From Influencer To Incarcerated: Former Model Jailed For Trafficking And Slavery

When two young Brazilian women were reported missing in September 2022, their families and the FBI launched a desperate search across the US to find them.

Torres will now have to see how powerful her influence is - on her fellow inmates while incarcerated. I Photo: Franklin County Sheriff’s Office

All they knew was that they were living with wellness influencer Kat Torres. Torres has now been sentenced to eight years in prison for the human trafficking and slavery of one of those women, Hannah Price reported for BBC News.

How did the former model who partied with Leonardo DiCaprio and graced the cover of international magazines come to groom her followers and lure them into sexual exploitation?

“She kind of resembled hope for me,” says Ana, describing her reaction on stumbling across Torres’ Instagram page in 2017.

Ana was not one of the missing women targeted in the FBI search - but she too was a victim of Torres’ coercion and would be key to their rescue. She says she was attracted to Torres’ trajectory from an impoverished Brazilian favela to international catwalks, partying with Hollywood A-listers along the way.

“She seemed like she had overcome violence in her childhood, abuse, all these traumatic experiences,” Ana told BBC Eye Investigations and BBC News Brasil. Ana was in a vulnerable situation herself.

She says she had suffered a violent childhood, moved alone to the US from southern Brazil, and was previously in an abusive relationship.

Torres had published her autobiography called A Voz (The Voice), in which she claimed she could make predictions as a result of her spiritual powers. Ana says she was particularly taken with Torres’ approach to spirituality.

What Ana didn’t know was that the inspirational story Torres told was based on half-truths and lies.

Torres’ ex-flatmate in New York, Luzer Twersky, told us that her Hollywood friends had introduced her to the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca, and she was never the same again.

"That’s when she kind of… started going off the deep end,” he says.