By the fall of 2017, Brittany Figlar had survived 11 years of being sex trafficked, abused, ravaged by forced drug dependency, jailed and ignored by law enforcement officers who did nothing to rescue her despite her urgent pleas on several occasions. Left to fend for herself after being expelled from a rehabilitation center in Lorain with no money and a bench warrant issued by Elyria Municipal Court hanging over her, Figlar unwittingly fell back into her final trafficker’s trap. It took her four more years before she could escape completely, get clean, help convict her trafficker to a life sentence without parole, and become a powerful advocate and voice for other survivors in Northeast Ohio and beyond.
Part 1 of this two-part series can be read here.
With winter approaching, the thought of sleeping on the floor of a shed with no power and a 5-gallon paint bucket for a bathroom made Brittany Figlar (nee Oldfield) jump at the offer of a little money and a place to stay with a man a friend told her about.
Unfortunately, when she went to get into the silver Toyota Camry that pulled into her friend’s driveway, the driver was a different man: Steven Gilbert.
“He drove me to a sleazy motel in Elyria called The Journey Inn that’s now shut down,” Figlar recalled. “As soon as we get into this room, he dumps out some heroin or fentanyl or crack – I can’t remember – and says, ‘You need to do these drugs, and these men that are going to start showing up, you’re going to have to start seeing them. You’re mine.’”
For the next four years, Gilbert enslaved Figlar, increasing her drug dependency and demanding she meet a quota of sexual encounters with johns totaling $1,000 to $1,500 a day.
“That’s a lot of guys that you have to see to meet that quota, and he would accept nothing less than that,” Figlar said. “If you made less than that there were severe consequences.”
Gilbert trafficked several girls and would beat, sexually assault, withhold food or drugs or lock them in a bathroom and force them into excruciating withdrawal when they didn’t comply or meet their quota, according to Figlar and court testimony in the later case against Gilbert. One of the women, who later testified against him. alongside Figlar, had one arm amputated because of a severe MRSA infection from unclean hypodermic needles.
A failed escape attempt
Figlar experienced one failed escape attempt when, pretending to be on a “date,” in the parlance of trafficking, though they are never romantic, a friend drove her as far as Warren, Ohio, with Gilbert in hot pursuit.
To ensure her friend’s safety, Figlar told the woman to drop her off and leave. Alone with no money, Figlar decided to place an escort ad, and the first john who showed up was an undercover officer from the Austintown Police Department.
According to Figlar, he pushed her to the ground, handcuffed and arrested her, even after she told him she was being trafficked and was fleeing from Gilbert. When she later pleaded with agents from the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force (MVHTTF) that she was being trafficked, Figlar alleges they ignored her and placed her in Mahoning County jail for a month until she was extradited to Lorain County Jail.
Figlar told them they would essentially be sending her back into the arms of Gilbert, her trafficker. Again, they ignored her, Figlar claims.
According to the MVHTTF, they were unaware of Figlar’s case at the time and that it was an Austintown Police Department case. Austintown PD said they can no longer comment because Elyria Municipal Court expunged all of Figlar’s charges in 2025. She was able to benefit from the 2024 Ohio law enabling expungements for trafficking victims forced to commit other crimes.
She spent another two weeks incarcerated there, and upon her release Gilbert picked her up, took her to a hotel room and beat her severely, she said.
A way out
Finally, in April 2021, Figlar learned that Gilbert suspected one of the women of snitching on him. She knew he was likely to kill whoever he thought was talking to law enforcement. Beyond desperate to escape this horrific life, but having come to care for all of the other women, Figlar decided to take the blame.
Gilbert took her to another motel, where the owner told him there was a room marked as “under construction” that he could use. He climbed in through a window to avoid recording any key card activity.
He let Brittany in the door. She got on her knees, placed a wallet-sized photo of her son on the floor so that it would be the last thing she saw before she died. As she looked down, Gilbert pressed a gun to her head for several moments.
“People like him are so evil that they want you to be in the worst pain you can be in,” Figlar said. “So rather than just shoot me dead and let me be in peace, he holstered his gun and proceeded to brutally rape and sodomize me in that hotel room on camera for all of the other girls to see what he was doing to me.”
The next day, when Gilbert ordered the girl with one arm to stand watch over Figlar at her mother’s house and then left, Figlar knew she had a chance to escape. She started throwing things and screaming, cutting her arm with a knife, all to confuse the girl. She then grabbed the car keys and fled.
Figlar called one of her aunts who came to meet her. She left Gilbert’s car in an abandoned Burger King parking lot in Elyria and threw the keys in the front seat. Her aunt drove her to Elyria Memorial Hospital, where she was diagnosed with “drug psychosis” and, because of the cuts on her arms, placed on suicide watch.
In the middle of the night, Figlar was transferred to Windsor Laurelwood Behavioral Health Center near Cleveland. After talking with her, a psychiatrist there contacted Detective John Morgan from the Cuyahoga County Human Trafficking Task Force in Cleveland at that time.
The detective who changed everything
Now retired but still working as a consultant, Morgan and his team always applied a more compassionate and progressive approach to helping survivors. Instead of pointing guns, shoving victims to the ground and handcuffing them, they would ask the women how they were doing, do they need to eat, do they need a place to stay, who was abusing them, were there others who needed help, etc.
According to Morgan, they would listen to the women, treat them as human beings, knowing their interactions with most police had not gone well and they were often disrespected and abused so they were unlikely to want to cooperate.
When Morgan met with Figlar, she was detoxing, but the seasoned human trafficking investigator looked past that and listened to what she revealed.
“It was quite astonishing that Brittany had full names, and she didn’t just know the trafficker’s pimp name, she knew his full name, all the cars he drove, all the women that worked for him, all the hotels they had been at, everything,” he recalled. “It was overwhelming to me. Then it’s my job to corroborate what she says, but she had such minute, vivid detail to everything she said there was no way I could not look into this.”
Morgan contacted the Lorain Police Department detective that Figlar had given her statement to so he could assist with the investigation. Morgan then saw it all the way through to the arrest and trial of Gilbert. He took a new tactic in court, testifying first to educate the judge and jury about the realities of sex trafficking and how brutal and devastating the experience is to victims.
“Brittany is unique in the fact that she wasn’t afraid to tell her story, and she told her story not only to help herself but to help other people get out of that situation and to get this guy behind bars,” Morgan said. “Brittany was fortunate enough that the Harriett Tubman Movement really helped her, but she helped herself first.”
The Harriet Tubman Movement is a nonprofit based in Burton, Ohio, that helps survivors of human trafficking safely recover their lives.
Next, Figlar, the woman who had lost an arm, and other victims spent days testifying. The trial in Lorain County Common Pleas Court ended in May 2023 with Gilbert being sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole only after serving 174½ years. To date, it is still the longest sentence for trafficking in Ohio history.
“That trial changed my life because, after everything from childhood until then that I had to endure, nobody believed me until it came out of the prosecutor’s mouth in a court of law,” Figlar said. “The story had been the same the entire time, but it meant nothing until then. I am the 0.1 percent of victims that will ever have that day in court.”
Recovery and healing for Figlar
During the investigation and trial process, Figlar traveled to a remote facility in the mountains of Kentucky for detoxification and rehabilitation, one of several that advocates from the Harriet Tubman Movement recommended for her. She spent nearly a year in the rigorous program regaining her health and her faith in God.
To sustain her long journey of healing, Figlar continues to attend trauma therapy sessions. She loves to fish and be on the water or play with her two dogs and two cats. In May 2025, she married Allyson Figlar, MSN, a forensic nurse who developed MetroHealth Medical Center’s human trafficking screening tool.
Today, Figlar and Morgan are working with Catherine Brown, an attorney and co-founder of RiskSlate.AI in Cleveland, and her partner to launch a new business that will include a national human training program for law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and others.
“Brittany is exceptional, and I love that she is very honest about her story,” said Brown. “She tells it in a way that most survivors can’t, and I know parts of her story make people uncomfortable, and if you imagine what she endured over those 15 years, it absolutely should make you uncomfortable.”
The new firm is close to opening and will feature advanced software that Morgan was instrumental in developing that will expedite investigations of human traffickers and others who commit money laundering or defrauding elderly citizen crimes. Now, instead of combing through thousands of documents and Excel spreadsheets with a highlighter, their program will employ AI to do that work in minutes rather than months.
In addition to teaching for several institutions and doing public speaking, Figlar also works with the H.E.A.L. Human Trafficking Task Force out of the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office, which covers Huron, Erie, Ashland and Lorain counties.
She accompanies the detectives on sting operations and speaks to johns they ticket or arrest to share the horrific conditions suffered by the women the men pay for sex. That includes frank discussions about the fact that their “dates” are actually rapes because they are done against the women’s will.
“These guys are addicted to it like heroin,” Figlar said. “I’ve seen some of them get arrested three times and they still get on the sites and order human beings like you order pizza. You’re going to get a ticket? Pay a fine? What are we really stopping? The consequences aren’t severe enough, and until we make them more severe, the same cycle is going to keep happening.”
Figlar also believes more protections need to be provided for victims so that they feel safe testifying in court. Many dread facing their pimp or having to publicly relive their experiences.
“I was on the stand for two days, and most victims cannot or do not want to do that,” Figlar said. “We have nothing in place as a safety measure to make the prosecution of these guys easier where we can alleviate that fear for victims.”
She’s also concerned by the relatively small amount of prosecutions and convictions for human traffickers. (Statistics specific to traffickers, not johns, are not recorded by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office or the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.)
“We are not making enough of an example out of the bad guys to deter the ones that are still doing it from doing it,” Figlar said.
Keep our local journalism accessible to all
Reader support is crucial as we continue to shed light on underreported neighborhoods in Cleveland. Will you become a monthly member to help us continue to produce news by, for, and with the community?
P.S. Did you like this story? Take our reader survey!
