A sex trafficking survivor who was taken from a Dallas Mavericks game at 15 years of age is speaking out for the first time since her abduction.
In 2022, Natalee Cramer was at a Dallas Mavericks game with her father at the American Airlines Center. Midway through the game, she got up from her seat to go to the bathroom.
She wasn’t seen for the next eleven days.
“I was feeling good, just ready to go hang out with him. We got there, sat down at our seats, first quarter happened, and I started to get this anxious feeling,” Cramer told WFAA.
Cramer admitted that she struggled with anxiety and often turned to marijuana and alcohol to cope.
She got up from her seat without her phone and told her dad she was going to use the bathroom. Instead, she began to walk around in an attempt to ease her anxiety. While walking around, Cramer asked a man outside if he smoked.
“He told me we could walk back to his car that was in the parking lot in the garage, and that’s when the second guy came,” Cramer said. “We got to the car, and I was just kind of put in there and taken to their house.”
Cramer said that what happened wasn’t like the abductions people see in the movies.
“It’s not like a guy with candy in the back of his van. … It looks like a normal conversation until it’s not. You don’t know you’re in danger until you’re in the middle of it, and you don’t know what to do, and you can’t get out.”
Cramer was held in North Texas for days and raped by multiple men. She was then transported to Oklahoma City, where a different group of people sex-trafficked her at a hotel for more than a week.
A private investigator was able to find Cramer’s photos in online sex advertisements and traced the location to Oklahoma City.
“I was just walking down the side of the road over and over again just saying ‘send somebody, send somebody,’ and a cop drove by me. He pulled up next to me and said, ‘Are you Natalee Cramer?'”
Cramer’s family is suing the extended-stay hotel in Oklahoma and the Texas companies that ran it, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
After the teen was rescued, Oklahoma authorities arrested eight individuals, two of whom pleaded guilty to trafficking and child porn charges. The hotel was allegedly “known for pimps and prostitutes,” according to guest reviews.
“On one occasion, a hotel employee saw the 15-year-old victim crying in the lobby while two adult men escorted her to their room and yet did nothing,” the family’s attorney, Zeke Fortenberry, claimed in a news release. “Other times, men patrolled the hotel hallway with an AK-47 style assault rifle.”
The lawsuit contends that the hotel rented at least two different rooms to 44-year-old Kenneth Nelson, a registered sex offender, who is now serving 25 years in prison on charges of sex trafficking and more in connection with this case. Cramer can be seen in surveillance footage being shuffled from room to room, where she was allegedly forced to perform sex acts with Johns while under the influence of illicit substances, according to the complaint.
In January, Cramer’s parents spoke out after a Dallas County grand jury threw out the charges of sexual assault of a child against 33-year-old Emanual Cartagena, the man accused of luring Cramer away from the basketball game. According to the family’s attorney, Cartegena’s charges were dismissed because Dallas County prosecutors “presented a half-assed case,” per DX.
Cramer says she ran away before she was trafficked and once again from a treatment center after she was rescued.
“I was running for attention. I was running for drugs,” Cramer told WFAA. “For me, a lot of it was my mental health. I wasn’t in therapy, I was struggling with self-harm, I was struggling with friends, I was struggling in school. I still don’t know the reason. I still don’t know the reason why I did the things I did and why I didn’t do the things I didn’t do. Like why I didn’t call, why I didn’t just stop running.”
Cramer and her parents have started a nonprofit organization called Aisling, dedicated to helping families affected by human trafficking.
The organization offers aftercare programs for survivors, mentoring, and funding for therapy services and has a team of professionals dedicated to bringing civil action to those affected by trafficking.
“If they can’t speak for them, I’m going to speak for them,” Cramer said about the survivors Aisling is helping.
Cramer, now 18 years old, is picking up the pieces of her life that was interrupted by her traumatic ordeal. She now lives in her apartment and is working toward getting her GED.