Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have long been skeptical of Nick Kristof’s tales of sex trafficking horror. It’s not that I think this is a non-existent phenomenon, and no amount of trafficking is tolerable. It’s just that I’ve never believed this is a widespread phenomenon rampant with torture and brutality as Kristof has enthusiastically, almost voyeuristically transcribed it in columns such as this one:

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes….

I’m sorry, but I call bullshit on this; I just don’t buy it. (Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes? That’s a nice touch.) It sounds like something out of the Salem Witch Trials—a fantastic story made up to impress a willing listener, a white, privileged man who confidently considers himself both judge and jury, confessor and healer.

Now one of Kristof’s main sources, a woman named Somaly Mam, the bulwark for so much of what he has written about sex trafficking, turns out to be a fraud. And not only is she a fraud, but she persuaded others to go along with her in spreading tales of horror.

This devastating Newsweek story lays it all out.

…In 2009, Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times about a girl named Long Pross, who had finally summoned the strength to tell her stunning story of sexual slavery. He reported that a woman had kidnapped Pross and sold her to a brothel, where she was beaten, tortured with electric wires, forced to endure two crude abortions and had an eye gouged out with a piece of metal by an angry pimp. Pross, Kristof said, was rescued by Mam and became part of her valiant group of former trafficking victims fighting for a world free of sexual slavery.

Pross’s story was completely made up, coached by Somaly Mam. But here’s what Kristoff wrote without the slightest skepticism.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

Pross paid savagely each time she let a potential customer slip away after looking her over.

“I was beaten every day, sometimes two or three times a day,” she said, adding that she was sometimes also subjected to electric shocks twice in the same day.

Kristof, by the way, is the same columnist who turned his column over to Dylan Farrow so that she could make wildly implausible and completely unsubstantiated attacks against Woody Allen. There is a common denominator: In both (all) cases, Kristof abandoned his critical judgment. As a general rule, he replaced it with a primitive, white man’s burden racism—those emerging market, dark-skinned people are capable of anything, no matter how vile!—and an inflated sense of his own saintliness.

This puts the Times in a very tricky position. The newspaper should investigate the veracity of Kristof’s work just as it once did Judy Miller’s. But it probably won’t—there is a constituency of people too invested in this victim mythology who don’t want to admit that Kristof is profoundly wrong. And, of course, it’s tricky because of the very real problems that do exist for women and girls around the world. I don’t think it’s wrong, though, to wonder if Kristof isn’t in the realm of a Rick Bragg or Jason Blair or Stephen Glass, a fabulist whose dramatic inventions were directly tied to his own journalistic success.

Kristof himself is in Nigeria, reporting on the kidnapped schoolgirls. Though he has a blog to which he regularly contributes, he has said nothing about the Somaly Mam revelations. Never mind the past; there is always a new victim for Saint Nick to save.