Your Excellencies and Distinguished Guests,

Good Morning. You know, I was just thinking: We’ve only seen one another in the movies. You’ve seen me in films, and I’ve only ever seen this room in them!

I am very delighted and honored to be here. I am feeling a little fear — healthy fear — which my grandmother has taught is my Higher Power’s way of shaking the truth out of me.

I am Ashley Judd and, amongst other things, I am an actor. I have appeared in scores of films and on Broadway. I would understand if you might be wondering right now, “How dare she imagine she has something to contribute to the urgent, charged debate about the scourge of modern slavery, of human trafficking!?”

Actually, I believe wholeheartedly the real question is, “How dare I not?” How dare I not stand before you with all the earnestness at my command and witness to you what I have seen? In my capacity as a board member for Population Services International; and Global Ambassador for YouthAIDs, our HIV/AIDS prevention programs; and our child survival programs, Five and Alive, I have traveled to 12 developing countries and experienced viscerally the insidious enmeshment between poverty, illness and gender inequality, and how that triad sets up the exquisite pain and degradation that is sex and labor slavery. I have seen the poor and the vulnerable, the disempowered and the exploited. And when orphans in Mumbai slums begged me to take them back home to America with me; when I sat in mediation with monks in Thailand surrounded by the cremated remains of HIV victims, remains which were rejected by their families due to stigma; when I, a rich, white woman of the global North walked scot-free out of brothels in Kenya, Madagascar, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of Congo; when I have danced at youth drop-in centers worldwide with beautiful, vulnerable children, knowing the funding for these life-saving yet simple facilities was inadequate, putting those children but a few precarious steps away from sex and labor slavery, I have made one keening vow: I will never forget you, and I will tell your stories. I will tell your stories. I will tell your stories.

To quote the effervescent light that is Marianne Williamson, “My greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.” Ms. Williamson adds, “We are, all of us, not just some of us, children of God, and our playing small does not serve the world.”

So I am here at the United Nations because when it comes to human dignity and rights, I refuse to play small and I am going to tell you those stories. How dare I not.