Somaly Mam (Khmer: ម៉ម សុម៉ាលី [mɑːm somaːliː]; born 1970/71) is a Cambodian anti-trafficking advocate who focuses primarily on sex trafficking.

She set up the Somaly Mam Foundation, raised money, appeared on major television programs, and spoke at many international events.

[3] An investigation by Marie Claire magazine came to a different conclusion, finding witnesses that supported Mam's story and contradicted Newsweek's allegations.

[2][3] Mam was an untrained healthcare worker[11][12] with Médecins Sans Frontières and, in her spare time, handed out condoms, soap, and information to women in the brothels.

Speaking on a United Nations panel to member states, international aid organizations and the media in New York on April 3, Mam stated that eight girls had been killed after her organization AFESIP conducted a high-profile raid on a massage parlor at the Chai Hour II Hotel in Phnom Penh, where 83 women and girls were taken and placed in her refuge center.

[21] Mam had long claimed that the teenager was kidnapped and raped by human traffickers in retaliation for her raid on the Chai Hour II Hotel.

Legros said their daughter was not kidnapped, but had run away with her boyfriend, and that in his view the abduction story was a means of "marketing for the Somaly Mam Foundation".

Mam's work as president of AFESIP was being featured on French television as part of the popular weekly show Envoyé spécial.

Ratha, then a teenager of about 14 years from Takeo province, told a story of sexual slavery in an unspecified brothel somewhere in Phnom Penh.

The embassy cable quoted sources in the anti-trafficking community in Phnom Penh as saying that Mam was "rotten to the core," but as having made a "strategic decision to remain silent on concerns about AFESIP's accounting systems and general lack of financial controls to avoid putting … other anti-[trafficking] NGOs 'at risk'".

The new organization will not rescue women and girls but collaborate with other NGOs to rehabilitate and educate them once they are free so they can find jobs", the co-founder of the 'fund', Rigmor Schneider told a reporter, and explained plans to operate two residential centres.

"[29] On October 9, 2014, in an interview in Global Post, Mam's ex-husband and co-founder of AFESIP Pierre Legros said: "When you work in this world, you know fabricated stories are used by everyone to get funding."