‘Pimp Daddy’ sentenced to 27 years for violent sex trafficking and coersion

Violent pimp Damion St Patrick Baston has been sentenced to 27 years in a Florida prison, which he now plans to appeal, according to his lawyer.

US attorney David Rowe told AAP he was ‘not happy’ with the length of the sentence, but ‘he’s relieved he didn’t get life’ and will appeal both the sentence and his conviction on 41 charges.

Despite the evidence against the 37-year-old former stripper and conman who started a sex trade business on the Gold Coast in 2009, his lawyer said Baston has merely been a ‘tourist’.

‘He went to Australia as a tourist to enjoy the kinds of activities that exist in a resort where there is a red light district,’ Rowe said.

‘He was a bouncer, not a pimp.’

Assistant US attorney Olivia Chloe  told the court before the sentencing Baston had ‘prostituted multiple women for his own profit, using physical and sexual violence and psychological coercion’.

‘He continues to deny what the jury resoundingly found: that he knowingly recruited and enticed his victims, knowing that brutal force and coercion would be used to make them engage in prostitution,’ Ms Choe said.

His attorney David Rowe has asked for a sentence of between ten years and 12 years and six months.

Rowe said Baston –  who wore fur coats, gold chains, designer clothes and a $75,000 diamond watch bought from the earnings of the girls he turned into international sex slaves – is a victim of ‘lusty’ girls and the African slave trade.

The 37-year-old former male stripper, conman and Jamaican nightclub dancer, also known as ‘Daddy’, is in the Federal Detention Centre in Miami.

Mr Rowe claimed the women Baston enslaved were in fact ‘extroverted women highly motivated by sexual lusts’.

He said to one of the Australian, New Zealand and US woman his client turned into high-end prostitutes, that Baston was ‘the stud of her dreams’.

Judge Altonaga’s court found him guilty earlier this year on 21 charges including sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, importation of an alien for prostitution, transportation for prostitution, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Six young women, including two Australians, a New Zealander, a Lithuanian and two American girls gave evidence to the court of the life of prostitution and stripping for money he indoctrinated them into. In July, a jury took just six hours to convict him.

Part of the evidence before the court was Baston’s ‘pimp manifesto’ with which he persuaded young women to be ‘hoes’ – whores – instead of ‘f***ing for free’ with their boyfriends.

His methods as revealed byDaily Mail Australia, included convincing the girls that they were like a deluxe car, ‘be the Rolls Royce, not the Hyundai or the Civic parked at the metre around the corner’.

Photographs obtained from the Florida District Court showed Baston toting high-powered semi-automatic weapons, lying in bed covered in Australian bank notes, posing in a fox fur with a fistful of $100 bills, and wearing a bizarre pair of gold fangs.

But his lawyer insists that it was the girls’ fault, describing the victims as ‘non-chaste women, fully acquainted with escort services and the bawdiness of dancing in exotic nightclubs’.

‘These women are not sexual victims,’ Rowe wrote in a sentencing motion.

‘They are extroverted women highly motivated by sexual lusts, and, by nature, lie, play and deceive.’

Prosecutors told the jury Baston beat, threatened and raped the women and kept the hundreds of thousands of dollars they made as prostitutes.

Baston’s pimping began on Queensland’s Gold Coast, but led to the Middle East and the US.

More at The DailyMail Online.