Before we start just a quick warning, today's episode features a graphic description of a

rape.

We'll start in just a few seconds.

When I first met Amber Mansfield, she was a 39-year-old woman of color.

She lives in Mora, Minnesota, population 3,500.

She has a nine-year-old daughter, and I drove up there.

And I came to this white-clabbered house with an SUV on the driveway and a bicycle

in front.

And I went inside and we started to chat.

And she told me her story.

I grew up in Minneapolis, also some of the further out rural areas.

Amber Mansfield has a bit of a checkered past.

She is the first one to admit that.

She bounced around in foster care because her parents were unable to take care of her.

In her early 20s, she was charged with a misdemeanor offence of prostitution.

Since then, she left Minneapolis, got her high school degree, a house, a car, had a child.

And in 2011, she began to correspond with a man named Keith Washington.

We've been bailed.

We corresponded every day pretty much.

I grew up in the neighborhood where his family lived.

So I knew his brothers, and we were roller skating.

One of them dated my best friend.

...