ABC’s Modern Family star Ariel Winter went undercover as a 12-year-old girl for a sting operation to catch a child sexual predator. “I am familiar with male predators, because I worked in Hollywood at a young age,” the actress said.
Winter, who played Alex Dunphy on Modern Family, posed as an underage girl to help catch a child sexual predator in an undercover sting operation for the nonprofit organization Safe from Online Sex Abuse (SOSA).
The sting operation was included in the true crime docuseries SOSA Undercover, which featured the 27-year-old actress pretending to be a 12-year-old girl to attract a 31-year-old man in Oklahoma City.
“I am familiar with male predators, because I worked in Hollywood at a young age, I started at age four,” Winter told Daily Mail.
“I don’t wanna say too much about it, but by the time I was on a laptop and cell phone, I was getting inappropriate messages from older men, and it causes trauma,” the Sofia the First voice actress said.
Winter went on to say, “The experiences I had in person and online as a child have affected me so deeply that I’ve had to go to therapy for it,” adding, “The movie and TV industry is a dark place.”
“Growing up in the entertainment industry, I’ve been the girl we are trying to save,” Winter said. “It’s vital to me to help protect young women from the experiences I endured in my own life.”
Earlier this year, ahead of the series’ March 20 release, SOSA shared a clip from the premiere episode to its Instagram account, showing Winter donning a blonde wig and talking to an accused child sexual predator in a video chat while pretending to be a young girl.
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The actress took to the comment section of the Instagram post, where she disclosed, “I was a victim of grooming online and IRL [in real life], and CSA [child sexual abuse],” adding, “The effects are lifelong and inescapable.”
“This has ALWAYS been a problem, but in the digital age it is only escalating to more extreme levels and in more manipulative ways,” Winter continued. “The access predators have to ALL children in this day and age is immeasurable.”
“This issue needs to be brought further into the light and fought with everything we have,” the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang actress stressed, noting that the crimes featured in the docuseries are “very real,” and have resulted in arrests.
Winter also praised SOSA for helping “get actual convictions and take these perpetrators off the streets.”
“It is not easy to do this work, but it is so rewarding to know that we’ve helped protect even one child,” the actress said.
As for her experience in being a part of SOSA’s sting operation, Winter told Daily Mail she was “surprised by the volume how many men were out there looking to talk to young girls who were 12 or 13.”
“It’s hundreds of thousands of men,” she said.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
