Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries Arrested on Sex Trafficking Charges | US News

Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries has been arrested on sex trafficking charges, a spokesman for federal prosecutors said.

Matthew Smith, Jeffries' partner, and a third man, James Jacobson, were also arrested on the same charge.

Jeffries and Smith were arrested in Florida and are scheduled to make their first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in West Palm Beach.

Jacobson was arrested in Wisconsin. There was initially no information about a court date.

Abercrombie & Fitch declined to comment on Jeffries' arrest.

At a news conference in New York, Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Jeffries used his “power, wealth and influence to traffic men for his own sexual pleasure and that of his romantic partner.” , Matthew Smith.”

Mr. Peace said the indictment alleged that Jeffries and Smith hired Jacobson “as a male recruiter.”

Jacobson conducted “experiments with men around the world, usually paying them to have sex with him.”

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Smith would then decide who would meet him and Jeffries, and the selected men would be flown to Jeffries and Smith's homes or to hotels around the world “to attend events and engage in commercial sex.”

Mr Peace claimed all three defendants “used force, fraud and coercion to abuse these men for their own sexual gratification”.

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Several allegations of sexual misconduct followed – including a lawsuit filed last year in New York that accused Abercrombie of allowing Jeffries to run a sex trafficking organization during his 22-year tenure.

Jeffries' attorney, Brian Bieber, said in an email to the Associated Press that he would “respond fully to the allegations after the indictment is dismissed and as appropriate, but he will do so at the courthouse and not in the media.”

Information about the other defendants' attorneys was not immediately available.

Jeffries left Abercrombie & Fitch in 2014.

Abercrombie said last year it had hired an outside law firm to conduct an independent investigation after the BBC broadcast a report about similar allegations.