Jennifer Beagle spent nearly eight years on the streets. Today, 24 years sober, she's one signature away from opening Louisville's first long-term residential home for survivors of human trafficking.

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Jennifer Beagle has a habit of saying her story out loud- all of it- and then waiting to see if you flinch.

"I have a big story," she told me, sitting in the conference room of a church just off Tucker Station Road. "If it could happen, it did happen. And that's why I help people today the way that I do."

She isn't exaggerating. Beagle's story begins in a chaotic Florida childhood- the youngest of seven kids, a home marked by alcoholism and extreme domestic violence, sexual abuse by a family member around age seven. She was sneaking sips of her dad's beer by nine. By 11, she says, she was a full-blown alcoholic. By 13, an addict. At 14, after getting caught with marijuana at school, she landed in foster care- where her foster father raped her and then spent the next year trading her to his farm hands for drugs.

"That's trafficking by definition," she said. "We didn't know it was trafficking at all decades ago. But it was."

It's a word she uses deliberately, because for most of her life, nobody else did. She was just "the problem child"- the delinquent in the system. "No one looked at why at home," she said. "And that's still a big deal today. The child's still blamed."

Eight years on the streets

What followed was decades of the same pattern wearing different faces. A marriage at 19- her first husband was a Kentucky truck driver, her first tie to this state. A second marriage to a man as violent as her father. A sister-in-law who introduced her to crack cocaine and, Beagle later realized, had arranged for the dealer to demand sex as payment.

Within months, she was being sold for drugs. She lost custody of her son. And for nearly eight years, she lived homeless on the streets of Gainesville, Florida- accumulating arrests for prostitution, possession, and paraphernalia, and surviving violence she recounts with unsettling steadiness: beatings, gang rapes, and being left for dead.