Case in point, the case of someone identified only as V.M. who worked for an extremely rich couple in New York for $1,000 a month for 5 years, and was never allowed out of the huge mansion, didn't have access to health care, etc.
I've seen two articles on this already. All of them state that V.M. came from a state in India...none of them mention anything about her enslavers except that they were extremely wealthy.
If the one article hadn't published a photo of "Annie George", no one would know that... wait for it... she's Indian too.
All these extremely wealthy folk who keep these slaves in New York haven't been white... they've been immigrants themselves from countries like India where slavery still goes on!
I can remember an episode of Barney Miller 30 years ago, when some diplomat from Africa, black, had a black indentured servant. 30 years ago this little event was treated fairly.
A couple of years ago, a few months after the story broke about some illegal immigrants kept as virtual slaves by some legal immigrants from the same country, Law and Order "ripped the story from the headlines." Of course they changed it so that the enslavers were rich white folk instead of rich immigrant people of color...
Of course that's not the first time Law and Order has changed the race of someone involved in one of their "ripped from the headlines" stories. There was the case of some Latina woman who had run over a pedestrian so hard that his body was stuck in her windshield! She went home and parked the car in her garage for three days until he died, then called some friends to help her dump his body.
When Law and Order did the story , the Latina woman had been changed to a wealthy white woman.
(Not that wealthy or even middle class or even poor white folk aren't capable of inhuman behavior, as we do see on a daily basis - but it's just pretty egregious for Law and Order to deliberately change the race of someone when they're doing their "ripped from the headlines" stories.
Here's a photo of Annie George.
And here's the article that doesn't bother to mention that this very wealthy woman is an Indian.
From the Gothamist: Illegal Maid Says She Was A Slave In A Gold Gilded Mansion
Annie George, seen at her husband's 2009 funeral, has been accused of forcing a maid to work 17-hour days for almost no pay (AP).
An upstate widow has been accused by authorities of breaking immigration laws and keeping an illegal alien essentially as a house slave. 39-year-old Annie George of Rexford reportedly compelled an Indian woman, identified in court as V.M., to overstay her visa and then had her cook, clean and care her her six children (while sleeping in a closet in one of the kids's bedrooms).
The servant had previously worked for a U.N. employee's family before being lured by George in 2005 with a $1,000 a month salary—not that she got that, according to the complaint she was paid about $29,000 total despite working 17 hour days. At the George home, Annie's real estate mogul husband Mathai died in 2009, V.M. was tasked with caring and cooking for the children as well as maintaining the 30,000-square-foot mansion in Rexford—which boasts 34 rooms, 10 bedrooms, an indoor pool, helicopter pad, a four-story solarium, a glass elevator and 24-karat gold gilded ceilings—that they lived in.
V.M.'s work allegedly went without a personal or sick day from October 2005 until April 27, 2011, when federal Homeland Security agents, working on a tip, went to George’s mansion and demanded she release the woman. According to the complaint George owes V.M. $77,000 for the last two years and about $206,000 for the last six years of work. George, for her part, is denying the allegations. A lawyer for her tells the Post that "The woman was not a servant, and she [George] wasn’t keeping her in the house or anything else."
Sadly this isn't the first (and probably isn't the last) story we've heard about rich people keeping maids like slaves.
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