Twenty-three men of wealth and influence have finally been charged in a sex trafficking case known pejoratively as the “high-end brothel” case. Why anyone calls this a brothel is beyond me. There’s no crime called “running a brothel.” Everyone knows this, just like they know there’s no saloon down the street where men get drunk and stumble through swinging doors before shooting each other with Colt 45s.

So stop calling it a brothel and consider this: More than 2,800 men participated in the well-organized sexual abuse and exploitation of young Asian women; some rumored to be underage. This is not a brothel, it’s slavery. The “high end” part just means the pimps charged a lot more than the thugs who sell homeless women for drugs down at Mass and Cass.

Though they tried to keep their names a secret, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled last year that the identities of the well-heeled bums must be revealed at the magistrate’s hearings, where a clerk would decide whether criminal charges should be filed. As karma would have it, the public paid extra attention to the hearings because of how hard the men tried to hide.

The public expected the loafered crowd to appear in person, though the law does not require it. The men should have been there, looking remorseful, but during the first two hearings at which a total of 23 men were charged, only two came in person. The rest didn’t show at all. Their names were announced, but the media struggled to identify them because their names were spoken rather than spelled out, and some of them had common enough names that if you tried to search for them on the internet, it was impossible to know for sure which one was the criminal.

A Cambridge City Councilor named Paul Toner was hard to miss, as was James Cusack, Jr., the cancer surgeon from Mass. General. But most had several namesakes so their pictures didn’t make the news because it might have been the wrong guy. One has an Indian name that’s so unusual, nobody else in the country much less in Massachusetts has the same moniker. But when you search his name on LinkedIn, you reach a man whose last name is just the letter B. Did he change it to insulate himself from detection?

Twenty-five of 28 have at least been identified to some extent. The last five will face the magistrate Friday, whether they show up or not, and the whole lot of them will soon appear in person, in a different courtroom, on arraignment day, which should be in the next month or so. I say should be because they will try to make deals with the prosecutor beforehand, in the hope of avoiding arraignment altogether, but Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan is politically wise enough not to indulge such foolishness.

Some will also try to delay the arraignment date by claiming to be “too busy” to come to court because they will be sailing or traveling abroad — the kinds of excuses you don’t hear from defendants whose vacations last a week and involve day trips to Revere Beach. A few of the fancy-pants lawyers will claim they have more important cases to deal with in Superior Court and cannot fit a lowly district court arraignment into their schedule for months. And even after the arraignment dates are set, watch how everyone’s grandmother suddenly dies, and they get to delay things yet again.

Meanwhile, City Councilor Toner says he’s not resigning, even though evidence of his guilt is overwhelming, and his role in the sexual exploitation of the young Asian females was allegedly prolific. He had over 400 reported separate contacts with the pimps. FOUR HUNDRED. If he averaged five contacts per incident, that would mean he participated in a lot of exploitation.

This is not poor judgment. What Toner is alleged to have done was deliberate and vile, and because young Asian females were targeted, some are even calling it a hate crime. Yet Toner thinks he should remain employed by the City of Cambridge and decide important questions of law and policy for a city that is filled to the brim with similarly vulnerable people.

Anyone who supports Paul Toner should answer this question: If he paid a pimp to have sex with your teenage daughter, would you vote for him? If the answer is no, then he needs to go.

Remember, 2,800 men participated in this inhumane perversion. Cops targeted only the top 10% who caused the most harm by spending the most money to help pimps traffic the largest number of girls. Toner is named as one of them — and the fact that he still thinks he deserves the public’s trust is exactly why he is unfit to serve.

Wendy Murphy is an attorney and victims’ rights advocate.