Year after year, right-leaning anti-trafficking groups claim the Super Bowl, America's largest sporting event, is the nation's biggest draw for sex traffickers, who allegedly transport kidnapped women from city to city to please tourists in town for the yearly championship game. Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, appears to be the loudest voice pushing this theory — she appeared at Florida International University last month to once again claim the Super Bowl is a hotbed for sexual slavery.
"We are simply saying — it is not an opinion — that there is no evidence for an increase in trafficking at the Super Bowl," Borislav Gerasimov of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, an alliance of dozens of anti-trafficking groups, told that news agency.
Despite that finding, prostitution raids are common before every Super Bowl nowadays: 249 people were arrested in Houston prior to Super Bowl LI, 110 were taken into custody in Minneapolis the following year, and 169 were collared before Super Bowl LIII last year in Atlanta.
Few of those cases, however, had anything to do with sex trafficking. Most of the defendants were simply johns and prostitutes.