 million lawsuit against the city, but have since withdrawn it.

Zunga has reportedly had his own dodgy encounters with police since uploading the video to YouTube. According to the Free Thought Project, Zunigas's home was visited by police, and his phone was taken without a search warrant. He also noted that cops dismissed him from the scene and didn't appear to be interested in taking statements from any of the numerous witnesses present at the time. He adds that police waited a week before they abruptly showed up at his door to demand his phone.

The county coroner in the Pasco case has reportedly called for an inquest into the shooting, which would empower six civilians to rule on the killing's legitimacy. But Franklin County Prosecutor Shawn Sant will have the final say on any possible criminal charges. Videos of excessive violence by law enforcement are a dime a dozen these days, but as cases like this one and Eric Garner's in New York show us, evidence and outrage aren't enough. Local cops won't hold back unless prosecutors hold their feet to the fire.

Being shamed on YouTube and social media is one thing; fearing the other side of a jail cell is quite another.

Now onto this week's bad cops:

-More ugly news from Washington state: On February 17, the King County prosecutor's office decided not to file charges against officer who shot an unarmed man 16 times while he lay in bed. In February 2012, Deputy Aaron Thompson and Corrections Officer Kristopher Rongen came to the home of Dustin Theoharis to search for another man who had violated his parole. According to Rogen, he and Thompson fired at Theoharis after the man said he had "three guns" and then reached under the mattress. Theoharis says he was shot after reaching for the identification he was asked to produce. He survived the barrage of bullets, and the county settled with him for $3 million. Now Theoharis is suing Rogen in federal court, and a judge has ruled that a jury trial can move forward. However, the fact that the DA's office has dismissed any potential criminal charges against the officers is still shameful.

-My former Reason colleague Jacob Sullum has a disturbing look at how the Department of Justice is still determined to prosecute medical marijuana cases— even in Washington state, where the drug is now legal for recreational use. The so-called Kettle Falls Five could receive up to ten years in prison thanks to federal mandatory minimums for the plants and the presence of (legal) firearms in the homes of the suspects. This shows that the war on drugs isn't really over until it ends at the federal level.

-Another day, another Edward Snowden–fueled revelation: this time, we learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) and British intelligence are in possession of SIM card encryption keys, which they stole from a cell phone manufacturer that sells to Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others. This makes spying on communications a breeze for the agencies.

-In Orlando, Florida, a February 19 local news investigation showed pharmacists rejecting legitimate prescriptions, blaming a 2010 crackdown on pain pills and, more recently, DEA intrusion. But DEA Assistant Special Agent Jeff Walsh told WESH that this is "an issue between the patient and the pharmacist, not the DEA," and that the "DEA has never exercised any punitive actions against a pharmacy or pharmacist unless their actions have been egregious and habitual." Considering the tricky nature of treating chronic pain with opiates, the DEA's suggesting legitimate dispensers have nothing to fear is patently false. The federal agency should at least take responsibility for scaring the shit out of medical professionals.

-The Washington Post has been on the Fairfax County, Virginia, police killing of John Geer ever since it happened a year and a half ago. Now the paper's editorial board has declared the shooting of the unarmed Geer—which happened while he was standing in his doorway with his hands raised—a "police cover-up." They make a compelling case for it.

-Our Good Cops of the Week rescued a man who fell into freezing water while attempting to save his dog. On Wednesday, Annapolis, Maryland, Police officers Joey Gatens, Chris Rajcsok, and Jeff Kelley responded to a 911 call from Vytas Penkiunas's wife, whose companion passed out as he tried to recover their Labrador Retriever. Gatens performed CPR on the dog, but the pooch didn't make it. Still, the three officers deserve our respect for risking their safety to retrieve a man who might have died without their aid.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.