The National Women’s Political Caucus honored The Daily Beast with a journalism award Thursday night for a story about a young Manhattan woman who saved two Russian students from potential sexual slavery on Coney Island. The story, “How a Blogger Blocked Sex Slavery,” written by Abigail Pesta, describes how Kathrine Gutierrez Hinds boldly injected herself into the lives of two young Russians in danger, simply because she read about them online. After learning of their plight from a blogger on the site MetaFilter, she intercepted the women from a strip club, taking them into her tiny apartment and defying a likely mafia trafficking ring. The story sheds light on exactly how women are trafficked in the $32 billion global trade. Pesta is the editorial director of Women in the World at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Other award winners included Liz Brody of Glamour magazine; Carole Zimmer, Simon Clark, and Cam Simpson of Bloomberg News; Sheila Weller and Jan Goodwin of Good Housekeeping; Jenny Deam of Prevention; and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, director of the documentary Miss Representation, among others.
