This letter is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.It’s a pivotal moment in any young woman’s life, when she flees from her first pimp. Dionne, then aged 19, left in the night with just a few belongings, out onto the streets of downtown Miami. She had suffered at his hands for more than a year since being lured to the city on false promises—mainly, the one about helping her become a swimwear model—and now homelessness felt like the better option.It was late spring 2016, and on her first night as a free but cash-strapped woman, Dionne went to work at a strip club. Between routines, one of the dancers—21-year-old Vicky Berry—sang the praises of a man named William Foster; a genial father figure, as Berry painted it, who had helped her get off drugs and was providing all manner of useful guidance to a group of women who lived together as one big happy family in his vast luxury residence in North Beach. “Vicky was raving about Will,” Dionne recalls. “She was like, ‘Come to the mansion and just meet him.’”The house was “gorgeous,” she says, “the nicest thing” she had ever seen. Dionne, who hails from “the hood” in Philadelphia and had been living in a cheap hotel, thought she’d hit the jackpot. She swiftly decided to move in, and a few days later was on a flight to Las Vegas to meet Foster, where he was visiting a larger group of women living in a number of glamorous properties he owned in Sin City. When Foster collected Dionne from the airport in a white Jaguar, he eschewed pleasantries: “He insisted on knowing if I was abused when I was younger.” Dionne confided in him that she had been sexually abused by family members throughout her childhood. He then chose to tell her that he was investing in the launch of a new financial services app, along with a number of other ventures. “He said he wanted to see me do well in business,” says Dionne.Foster, a smooth-talking five-foot-nine lothario originally from Queens, New York, repeatedly insisted: “I am not your pimp.” Instead, he presented himself as an altruistic entrepreneur helping women thrive in an exploitative world. This was the deal: Every cent that Dionne, and all the other women in “The Family,” earned working at strip clubs and having sex with men would be pooled into a shared investment pot for the app being developed by Foster’s associates. This money would multiply many times over once the app had taken off, Foster assured them, and on the subsequent riches Dionne and the dozen-plus other women could retire early, possibly even in their twenties. In the meantime, Dionne would live in the Miami mansion and have everything taken care of: Versace, Fendi, and Gucci clothes; high-end watches and jewelry; and her pick of a fleet of luxury cars including a Ferrari, a Cadillac SUV, and a Corvette. “I took his word for it,” Dionne says. “He overwhelmed me with a bunch of fancy words.” The sex pestering began during that journey. Foster, an ordinary-looking bald-headed African-American man with a goatee, told Dionne how women “listen best during sex” and that one can “learn a lot about a woman from having sex with them.” En route to his luxury penthouse, Foster took Dionne to Walmart to get fresh bedding. “He saw me in better lighting and was like, ‘Wow, you’re super pretty.’ I’ve had low self-esteem since forever, and I was just in awe at that.”But, she says, “It was almost like he kind of knew this.”That night, Foster summoned Dionne to his bedroom. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, she could gaze down upon the famous Vegas strip as if she and Foster owned it. Dionne was extremely reluctant to have sex, but Foster claimed he needed “to make sure he knows who he’s dealing with.” So there, on his freshly made California king-size, her initiation into Foster’s harem truly began.Almost immediately after he had finished, Foster texted eight other women, who swarmed into the room. “Welcome to The Family!” they cheered, whooping. Aside from Vicky, Dionne had barely exchanged words with the other women in the house—they had seemed distant, even cold towards her—but now that she had been initiated, the group of “beautiful blondes, brunettes, and Asians” were excitedly asking all about her as they passed around a bottle of vodka. Soon, they would be going for regular hair and beauty appointments together. After the year of pimp-fueled misery she had just escaped from, the female company reminded Dionne of happier times as a kid with ten siblings: “It felt like sisterhood.” Back in Miami, where Foster maintained a kind of academy for newcomers and under 21s (until July 2024, it was legal for 18-year-olds to work as strippers in Florida), the sisters were making bank six nights a week, working shifts that could stretch to 14 hours long at a series of high-end establishments. You could find Foster’s “girls” at E11Even, where Drake and Rihanna were once spotted kissing; Scarlett’s Cabaret, which in 2016 was forced to pay its dancers $6 million in lost wages; Solid Gold, where Donald Trump’s pornstar former lover Stormy Daniels has performed, and a host of other venues across South Florida. (There is, though, no evidence that the clubs knew about Foster or how he was controlling the girls.)The backbone of Foster’s operation were his two “main girls”: Hanah Chan, who practiced elements of Buddhism and came from a conservative Chinese family in New York, and Ashleigh Holloway, a sterner figure from rural Georgia who seemed at times to play a role akin to Foster’s wife. She had become the first member of The Family back in 2004, while Chan joined several years later, as Foster molded his fledgling sorority into a hyper-efficient money-making sex squad. “We scouted out clients for after-work services,” says Dionne, describing them generally as “rich, ignorant bigots.” “We worked our shifts loaded up on a bunch of energy supplements and set up ‘dates’ for afterwards.”Between chain-smoking cigarettes, Foster coached the women on how to dance more exotically, and what to say and do to clients in the throes of passion to extract as much money from them as possible. “He taught me everything I know about being a woman,” recalls Dionne, who remembers other girls making up to $2,000 an hour when she was starting out. “Even during sex, he would tell me how to make my face and how to act.”Foster also forbade the girls from having boyfriends or taking drugs including cannabis, periodically testing them for traces. When they got home after work, they would line up to spread their hundred dollar bills out on top of Foster’s bedsheets and give him a kiss good night. He would then choose which girl would spend the night in his bed.Despite all this, Dionne was initially content. For a time, the women of The Family lauded Foster for showing them the secrets of “the game.” Sure, he would make his strange demands—often sexual in nature—but as she absorbed his wisdom and observed how the other girls operated, her earnings steadily grew.Then she started bashing up against a glass ceiling. She struggled to make in excess of $1,000 a shift and would compare herself ruefully to higher earners. It was because she was “short and skinny,” Foster said. She lobbied for boob and butt enhancements, and Foster promised that after “six months of hard work and dedication, he’d pay.” Foster also told Dionne that she was “getting chunky”—despite previously critiquing her petite frame—and decreed that she would not be able to get breast surgery until she went on “the lemon diet.” The lemon diet is more or less exactly what it sounds like: “No food or solids for ten days, just lemon juice mixed with cayenne pepper and maple syrup, and I still had to work full time,” says Dionne. After eight days, she was “getting fucking cranky.” That afternoon, another sister was cooking in the kitchen. “I was like, ‘Babe, let me get some food.’ And she said, ‘I’ll have to ask Will. Aren’t you on the lemon diet?’ At this point I just lost my shit.” Dionne screamed: “Fuck this shit, fuck this diet, fuck you people.” Her rage continued until Foster came in and ordered her into one of the adjoining rooms. “I thought he was going to beat me up,” she says. But instead of going ballistic, as he sometimes did, Foster was calm. “You can’t break your lemon diet, or you won’t get your boobs done,” he said. “And I know how bad you want to do this, so take this and just calm down.”He pulled out a pill. “I don’t know what it was exactly, but I took it. It kicked in, and I was asleep the rest of the night.” After that, Foster began dosing her with the prescription antipsychotic drug Abilify, which he was also giving to several other girls and comes with a raft of side effects including problems with impulse control. A few weeks later, after getting painful buttock-enhancing injections, Dionne was awarded her boob job and her A cups became small Ds. Foster made her get a nose job too, against her wishes. But it seemed he had his finger on the pulse of what the discerning gentleman in Miami would pay for. “My money went up drastically,” she says. “I had $4,000 nights. It definitely worked.”Dionne, having proven her “trust” to Foster, was welcomed into his inner circle of women who helped recruit and manage the others, receiving perks and a modicum of freedom in return. “We became the manipulators,” she says.“The ‘Lemon Diet’ is more or less exactly what it sounds like: No food or solids for ten days, just lemon juice mixed with cayenne pepper and maple syrup, and I still had to work full time”One of those “perks” was regular sex with Foster, who obsessively kept tabs on all of his girls. Dionne had sex with him several times per week, as many of the other inner circle did, leading her to conclude that Foster had sex as many as 50 times a week, not including the regular visits he’d make to swingers’ clubs accompanied by Ashleigh and one or two others. (The father-of-two, whose children lived with their mother, never used protection, claiming he’d had a vasectomy.) Foster’s mother would come over to keep an eye on the girls while he was away in Las Vegas. During these absences, Foster would arrange for acquaintances to visit and have sex with the girls as he watched on remote video feeds. “At first I didn’t have no emotions for him,” says Dionne. “He was older and the sex hurt for a long time [because he was so well-endowed]. It was very discomforting until one day I just started liking him. I woke up and was just like, ‘I’m Team Will. I believe in his vision.’”Looking back, she sees how she was “broken down; physically, mentally, emotionally.”Dionne was spared the worst of his wrath, which often took the form of humiliating verbal takedowns. Vicky, the bubbly brunette from Arkansas who recruited Dionne (coincidentally, she had escaped from Dionne’s ex-pimp some time before), was a tougher nut to crack. “His plan for me was to work out, do the lemon diet and become a better version of myself,” Vicky says. “But I was always in trouble for drinking and partying.” Such pleasures weren’t permitted while they were supposed to be focusing on earnings. After the lemon diet left her in hospital with a stomach ulcer, another, more intense form of abuse followed. “He’d always joke that other pimps would punish their giqrls by having anal sex with them, and joked about doing it himself,” she says. Eventually, Foster got tired of Vicky’s failure to abide by his every word, so he moved himself into her room for a couple of months and followed through on his threats.“He used that as a punishment against me multiple times,” she recalls, her voice cracking. “It was extremely painful. But it was anything to make him happy, in my head.” Eventually, she had to go to hospital. Between the rough sex, the capricious deployment of validation and praise, and the on-off treatment as an outcast (when Foster clicked his fingers, the girls would shun those who were not in favor), Vicky eventually “grew really attached to him,” coincidentally around the time he started dosing her on Abilify: “Then it became all about Will, I just wanted to make him happy. Everything I did was for him.”When anyone outside of the “main girls” wanted to spend money, Foster was extremely strict. “If we wanted to buy makeup, we’d have to request [the specifics] and he’d say, ‘OK, that shouldn’t be more than $40,’ and he’d give us $40 only.” He also ordered the darker skinned girls to stay inside on hotter days and use high-strength skin-whitening creams. “Whenever the girls went to the beach he kept me back, as he said customers like lighter skin,” says Vicky. “I still have trouble going outside as a result.” But on Foster’s dream they were sold near-universally. Life was good for a while, or so it seemed. The girls had to have sex to earn, but most of them had already been doing that. Now they were taking more money, even if it all went to Foster, and their quality of life had improved beyond measure. As well as the cars, clothes, and beauty treatments, some of the senior girls were gifted holidays and cruises. “It was very fun for us,” says Dionne. “It was a sisterhood, a family. We’d go out and buy bottles in the club in our little crew.” The money piled up, with Vicky once making $18,000 in a single night and crediting her success to Foster’s training. “We had a thing called ‘the book’ and every night everyone would write down what they had made, and as a family we’d be like, ‘OK, we’ve made this over the last six months.’” That figure stretched into the low millions between 2016 and 2018, and Hanah and Ashleigh spoke vaguely about stocks, trades, and company investments, which seemed to placate any concerns. Foster hyped up other stocks related to beer and baseball, sweeping the girls along in a disorientating, blur of information, psychiatric drugs, constant sex, and the occasional meltdown if any of the girls acted out of line.“He’d always say, ‘I’d hate for you to leave, you’ve worked so hard and put so much money into these investments,’” says another former Family member named Aria. “If you said, ‘I’m leaving, I need money,’ he’d say, ‘Oh, your money is tied up in investments.’”“It was a sisterhood, a family. We’d go out and buy bottles in the club in our little crew”In the second half of 2017, the girls increasingly began to question Foster. It had long played on Dionne’s mind that the strippers outside of The Family would tell her at the club, “your wifeys are like robots.” Then Foster started inducting new recruits with no prior experience of dancing or work. Some of them, unbeknownst to the sorority at the time, appear to have been funneled through a sham organization called Foster’s Care, which purported to help sex-trafficking victims and provide “protection in partnership with police and FBI.” What was unfolding before the girls’ eyes didn’t sit right.“At that point I was very, very green, I was a baby dancer,” says Aria, who was also from Philadelphia and joined, aged 19, at the same time as Vicky, having met Foster while giving him a lapdance in a Miami club. “I wasn’t into sex work just yet.” Still, she was stripping and had designs on taking things further. Some of the newbies were “these sweet young girls who barely wore makeup and lost their virginity to their high-school sweetheart,” she says. “They had no hustle. They were clearly not comfortable walking into a hotel, knocking on a door, and spending an hour with a random guy.” Other new recruits, conversely, were considered a little too streetwise. “He would get girls on drugs who had messed-up teeth,” Aria says. “He’d say, ‘She just needs surgery, boobs, and the lemon diet. She’ll be fire.’” Looking back, she realizes that Foster was simply onboarding any girl who fell for the ruse. “He got too greedy.” But when it came to recruitment, the girls were willing accomplices. “I would bring girls in from the clubs,” admits Dionne, who was now luring new recruits with strategies similar to those used to traffick her into sex work. “I’d spend hours messaging girls on Instagram and Snapchat, spreading our gospel. If you brought a girl home, you got to go shopping.” Aria left first, in the spring of 2017. Foster had hatched plans to send a group of the girls to Detroit, and Aria was to be their supervisor. Ostensibly, he was concerned that the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was keeping the money out of Miami. But he was also becoming evermore fearful of the law catching up with him. Meanwhile, the girls were beginning to untangle his lies as their workloads increased and the financial rewards they were promised never materialized. “I felt so bad for leaving the girls I was close with without telling them,” says Aria. “But I had started to open my eyes and there was something else driving me. I think it was the force of God.” One day when Foster was out of Miami, she jumped in a taxi and fled with just the clothes on her back. “I told him when I got to the airport,” she says. “He was upset. ‘Are you serious?! You’re making a huge mistake, you’re so stupid.’ I just remember hanging up the phone.”Foster continued to dismiss protests from those who didn’t want to move to Detroit for winter, and it was there that the sorority ultimately began to rupture. Coerced into regularly working double—or even triple—shifts that lasted nearly a full day, some of the girls started to feel the pressure, and would scrap over petty beefs. The burden of reaching Foster’s increasingly unattainable financial targets weighed heavy. Some relapsed into drug use; Dionne started smoking weed again.Living between Miami and Las Vegas had often been glamorous and fun, but the harshness of the new Detroit regime took its toll. Fearing federal surveillance, Foster forbade the girls from using their phones unless absolutely necessary, even extending that to a ban on texting and calling each other. “He would talk about the FBI a lot and what we would need to do if that ever did happen,” says Vicky. “He said that we would all have to go our separate ways, not talk for a couple of years, and then come back together so we could do it all over again.”“We were supposed to make $30,000 each to come home with,” adds Dionne. “He was working us like dogs to get funds in case something happened.” Detroit was the final straw for Dionne. “Things were not adding up,” she explains. “Seven days a week, double after double; triple shifts. It was exhausting. I would come home and my vagina would literally hurt. It was non-stop.” After going back to Philadelphia for her aunt’s funeral, the penny dropped and she realized she was “getting pimped on and medicated.” When she got back to Miami in August 2018, she packed a suitcase and never looked back. “He had been so adamant about not being a pimp. It was so confusing.” By then, Vicky was getting tired of dancing and “hoeing.” She was seeking to qualify to sell life insurance, but could not fathom leaving Foster. “He said if I found another hobby I could stop dancing…” But Foster got so paranoid that there were eyes on him he had the girls in Miami stop going to the clubs. Instead, he had those who remained “fucking on camera day in, day out,” streaming their shifts on the content marketplace ConnectPal, a precursor to OnlyFans. “I had to sell myself 24/7,” Vicky says. “I had no idea who I was.”Vicky, who by that point was so depressed she was drinking a glass of Remy Martin cognac as soon as she woke up each day, was the only one with Foster in Miami when the FBI finally came knocking. One of the newer recruits, a recovering crack cocaine addict, was particularly aggrieved at being forced into sex work when she had been promised help. After she was sent to Detroit, she alerted Homeland Security’s sex trafficking hotline, setting in motion a dramatic sequence of events that would change the lives of all involved. “I just heard banging,” Vicky recalls of the dawn 2019 raid. “We stayed up till 5AM drunk and he was listening to the TV super loud because he was deaf. I was looking at the TV and trying to make sense of where the noise was coming from.” She went to the front door “butt naked” and saw armed police, demanding she open the door. “I said ‘No’ and woke Will and said the FBI is here,” she recalls. Foster “always said he wasn’t going back to jail if he got caught” and went looking for a gun but could not find one.Eventually, he opened the door and was immediately strong-armed and cuffed. “I was scared,” says Vicky. “They made me walk outside backwards with my hands up.” But when police put a white sheet over her instead of handcuffs, “I was like, what’s going on? I was prepared to do 15 [years] for that man.” Vicky watched CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and recognized that she was wearing a victim sheet. “I was like why the fuck are you treating me like a victim? They were trying to tell me what was going on, that I’d been trafficked, but I was trying not to hear it.” When she saw Foster, he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “It was the first time I saw him feel bad.”Hanah Chan and Ashleigh Holloway, who were out that night, went to police stations shortly after being contacted and given 12 hours to hand themselves in. They had both played too key a role over so many years in the organization to be deemed victims by the police, and later pleaded guilty to bank fraud. Foster was denied bail and pleaded not guilty to three counts of sex trafficking by force, along with charges of conspiracy to sex-traffic minors, sex trafficking of a minor, and transportation of an individual for prostitution.Still in thrall to Foster, Vicky kept in touch with him while he awaited trial. “It took me a long time to talk to the FBI as I had Stockholm syndrome,” she says. Eventually she went back to Arkansas and got back into dancing of her own accord. Her days now are spent working or caring for her four-year-old daughter, who has autism. “I feel guilty that I still miss him sometimes, even after everything he’s done,” she says. “He fucked with our psyches. The FBI called him a master manipulator. The court referred to us as a ‘cult.’” “She went to the front door ‘butt naked’ and saw armed police, demanding she open the door”At first, Foster’s defense floated an elaborate argument that he and Ashleigh were engaged and that they had a swinging problem. But Foster, who was 50 years old at the time of his sentencing in 2022, eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 60 years in prison, ordered on top of that to pay $14 million to his victims. “He put in our heads that working a regular job is stupid. Why wait two weeks to make a paycheck when you make [the same] in one night?” says Aria, who now works as a medical assistant in an urgent care unit. “It took a lot to break the cycle of always running back to the strip club every time I felt financially distressed.” By sharing her story, Aria hopes to shine a light on how many other women are inadvertently ending up sex slaves. “We aren’t the only ones this has happened to.”“It’s happening under everyone’s noses. It’s a quiet suffering,” says Dionne, who left sex work and is studying at business school. “We weren’t in the hood, we were in suburban America. We were living next to a doctor and a schoolteacher.”What was driving Foster? Primarily sex, which he was having a lot, as well as power, money, and control, according to the three women VICE interviewed. Foster may have also been partial to Adderall and cocaine, along with the cigarettes he chainsmoked. According to Ashleigh and Hanah, who have spoken to the three women, he has attempted suicide more than once in prison. As for the millions he earned off the backs of the suffering women? As of April 2026, the FBI — which did not wish to comment on this article — hasn’t been able to recover any of it, and none of the women have received a cent of the $14 million in restitution.It’s perhaps not surprising to learn that Foster was unable to make good on his promises of vast riches when you consider the schemes he claimed to be investing everyone’s money in. His “drinkable baseball bat” idea for spectators to swig beer out of at Major League Baseball games was woefully half-baked, though others seem to have profited from the concept recently. A doomed AI-coding assistant and a payment services tool whose domain name is currently available to buy for $83 a month also never took off.“I had always thought Will wanted to see us do well with our money,” says Dionne, her voice trembling with disbelief even years later, carrying the weight of everything she has endured. “To do something great with it.”Follow Mattha on Instagram @matthabusbyThis letter is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.If you think you may be in an abusive relationship, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or visit their website, thehotline.org.If you need someone to talk to about an experience with sexual assault or abuse, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), where trained staff can provide you with support, information, advice, or a referral. You can also access 24/7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.The post ‘Welcome to the Family’: Inside the Sex Cult of Miami’s Most Diabolical Pimp appeared first on VICE.