By Amy Bruins, Vice President of Community Impact, Our Rescue
Mature Content Warning: This article discusses mature themes portrayed in Euphoria, including addiction, sexual exploitation, coercion, assault, commercial sexual exploitation, forced criminality, and human trafficking.
Euphoria (HBO) has never been a show that shies away from difficult subjects. The series explores complex and often uncomfortable themes including addiction, coercion, sexual violence, exploitation, and trafficking-related abuse dynamics.
So what does human trafficking and exploitation really look like? When people think of human trafficking on TV, they often picture kidnappings, chains, locked rooms, or dramatic rescue scenes. However, Euphoria does something different and in many ways, more unsettling: exploitation that happens gradually and through relationships, often hiding in plain sight.
The HBO series, through Rue’s relationships with traffickers, Laurie and Alamo, portrays trafficking as something quieter, messier, and far closer to reality: a slow process built on traffickers exploiting vulnerability and dependencies, including substance addiction and debt. At the same time, the show’s dramatized style and pacing sometimes exaggerate or simplify how trafficking works.
Here’s a breakdown of how Euphoria presents human trafficking and how accurate that portrayal really is. But first, a quick reminder on what human trafficking is: human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Within labor trafficking, there is forced criminality, where individuals are compelled to commit crimes – such as drug distribution – under coercion. Euphoria depicts commercial sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and forced criminality.
How Euphoria Depicts Human Trafficking
To understand the Euphoria’s human trafficking storyline, it helps to look at how the show connects addiction, debt, sexual exploitation, forced criminality, and coercive control. These themes appear most clearly through Ruby “Rue” Bennett (Zendaya) relationships with Laurie (Martha Kelly) and Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), as well as through the women being exploited at Alamo’s strip club.
At the end of Season 2, Euphoria had not shown human trafficking outright—but it signals that Rue is experiencing escalating forms of coercive and trafficking indicators. Season 3, meanwhile, heavily implies that Rue is being trafficked.
How Euphoria Depicts Human Trafficking in Season 2
Laurie, a soft-spoken former teacher turned calculated drug dealer and crime boss, who fronts Rue a suitcase containing $10,000 worth of drugs to sell. Laurie warns Rue that if she fails to pay her back, she will be “kidnapped and sold to some really sick people,” showing Laurie’s pernicious intentions.
When Rue’s mother, Leslie Bennett, (Nika King) finds and flushes the drugs and Rue can’t repay the debt, Rue goes to Laurie’s house while in severe withdrawal. What follows is an unsettling grooming sequence:
- Laurie acts calm, understanding, and maternal rather than angry.
- She injects Rue with morphine, escalating her drug use.
- She bathes Rue and keeps her in a locked house.
- Rue notices padlocked doors and hears noises suggesting that other people may also be trapped inside.
Rue manages to escape through a window, but the message was clear: Laurie was grooming her, isolating her, and preparing to exploit her.
From Rue’s vantage, Laurie was caring for her, as though she was a surrogate mother. Meanwhile, Laurie’s actions toward Rue were pre-mediated and exacting – she wanted to exploit Rue and methodically set about doing so.
This ambiguity is intentional—and important. Trafficking rarely begins with force. It starts with trust, dependency, and control.
How Euphoria Depicts Human Trafficking in Season 3
While Season 2 implies Rue is highly vulnerable to being trafficked, Season 3 strongly implies that Rue is being trafficked. After a five-year forward jump, Rue is now an adult—but still trapped by familiar power dynamics. Rue has not paid off her growing debt to Laurie, so she “works” directly for Laurie as a drug mule, smuggling fentanyl across the U.S.–Mexico border to pay off an enormous, ever-growing debt.
This marks a shift in how trafficking is portrayed. Instead of implied sexual exploitation, the show focuses on forced labor within organized crime, also referred to as trafficking for the purpose of forced criminality. Rue is not physically chained, but she is coerced through:
- Addiction that Laurie helps sustain
- A debt that can never truly be repaid
- Threats and loss of realistic exit options
The show makes it clear that Rue’s participation is not a free choice. She is working under coercion, exploitation, and fear—key elements of trafficking in the real world.
Rue is later “traded” from Laurie to another drug dealer and trafficker, Alamo, as payment for Laurie’s bad drugs killing one of “Alamo’s girls.” While Rue is not physically forced to go from Laurie to Alamo, her addiction, lack of money, and fear of retaliation, mean she has little real control over her situation. Rue first hopes Alamo will be better than Laurie, which fades quickly.
Alamo is the owner of the “Silver Slipper,” a fully nude strip club. Women working there are heavily controlled, sometimes drugged, and they regularly endure forms of sexual violence, exploitation, and trafficking.
We are introduced to Angel (Priscilla Delgado), a sex worker and sex trafficking victim. Angel is experiencing growing distress and is eventually checked into Alamo’s preferred rehab center, “Hope Springs,” where all services will be covered by him. Rue notes that Alamo is remarkably generous to cover those costs and later senses something is off after checking Angel into Hope Springs. Angel’s fate is unclear.
The Silver Slipper is later robbed by Laurie’s crew, as part of an ever-escalating feud with Alamo. (Alamo had Laurie’s beloved pet bird killed in an earlier episode.) Gun fire breaks out throughout the strip club, and we see people fleeing for safety in the background. Rue and Magick (Rosalía Vila Tobella), another sex worker and sex trafficking victim, were in the office when the robbery began. In the office, two rival gang leaders have an intense negotiation – they casually negotiate Rue and Magick’s lives as though they are assets to be traded. At the end of Episode 5, Euphoria’s human trafficking storyline is still going strong. Our Rescue will be staying tuned for the final episodes and noting what Euphoria gets right and wrong about human trafficking through the end of the series.
What Euphoria Gets Right About Human Trafficking
1. Trafficking is a process, not a single event
One of the strongest parts of Euphoria’s portrayal is that exploitation builds over time. Rue is not simply grabbed off the street. Laurie (and later Alamo) does not abduct Rue. She listens to her, empathizes with her, gives her what she needs, and tightens control. This mirrors real trafficking cases far more accurately than sudden kidnappings, as often misrepresented in media.
2. Addiction is a powerful tool of control
The show realistically portrays how traffickers use addiction to maintain power. Laurie exploits Rue’s addiction, estrangement from family, housing and financial instability, and shame. Laurie does not just sell Rue drugs—she increases Rue’s dependence and uses withdrawal as leverage. This reflects documented trafficking patterns, especially among people with substance use disorders.
3. Debt bondage is central
Laurie imposes exorbitant interest rates and charges to Rue’s debt, which quickly morphs and compounds. Rue understands that she cannot pay off the debt, so the debt is both financial and psychological. The sense that she “owes” Laurie keeps her trapped. Debt bondage is one of the most common mechanisms traffickers use to prevent escape.
4. Human Trafficking encompasses forced labor and commercial sex
Season 3’s focus on forced labor and drug smuggling helps challenge a common myth: that human trafficking always involves sex work. In reality, labor trafficking is widespread globally but often underrepresented in the media. People can be exploited for labor, services, or criminal activity, and their exploitation may be missed when systems see only the crime and not the coercion behind it.
5. No one labels what is happening as “Human Trafficking”
Characters do not say human trafficking; rather, they use vague terms like “jobs,” “the game” or “the life.” Alamo frames Rue’s drug trafficking at the strip club as an opportunity, even as he controls her movements and exposes her to inherent danger and criminal liability. This silence is important because it shows how trafficking may go undetected or unnoticed, especially when victims are young, vulnerable, and already marginalized.
6. Human trafficking victims not self-identifying
Euphoria helps expose the idea that trafficking victims may not identify themselves as victims. Rue sees her situation as the result of her own bad choices, rather than trafficking and exploitation. Angel, too, is treated as a “problem employee” rather than someone in need of mental health support. Many trafficking victims do not come forward because they feel ashamed, guilty, or convinced they deserve what is happening to them.
7. Victims being expendable in the eyes of traffickers
Traffickers seek to systematically dehumanize and disempower victims. Laurie, Alamo, and their respective crews routinely treat victims as though they are assets – closely tied to profits, debt, and utility – to be leveraged or exchanged. When a victim steps out of line, they are seen as disposable.
Where Euphoria Falls Short or Oversimplifies Things in its Human Trafficking Portrayal
1. The timeline is unrealistically fast
Like many television shows, Euphoria speeds up the progression from vulnerability to exploitation. Rue’s descent from initial debt to near trafficking to large-scale exploitation—happens much faster than it typically would in real life. More often, Human Trafficking often develops over longer periods, with increasing layers of control.
2. Laurie and Alamo do too much
Laurie and Alamo are powerful characters, but the show sometimes places too many roles on a couple of individuals. Laurie functions as recruiter, dealer, organizer, and criminal enterprise kingpin. In real trafficking operations, these roles are usually spread across multiple people. Concentrating everything in one character makes for strong storytelling but oversimplifies how organized exploitation and criminal enterprises work.
3. Systems, support, and recovery are invisible
Law enforcement, social services, border systems, nonprofits, and healthcare all play major roles in real trafficking cases and support. Euphoria keeps the focus tightly on personal relationships, which heightens emotional impact but downplays systemic failures that sustain exploitation.
Overall
Euphoria offers one of the more psychologically realistic portrayals of human trafficking on television—especially when it comes to grooming, targeting vulnerability (in this case, highlighting Rue’s addiction and familial estrangement), debt, and exploitation.
While the show inaccurately compresses timelines, simplifies trafficking networks, and leaves out available support options for dramatic effect, it successfully pushes viewers away from sensational scenarios and toward a harder truth: trafficking often looks quiet and relational, not random. Human trafficking often goes unnamed and unnoticed because traffickers dehumanize and exert strong control over their victims.
This storyline may open important conversations about how society treats those who are most vulnerable (e.g., persons experiencing economic instability or housing instability, persons experiencing substance use and addiction, prior trauma or abuse history) and how vulnerability makes people targets. To prevent human trafficking and exploitation, we must also address these vulnerabilities.
As Euphoria shows, sometimes uncomfortably well, human trafficking is a complex, evolving crime. It presents two complex human trafficking realities – 1) someone can be breaking the law and still be exploited; participation does not equal power and 2) trafficking victims may initially engage voluntarily (e.g., Rue taking the $10,000 loan from Laurie), but that initial consent becomes increasingly exploited or coerced as traffickers increase control over victims (e.g., Rue later is drugged, forced to a be a drug mule, and sold).
Our Rescue Human Trafficking Training Resources, Reporting and How to Get Involved
One of the hardest parts of watching a show like Euphoria is the feeling of helplessness it can leave behind. The story ends, but those realities continue in everyday life. The good news is that there are meaningful ways to get involved.
Because informed individuals and communities are the strongest force for preventing harm and increasing community safety, start by taking Our Rescue’s free training on important topics like human trafficking, online safety, psychological first aid, and trauma.
If you would like to report human trafficking or child exploitation, please visit our Reporting Human Trafficking page. Here, we also have links and support options for persons in need of support or referral assistance.
Join the Fight
Human trafficking movies and TV shows spark conversation and empathy, but understanding reality is critical. Supporting survivor care, law enforcement, and community education can help reduce exploitation.
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Learn more: National Human Trafficking Hotline
