Freedom

By Michael Wing

She moved to L.A. to pursue the Hollywood dream, but it seems Landon Starbuck was really just trying to escape herself.

The belief that she was never good enough was the teenage malady plaguing the young, talented music artist from the Lone Star State. At age 18, she moved from Dallas, thinking Hollywood would be her cure. Ms. Starbuck had apparently been so naïve.

Somehow, she thought, if she became an even better singer, even prettier, even skinnier, and if she could find that right person who would believe in her talents, nothing else would matter.

How quickly she found out otherwise.

Instead, she witnessed how Hollywood exploits children on an industrial scale, and she became disillusioned. More recently, she has taken the fight to the predators themselves who target young stars—as they had targeted her.

She told of her experiences that opened her eyes to the sexual quid pro quo culture that is Hollywood, of what was expected, the favors, the denigration needed to become a star.

“I had a manager who asked me to star in a music video for a very well-known band and I agreed to do it, and I showed up,” she told The Epoch Times, adding that this was implicitly “the next step in my career,” for she would tour with the band.

“There was a wardrobe rack and there was lingerie on it,” she said. “It was very clear that you have to take your clothes off to be in this.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not comfortable wearing that,” she told the manager.

“That’s okay,” they replied. “We’ll find somebody who will.”

And like that, Ms. Starbuck lost her tour, leaving her feeling rejected.

The ways this same old story played out time and time again for Ms. Starbuck were manifold.

She was asked to toast her own record-signing celebration, where she announced she would be a role model for girls by keeping her clothes on. “The very next day, I was pretty much toasted,” she said. “My label deal fell through, my—everything just fell through.”

You have to mingle, go to the parties, wine and dine and rub elbows with the right people, Ms. Starbuck’s friends and peers had said.

“Landon, you really should just do it,” they told her. “You don’t have to, you know, sleep with them. You just have to go and have fun and party.”

“We all know that that’s really what they’re expecting, though,” Ms. Starbuck replied.

She failed to grasp how getting wasted on a rooftop in Las Vegas with a bunch of executives was part of the job, she said. But it is part of the job.

“I thought something was wrong with me for not loving what I do and wanting to work hard enough,” she told the newspaper.

She essentially became blacklisted, a pariah in Hollywood. Rumors swirled of how she was “hard to work with,” and so she bounced between agents, labels, and managers until she’d finally had enough. She quit being a performer and would write for other artists.

That was worse, she said, because she now saw it happen to other children, and, as she’d signed a non-disclosure agreement, she was told to keep quiet.

She witnessed “young, budding stars being dropped off in studios, without the parents, … young minors, anywhere from—probably the youngest was 9,” Ms. Starbuck said, adding that “they were taking drugs.” “I didn’t actually see the child do it. But I knew.

“Shortly thereafter, I quit.”

Disillusioned and wiser, she left Hollywood.

She would marry Cuban-American music video producer Robbie Starbuck, from California, who’s directed for the likes of Akon and Snoop Dogg. He also entered the political arena as a Republican congressional candidate in 2022.

Years passed. Now a parent of three, living in Tennessee, Ms. Starbuck is speaking out while arming parents with knowledge to combat a culture of exploitation that targets children on an industrial scale. It’s not just in Hollywood, she warns, but nationwide.

Today, Ms. Starbuck runs Freedom Forever, a non-profit that fights all forms of child exploitation. She also creates music, such as her single “Hope,” to shed light on the scourge of child trafficking.

Her alarm cry to parents is that the paradigm of child exploitation today has changed and hides under our very noses.

It used to be the child trafficker in a white van, nabbing kids off the street, she said. But the real threat now is online, the multifarious social media groups rife with predators aiming to groom and exploit kids—kids, who are curious, naïve, and vulnerable.

Parents are naïve to believe that Big Tech platforms—like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok—have any incentive whatsoever to protect our children.

“Parents don’t understand how these platforms work,” Ms. Starbuck told The Epoch Times of this innocuous-seeming threat. “There is no incentive or requirement for [these platforms] to protect children.”

She works with parents whose children were either trafficked or groomed because of foolhardy reliance on parental controls on said platforms.

Her solution? It starts not with legislation or Big Tech regulation—not even with rescuing kids, which is vital—but at home. And between our ears. The “Freedom Model,” she said, begins from the inside out, from inside our homes, devices, and minds.

Another crucial point is that parents must own up to what dangers they choose to expose their kids to when they let them use tech devices.

Predators on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are “actively grooming” your children, she said. Their aim is “to normalize predators and pornography.”

In 2022, there were 32 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation received by the National Center for Missing Children’s CyberTipline. This helps put the scale of the problem in perspective.

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Seriously, she asks parents, “in what other physical environment would we send our children into where we know there’s going to be pornography and we know there’s going to be predators?”

At what age are parents willing to “cosign on the fact that their kids will be exposed to groomers, indoctrination, or transgender ideology?” she asks.

“All of these things are creating vulnerabilities in our children.”