Oakland author’s novel based on Celeste Guap sex scandal chosen for Oprah’s book club

OAKLAND (CBS SF) — While 18th birthdays generally are memorable, Oakland’s Leila Mottley had a little something extra special to mark the occasion — she signed a major publishing contract.

On Tuesday, her first book — Nightcrawling — hit the store shelves and immediately became a the Oprah Winfrey book club selection.

The book is a gritty fictional story of an Oakland girl named Kiara, who grows up in the Regal-Hi apartment complex and is the victim of serial abuse.

Mottley began writing the book while she was still in high school.  

“It was a month before I graduated from high school,” the now 19-year-old Smith College student said on CBS Mornings. “The first chapter I wrote at 16 and then I wrote the book at 17. I just wrote through 17 and then signed my first contract on my 18th birthday.”

While it’s a work of fiction, it draws from the real life Celeste Guap sex scandal.  It was in May 2016 when numerous Oakland and Richmond police officers were investigated for sexually exploiting the teen daughter of a 911 dispatcher.

Guap told KPIX in an interview that she had sex with 14 officers from Oakland police department, as well as five from the Richmond police department, three Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies and a Livermore cop. She says she only had sex with three officers — all from Oakland PD — while she was underage.

The Bay Area media focused in the case, generating dozens of headlines and months of intense coverage. It also grabbed the interest of the then 13-year-old Mottley.

“It was inspired by a 2016 case that broke in the Bay Area where a young girl was sexually abused by Bay Area police officers,” she said of the book. “I was a young teenager, born and raised in Oakland, at the time the case broke and I remember paying attention to this and focusing on this whole case.”

“It was consuming our local media and being really kind of taken by the way the media seemed to focus more on the police department than on the harm done to this girl.”

The former Oakland youth poet laureate said she wanted her book to show how fragile young girls can be.

“I think often the world focuses Black and Brown girls to care for others and to neglect our own vulnerability,” she said. “So I wanted this book to show how we can be fragile and the world does not protect us.”