‘This is pimpin’: Feds charge allegedly violent Bay Area human trafficker after child sex abuse video found

OAKLAND — A San Francisco man has been charged in federal court with conspiracy to engage in human trafficking after a years-long saga that started when a young woman called 911 to ask for help escaping her violent pimp, court records show.

Michael Lavell Simon III, 37, was charged last month with the conspiracy case, superseding a federal criminal complaint that accused him of possessing a video of himself sexually abusing a 17-year-old girl. Simon, in custody at the West County Detention Facility in Pinole, has been under investigation for three years, both by the FBI and Oakland police, who’ve tracked him as far away as Gardena.

There have been twists and turns during the investigation, including failed attempts to prosecute Simon on a state level, two raids on California hotels where he was arrested, and an unsolved incident where one of his alleged trafficking victims was stabbed repeatedly inside her hotel room. In the end, prosecutors say the case against Simon is largely based on digital evidence, including the child sex abuse video and texts where the teen and two women allegedly bed Simon to stop beating them.

“It’s not about you being up under someone in this game. It’s about getting money. This is not a girlfriend and boyfriend situation. This is pimpin,” he allegedly texted a woman in 2023.

The investigation started on June 17, 2023, when a then-20-year-old woman called 911 in Oakland to report that she was hiding from her pimp near 10th Avenue and 10th Street and wanted to escape. Police identified her alleged exploiter as Simon and tracked him to the Value Inn on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland.

Simon was arrested nine days later, after a 90-minute foot chase that involved Simon running through several adjacent backyards and hiding from officers, according to court records. At the time, police say he was in possession of a spray-painted Infiniti, after receiving a tip he’d painted the car to disguise it after getting into a shootout.

Simon, on probation for a 2022 pandering conviction at the time, was charged with pimping and a co-defendant was charged with helping him destroy evidence. But weeks later the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence, court records show.

The following year, Oakland police built a gun possession case against Simon, and arrested him in December 2024 at a hotel in Gardena, where he was staying with two suspected sex workers. He later accepted a plea deal to a single charge — leading police on a chase near an open air sex market in Oakland — and received a 324-day jail sentence with a probation term that expires in 2027, records.

But during the FBI and SWAT raid in Gardena, police seized several cellphone belonging to Simon, and that’s when the investigation began to seriously progress. They searched his Instagram account, @sharkmoneymode_, where they say they found discussions about prostitution and conversations with the women, according to the criminal complaint.

“All you do is make fun of me ignore me and beat me,” one of them wrote him a month before his arrest. In September 2024, another woman allegedly texted him, “you hit me in my face and my head hurts.” Authorities also found similar texts from the 17-year-old girl, whose grandmother identified her from a non-explicit cropped still shot of the sex abuse video, according to prosecutors.

“I don’t need you to beat me up bcs I’m alrdy (sic) beating myself up for my own mistakes believe me I’m more mad at myself than you are,” the girl allegedly texted Simon in 2024.

In August 2025, one of Simon’s alleged victims took a rideshare to a hospital to be treated for stab wounds that she suffered inside the Knight’s Inn on West MacArthur Boulevard, according to Oakland police. Surveillance cameras showed the woman arriving at the hotel a day earlier with a man who prosecutors say appeared similar to Simon, despite the footage being “blurry.” He wasn’t charged in connection with the stabbing and the woman claimed she woke up with wounds and didn’t know what happened, court records show.

Simon’s arraignment has been set for this week.