Maggy R. Krell

Krell said her career was been shaped by an “epiphany” she had around 2004. She was prosecuting prostitution cases as a deputy San Joaquin district attorney in Stockton, but couldn’t escape the feeling many young women and girls in the court were victims, not criminals.

“I remember just looking at the files and feeling sick to my stomach,” Krell said. “I committed to myself that I was going to be a part of making this better.”

She later joined the California Department of Justice, spending almost 13 years largely focused on white collar crime. She also kept a multiple killer behind bars by convicting him in a cold case murder he committed two decades earlier.

Eventually, then-Attorney General Kamala D. Harris tasked her with pursuing human trafficking cases. Krell said she noticed prostitution was less and less a street-level activity.

“It was all through the internet, and it was all through one website, Backpage,” Krell said.

Last month, Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced that Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer has agreed to a plea deal in exchange for testifying against the two major shareholders in the company that had become known as “The World’s Largest Online Brothel.”

Krell led that prosecution for more than a year. An initial case was derailed by a provision in the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that limits the liability of website operators. She then added charges of conspiracy and money laundering — the very crimes Ferrer pleaded to.

But she was no longer with the agency when the deal was announced. In February, Krell was named chief counsel of Planned Parenthood of Affiliates of California.

With President Donald Trump in office, she said, the job will largely be about defending Planned Parenthood’s funding and its right to do its work. But she’s also looking for ways to be proactive — for instance, by filing an amicus brief in support of her old boss in the U.S. Supreme Court case NIFLA v. Becerra, 16-1140.

She said she sees her new role as an extension of her work as a prosecutor.

“I’ve spent the last year watching the federal government’s attempts to erode access to health care, particularly for low-income families and for vulnerable young women, a lot of the women I was protecting through my human trafficking work,” Krell said. “I felt that I wasn’t willing to stand on the sidelines anymore.”

— Malcolm Maclachlan