While the rest of the nation was glued in front the Super Bowl game telecast Sunday, Monique Lessan was urging people on her
Facebook page and blogs to watch a CNN-TV expose on underage girls being abducted and sold for sex online.
"My purpose in life is to keep children safe and bring them home to their parents," said the Persian-born Lessan, who has brought abducted children home from places such as England, France, Singapore and Mexico. "If I can make the world a little safer, then for me it is heaven on Earth."
Lessan is the founder of Healdsburg, Calif.-based "Teens against Human Trafficking," and proprietor of Healdsburg-based private investigation firm
Eye Investigate International, which specializes in recovering abducted children from all over the world.
Lessan, licensed since 1993, also does criminal defense investigations, missing persons searches, background checks, asset searches and adoptee and adopter discoveries.
"Despite her size and her sex, she is formidable, brave and truly a force for good in the world," said colleague
Patricia V. Davis, a Marin County, Calif. resident, author of the memoir,
"Harlot's Sauce," and editor-in-chief of HS Radio.
Like Lessan, Davis is a member of Santa Rosa, Calif.-based
Redwood Writers group, where Davis said she was struck not only by Lessan's non-traditional profession, but also that she came to the work through her own personal tragedy -- being kidnapped and assaulted by an older stranger at age 24.
"Monique Lessan is an inspiration to all women," Davis said. "She took something negative in her life -- her own kidnapping -- and turned it into her strength and life's work, which is to save others from the same fate."
With an ironically assigned PI license number "16-007," the exotic-looking Lessan has been
featured as a female James Bond-type protagonist on various TV spots and was screened earlier this month for a possible reality TV show on the Discovery Channel.
At the beginning of this year, she signed a publishing contract to write a memoir of her most significant child abduction cases, some of which she completed in conjunction with the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
"My last child abduction case, in 2008, involved a Chinese mother of a 10-year-old boy, whose father, originally from Dublin, Ireland, abducted the boy," said Lessan, who researches her cases online and works as a team with a network of surveillance and investigation contractors in each locale. "We found the boy in San Diego, and, after two days of surveillance, it took only 24 hours to reunite him with his mother."
Lessan, who speaks French, Spanish and Farsi in addition to English, has gone undercover on numerous occasions, using disguises ranging from "a student to a Persian princess -- I've done it all," she said. "I could be someone who's very rich with a lot of money, or just someone who needs to use the bathroom" just to get inside the house and investigate what secrets may be inside.
As she explains in
series of videos she produced last year with a group of
Healdsburg High School students, most young people aren't aware of how easily they can be lured into the clutches of people who would take advantage of them.
Lessan should know. Her own kidnapping was by a rich Iranian artist who pulled up beside her on at street corner in Santa Monica and lured her into his car with promises of money for modeling and a job in his gallery. A half-dozen mixed drinks later, he took her to a hotel and assaulted her.
"I didn't have the money to pay the rent," recalled Lessan, now 40-something. "I was unemployed, working odd jobs and as a movie extra -- I thought he would give me a job and money."
She escaped a day and a half later, after excusing herself to go to the ladies room at a restaurant and never coming back. But the experience changed her life -- and her career choice -- forever, she said.
"When I became a PI, I said I would never allow anyone to go through what I went through," she said. "It's one of the reasons I do what I do."
Lessan said she only spoke publicly about the incident for the first time last year when she was working with the Healdsburg High School students. She has since included it in the first draft of her book.
"Monique has an important story to tell," said Peter Beren, Lessan's publishing agent and consultant. "The story of the dark side of the global economy --human trafficking."
Story written by John Rudolf 
