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SHE once made headlines on the arm of Leonardo DiCaprio, but as the profile of model-turned-wellness-guru Kat Torres grew, so did her desire for money and power.
Fabulous investigates the shocking story of the influencer who became a sex trafficker.
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Scrolling through the Instagram of Kat Torres, 26-year-old Letícia Tupinambá gazed at image after image of candlelit baths, manicured nails and pampered pets against the glamorous backdrop of the Manhattan skyline.
Letícia came from the same city in northern Brazil as Torres, but their lives couldn’t have been more different.
“In 2017, I saw her talking about spirituality on Instagram, which caught my attention, so I started to follow her. At that time, she was all about good vibes, with a very angelic image,” Letícia says.
Now, however, that angelic image is in tatters.
A predator who exploited young women’s hopes and dreams for personal gain, Torres is currently serving eight years for sex trafficking and slavery, after grooming her young female followers and luring them to the US with promises of a better life.
Growing up in an impoverished neighbourhood of Belém with her alcoholic father, Torres, now 32, turned to beauty pageants as a way out.
After winning the 2012 Miss Caieiras pageant, she competed for the title of Miss São Paulo later that year – and began to attract the interest of global modelling agencies.
A haircare campaign for L’Oréal and work for Calvin Klein lingerie followed, as well as shoots for Vogue Brazil and Vogue UK.
Torres relocated to California in the US, where she partied with celebrities, and in 2013 had to publicly deny she was in a relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio, after they were snapped by paparazzi at Cannes Film Festival.
Meanwhile, she built up a following on Instagram, and in 2017 transformed herself into a wellness influencer and life coach, after launching a self-help book about her life, titled A Voz (The Voice).
Letícia, who was a student at the time, devoured the book.
“I found it inspirational, because she had a tough childhood,” she says.
“And I thought to myself: ‘If she can be successful, anyone can.’”
Capitalising on the popularity of her Instagram profile, in 2018 Torres set up a website offering life-coaching consultations, where paying members could access advice on spirituality, relationships and money.
Kat’s advice made me feel better and I started to believe in her
Letícia
The website proved a success and, at its peak, had 14,000 members paying to access her videos, with a yearly subscription costing around £90.
Torres then decided to expand her business to offer tailored life advice via one-on-one consultations.
“I had my first consultation with Kat on Skype in 2019,” reveals Letícia.
“She was very professional. Her advice on how to handle my anxiety and relationship problems made me feel better, and I started to believe in her.”
However, as members returned for further consultations, Torres’ advice took a turn.
“It worked in the same way as a cult – I can see that now,” explains Letícia. “I spoke with her monthly and she began to tell me I should distance myself from family and friends.
“She started to manufacture problems with my boyfriend. She was telling me how I should behave and what kind of attitude I should have towards him. I eventually broke up with him in June 2021, but I realise now that she was the problem in our relationship.”
Harbouring dreams of making it big in Hollywood, Torres began spending more time in LA, going to castings and acting classes.
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There, she met and later married 21-year-old Zach Menkin, and in 2022 the couple moved to Austin, Texas, renting a five-bedroom suburban mansion.
It was a marriage of convenience that would ensure Torres could stay in the US without any visa issues, while Zach could use her profile to boost his career as a personal trainer, too.
She soon increased her consultation prices and also began charging thousands for witchcraft ceremonies and tarot readings.
“By March 2022, Kat knew I’d broken up with my boyfriend and was feeling disillusioned with my studies,” says Letícia, who by this point had fallen completely under Torres’ spell.
“She persuaded me to take a witch bath, where you put leaves and herbs in the water until Kat says it’s OK to get in. It’s supposed to cleanse your energy and open this energy to making money.”
Around the same time, Torres also began to call on her followers to come to live in her Austin mansion, where they would work for her as personal assistants and learn how to become influencers.
Girls in the house were making $1,000 per day as “sugar babies”
Two young Brazilian women – who, like Letícia, had been following Torres for years and having regular consultations with her – took her up on her offer and flew to the US.
The women, whose brunette hair had been dyed blonde to match Torres’, were introduced on her social media as her “witch clan”.
“At first, I thought it was amazing that she was calling for followers to stay with her and have that opportunity to meet her,” says Letícia. “I was actually tempted to go, because I thought by living with her 24/7, I could learn so much from her.”
The following month, Letícia, who was training to be an engineer in Brazil and preparing to move to New York to study, had a call from Torres that would change her mind completely.
“She told me to quit my course and work ‘with my beauty’, as she put it. She told me how the girls in the house were making $1,000 per day as ‘sugar babies, escorting handsome men’.
“She said to me: ‘You won’t spend anything on food or rent, because we’ll provide everything for you. But you need to give me all the money you earn as a sugar baby.’
“That’s when it really hit me what was going on in Texas, and I was so shocked.
“Kat wanted me to come to Texas right away, as soon as I landed in New York. But then I would have been an illegal immigrant, as my visa was only for studying.
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“She said: ‘Don’t worry, we will get a guy to marry you.’ She must have realised I wasn’t buying it, because she told me my energy meant I wasn’t ready for Texas.”
Realising, to her horror, that Torres’ intention was to profit from her body, Letícia knew she had to distance herself from her former guru.
“That was when she told me I owed her $7,000 for the witchcraft bath. I told her I needed time to get my hands on that kind of money, but really I had no intention of paying, and I never spoke to her again.”
GIRLS 'CURSED'
Meanwhile, things had taken a very dark turn for Torres’ “witch clan”.
Just a few weeks after arriving in Austin, the young women were told they had to repay all the money that they owed for their plane tickets, accommodation and even the witchcraft ceremonies they had witnessed.
To do this, Torres told them they would be put to work in a local strip club, and if they refused, they would be “cursed”.
All their earnings had to be handed over in a bid to meet daily “quotas”, which were set at $1,000 per day initially, before quickly rising to $3,000.
When the girls were unable to meet these quotas, Torres said they had to work as prostitutes, which is illegal in Texas, and she added their profiles to an escort website.
One of the girls – 22-year-old Desirrê Freitas, who’d previously lived in Germany – worked against her will, with the constant threat of being reported to police if she tried to resist.
In September 2022, worried friends and family of the girls used Instagram to draw attention to the fact they had been missing for months.
A page called @SearchingDesirrê was set up, generating publicity within the Brazilian media, while police reports were now mounting in the US from Torres’ followers who claimed that they had been lured to work as her PAs, then not paid and threatened when they wanted to leave.
Panicked by the media attention, Torres took the girls to Maine, where they posted a video on social media insisting they were not being held captive.
'EXPLOITED & ENSLAVED'
On November 1, 2022, acting on a tip-off from Homeland Security that Torres was involved in human trafficking, a police detective contacted her and told her to go with the young women to the nearest police station, so that a welfare check could be carried out on them.
According to the police report, when they arrived, Torres was speaking unintelligibly and was distressed, explaining to detectives that people envied her fame and wanted to see her lose everything.
She denied prostituting the young women, but the profiles she had put on an escort website were soon discovered. The girls were taken away to safety and returned to their families, while Torres was deported to Brazil.
On June 28, 2024, Torres was sentenced to eight years in prison for subjecting Desirrê to human trafficking and slavery after the judge concluded she had lured her to the US for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
The cases of several other women who claim to have been exploited by Torres are still being processed in Brazil, although she is appealing her conviction and continues to argue her innocence.
Her American husband, Zach, has not been charged with any offences.
In a BBC interview from behind the bars of her Brazilian jail, Torres said of the women who testified against her: “They were saying so many lies. So many lies that, at one point, I couldn’t stop laughing.”
In her autobiography, entitled @SearchingDesirrê, the trafficking survivor poignantly said of her ordeal: “Many questions haunted me: ‘Could I stop whenever I wanted?’”
Desirrê continued: “I’m not fully recovered yet. I was sexually exploited, enslaved and imprisoned. I hope my story serves as a warning to others.”
Letícia, who now lives in New York, realises that she had a narrow escape.
“I didn’t report Kat to the authorities, because I was scared she would have her followers come after me on social media, but when a lawyer representing one of her victims contacted me, I did make a proper report about her. I could have been one of those girls if I’d gone to Austin.
“Now, when I reflect on what Kat did, and how she tried to suck me in, I can see that it’s like the ultimate Instagram-versus-reality nightmare.”
English (US) ·