A prominent Black Lives Matter leader has been charged with prostitution of a 17-year-old girl after he was arrested last month in a motel where he lived in College Park, Maryland.
Charles Wade faces seven charges, including a human trafficking felony, according to The Daily Caller. He posted $25,000 bail and awaits his court date scheduled for June.
Wade is the co-founder of Operation Help or Hush, which he started in response to Ferguson. His organization has housed and has provided food for fellow BLM activists. Wade has been profiled several times in The Washington Post for his work and once by Fusion for supplying pizza to Baltimore activists during the Freddie Gray protests. He was once a stylist for Beyonce’s sister and received an official White House invite to screen a movie along with other BLMers just this week.
But in April, police say Wade was selling an underage white girl for sex. Their report details an undercover officer answering a web ad on a known site for prostitution. The meeting was set at a local Howard Johnson Inn. The undercover john was greeted at the door by the female wearing only a towel. A male, assumed to be Wade, was noticed nearby watching the whole thing go down.
The girl was questioned and described Wade, whom she called CJ, as her “manager.” He had reserved the room with his passport and police confiscated three cell phones from him. The girl said she paid all monies to him and said he knew she was a minor. He brushed it off because she was only five months away from turning 18.
The DC spoke to Wade via e-mail since his release and he, of course, denied the charges and blamed it on “someone that we had just started temporarily housing.” But police say that there is evidence that the text messages exchanged with the undercover officer came from one of Wade’s phones.
Wade further tried to deflect blame by saying it was conservative Twitter “trolls” that are going after him with this story. He tweeted:
“For the past two to three days, ‘trolls’ have been actively baiting conservative news outlets to report on my arrest, amongst other vindictive things that they are actively working on.”
Previous to these legal troubles, Wade had been arrested before, in 2014, for making false statements. Something else he wasn’t upfront about in his e-mail to the DC was the fact that he agreed to enter a deferred prosecution program two days after he got out of jail, which means he would perform some type of community service in exchange for the charges being dropped.
