Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  Like Maddy, Michelle Christy (her work name) commands top dollar. Michelle says she currently makes between $2,500 and $3,500 a week, usually seeing only four clients. Her clients are often married corporate executives who want more than sex; they want someone to be an interesting, nonjudgmental companion for a few hours.

  “Sex is the least of what they want. I’ve got the CEO of a major NASDAQ company who comes to see me twice a month,” she says. “His second wife hates his first wife, and he needs a place where he can go and unwind. He’s thrilled to give me $1,000 to sit and talk.”

  Michelle has agreed to meet me in the air-conditioned lobby of the Alexis Park Hotel, a resort-style lodging with three pools and a conference center a few blocks from Las Vegas’s famously gaudy strip. Sitting on a plush sofa, her long legs primly crossed, Michelle looks like the corporate executive she once was. She is a tall, well-endowed brunette whose parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States before Michelle was born. (It’s pure coincidence that two of the more articulate escorts I encountered for this book hail from a Russian-Jewish background.) Michelle says she received a good education, earned a master’s degree at American University, and for many years worked as a sales executive for a large health care company. But she had too little time for her family and grew to hate her work.

  “I have two teenage daughters, and I found I was working seventy-five to eighty hours a week,” she says. “I was beaten up on a daily basis to meet quotas, and I was working for a company that I found highly unethical. So I left for freedom. I call my own shots now.”

  Michelle says that for every ad that she places on eros.com, she gets between one hundred and four hundred responses. “My ad says I’m an educated professional who chooses to do this work. I’m interested in exploring who I am and my body, and I’m interested in men who are interested in exploring who they are,” she says.

  Michelle looks me in the eye. “The men who come to see me are not necessarily interested in my blow job, although it’s pretty damn good.” She points to her head with two well-manicured fingers. “They’re interested in what’s going on up here,” she says.

  Like other high-end escorts, Michelle says she can tell a lot about potential clients from the email exchanges. “Is there a respectful tone, are they requesting naked pictures or sending me naked pictures?” she says. “I don’t see anybody like that.”

  Instead, Michelle might respond to an email that says, “’Michelle, your ad really spoke to me,’ or ‘I’m a fifty-two-year-old man and my wife has MS [multiple sclerosis] and I have needs,’ ” she says. “As long as you come to me honestly, that’s what matters.”

  Like Julie Moya, Michelle has developed her own system for screening out abusive customers or undercover cops. “One of the things I do to guard against violence is make sure there’s evidence of impulse control,” she says. “If they can’t wait to see me until next week, then I don’t want to see them. As a rule, I don’t see anyone under thirty-five. Kids don’t understand discretion. Rule number one in this business: never be with anyone who has less to lose than you do. I only deal with men who have something to lose.”

  If a potential client emails her that he wants to meet her in Virginia, she may respond that she’s in Maryland. “Cops don’t generally cross state lines,” she explains.

  Michelle usually meets her clients in midpriced hotels in Washington, D.C. (Security at high-priced hotels can be too intrusive, and the kind of clients Michelle seeks won’t come to low-priced venues.) She will only do “outcalls” (visiting with a client at a destination of his choosing) if she has met him before. “If they say come to my yacht, I’m not impressed and I don’t go,” she says. (The murdered sex workers whose remains were found on Long Island had all arranged to do outcalls with a stranger or strangers who answered their ads online.)

  Michelle’s two daughters (from her previous marriage) don’t know what she does. Like Maddy, she has a “cover” job. “I tell my kids I’m a ghostwriter,” she says. “I used to write a sex blog, and my kids would read it, so they won’t be shocked when I do tell them what I do. But right now I don’t think it’s an appropriate time.”

  Michelle, who is divorced and has recently remarried, says she was initially open about her line of work with her second husband, a fifty-eight-year-old criminal defense attorney. “He was supportive, but he couldn’t handle it; he ended up in the hospital with a heart attack,” she says. “So after that I lied and said I was only going to do foot fetishes. And I do have some clients who have foot fetishes.” These are men who become extremely aroused at the sight of an attractive woman’s foot and like to lick, suck, and sniff her feet.

  Michelle also has clients she refers to as adult babies. “They wear diapers and regress back to an infant when they’re with me,” she says. “I feed them, burp them, and they play with their toys, and then they go home to their wives.”

  Michelle will satisfy other fetishes as long as there is no pain or humiliation involved. “When I’m with someone, I get pleasure out of seeing them get pleasure,” she says. Her work, she says, doesn’t get in the way of intimate relations with her husband. “The sex is a much deeper, real experience,” she says. “If anything, my job has enhanced my relationship. It reminds me of the importance of listening.”

  That evening, I find Michelle, along with a group of other sex workers, splashing in one of the hotel’s pools. (The July sun in Las Vegas is too hot to even sunbathe near a pool during daylight hours.) Michelle is talking to Donia Christine, who owns a consulting company in New York and works with men and women in the sex industry to help them improve their business.

  “Eros.com’s days are numbered,” Christine is saying as I wade over. Michelle, who is wearing a one-piece black bathing suit with a plunging neckline, is dangling her legs in the warm pool water. “They are charging sex workers too much and attracting third-party players who bring phishing software [used to con browsers of the site into giving away personal information] to the site.” Christine, who has submerged much of her body in the pool, talks up Slixa as a good website on which to advertise for adult sex.

  “Backpage is a good site too, particularly for high-end escorts, because there are so many low-end prostitutes advertising there,” she says. (In 2013, the company that owns backpage.com sold all its print publications, including the Village Voice, to another publishing entity, Voice Media Group. But it retained the lucrative online website, which competes with Craigslist in posting all kinds of ads, including ads for paid sex.)

  Michelle listens intently, and by the end of the evening, she has agreed to pay Christine $8,000 to do a website for her with better search engine optimization, including new photos and a more upscale look. “I’m willing to pay that much if it allows me to clear between $4,000 and $6,000 a week,” Michelle later tells me.

  Michelle is confident that mastering the art of online branding will boost her business. And she is not alone. The next day at the conference, a late-afternoon panel session titled “Hooker-nomics: The Business of Sex or Your Pleasure Is My Business” attracts an overflow crowd of sex workers who are eager to learn the tricks of the trade. All the seats in the conference room have been taken, and people are sitting in the aisle or standing against the back wall. While there are three or four young men scattered around the room, most of the attendees are women, ranging in age from their twenties to their forties and fifties. Everyone is dressed for the heat (the air conditioning isn’t working too well), some in shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, others in cool flowing skirts and low-cut blouses. I spot Michelle and Maddy in the back of the room. Donia Christine is on the panel, as are three female sex workers and a male escort who calls himself Legendary Dave.

  Dave, who strolled into the room barefoot and bare-chested, in cut-off shorts, with close-cropped graying hair and gray chest hairs to match, tells the crowd he has been working as a gay escort in Washington, D.C., for nine years. “I really enjoy it,” he says. “It’s b
een a challenge, since I’m a parent and I wasn’t comfortable doing incalls, having people to my home. So I have a separate incall apartment ten minutes from my house.”

  In response to a question, Dave explains that he requires a 50 percent deposit on all his appointments because that weeds out people who are not serious about meeting with him. “I try to stay away from credit cards and PayPal,” he says. “PayPal froze my account and kept a couple thousand dollars for a year. So I don’t use PayPal anymore.”

  Dave says he usually only accepts cash deposits, and he asks clients to FedEx them to him. “It’s not kosher to send cash through FedEx,” he says. “But in my case, I live a little outside of rules. I recently had $6,000 sent to me via FedEx. I have a P.O. box where it is sent to.”

  Other sex workers mention a number of vendors, such as MoneyPak, Green Dot, and Intuit, through which they have had deposits sent to them anonymously. Donia Christine chimes in: “If you have a bank account through Chase, they have a prepay account, and you can use completely anonymous email that doesn’t indicate your name. Amazon gift card is another good idea. They will send it to any email you give them.”

  One sex worker asks how to go about branding herself. Christine suggests that the brand can be whatever her expertise or specialty is. “I don’t think people give enough thought to this when they put themselves out there, so they get lost in a sea of adult sex workers,” she says. “It’s about identifying the thing that you’re the expert at. You have to build on what you’re most authentic at.”

  One of the other panelists, a pretty, light-skinned woman whose black hair is tinged with green highlights, agrees. “You have to ask two questions first: who do I want to be while I’m doing this, and what kind of clients do I want to have,” says the panelist, who had introduced herself earlier as Sophie Laurent. “You want a brand that will attract the clients you want.”

  Heads nod, and around the room people scribble furiously on notepads or tablets. Someone strolling by might think they had stumbled onto a typical corporate conference, and in one very real sense, they would be right. The women and men in this room are serious about their work and intent on building successful careers. They are the new generation of sex workers, whose lives have been shaped and transformed by the Internet, for better or for worse. If Julie Moya had been in the room that day, she would have felt right at home.

  Why Women and Men Do Sex Work

  VARIATIONS ON A THEME

  In one sense, Julie Moya fits the stereotype that many Americans have of why and how women become prostitutes. She ran away from a difficult home life in her teens and began selling sex to survive. She was also repeatedly molested by a relative at the age of ten. The perpetrator was an uncle (by marriage) who gave Julie the attention she craved as a child. “I would sit on his lap, and he would feel me up and want me to touch his, you know . . . ” she recalls. “It was just hands. It happened for months. But I liked it — the attention and stuff.”

  Antiprostitution activists claim that almost all sex workers were molested as children. They use this “oppression paradigm” as an argument for trying to abolish prostitution.1 But research provides a much more nuanced reality. Teenage runaways, like Julie, who resort to selling sex for survival or are coerced into prostitution by pimps, are indeed more likely to have been abused than those who choose to become sex workers at a later age. In fact, abuse at home is often why they ran away in the first place. A 1985 analysis of the research literature on adolescent prostitution found that between 31 and 67 percent of juvenile prostitutes reported being sexually abused as children.2 A 1987 Canadian study found that even though juvenile prostitutes were twice as likely as respondents to the country’s National Population survey to have been victims of unwanted sexual acts as children, victims of sexual abuse constituted a minority of the sex workers surveyed. Sixty percent of the female respondents in the juvenile prostitution survey and 78 percent of the males did not report experiencing “unwanted sexual acts” while they were under the age of eighteen.3

  In a 2010 study of youth engaged in the sex trade in New York City, 33 percent of the 226 young people interviewed described being sexually abused or exploited by adults in their lives. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice researchers, however, did not specifically ask about past sexual abuse; the abuse narratives came up when the youth were queried about how they got into sex work.4 For example, one eighteen-year-old white youth from Yonkers said he was initiated into the sex trade by his uncle at the age of twelve: “My uncle . . . he used to molest me, and he used to do stuff to me. And basically — in my town, he knew people, and they were a bunch of perverts — and he pretty much got money for me to do stuff with them.”5

  There is no question that sex work is traumatizing for teenagers who have been molested as children. In the John Jay College study, one fifteen-year-old black girl from Brooklyn, who had started selling sex at age twelve, hated what she was doing because it “makes me feel dirty.” She was scared that someone was going to rape her again, but she felt she had no choice. “Like, I’m doing this for money, but this is the only way I know how to make a living,” she said.6

  Indeed, most of the youth interviewed in the John Jay College study said they had started selling sex out of economic desperation. Financial reasons are in fact why most sex workers get into the trade. According to a 2005 study by the Urban Justice Center in New York City, which surveyed 52 adult sex workers who work for brothels, escort agencies, or private clubs or who worked on their own, 67 percent of those surveyed said they got involved with sex work because they were unable to find other work that paid a living wage.

  Similarly, the teenagers in the John Jay College study said they didn’t have families who were willing or able to support them, and they felt they needed to sell sex to survive. One eighteen-year-old Hispanic girl said she started in the trade at age seventeen to help her aunt, with whom she was living, pay bills and avoid being evicted from their apartment.7 An eighteen-year-old white girl said she started selling sex at the age of fifteen after running away from the foster home where she had been molested. “My mother died and I was placed in foster homes. My foster father would touch me and I ran away. I ended up coming to New York and I was on the streets,” she told the John Jay College researchers.8

  Pimps prey on such vulnerable runaways. Andrea Powell, the executive director of FAIR (Free, Aware, Inspired, and Restored) Girls, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that helps sexually exploited girls, tells the story of one fourteen-year-old who ran away from an abusive situation at home. When she was approached at a mall by a man who offered her a place to stay for the night, she felt he was her savior. But over the next few months, she was forced to have sex with men at truck stops and hotels up and down the East Coast, including Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. One day, fearing for her life, she ran to a church in Washington, D.C., and a church member called FAIR Girls. The organization helped her find a job and a place to live and provided legal counsel and even assistance in applying for college. The girl now has her own apartment and a full-time job, Powell says.

  Sometimes, traffickers (the term Powell prefers to pimps) use more sophisticated tricks to entrap vulnerable teens. One aspiring eighteen-year-old rap singer from Texas saw an advertisement online for a rap contest in Washington, D.C. She was trying to escape an untenable home life and had no one whom she could really turn to for advice. Her mother had died when she was twelve and her father had killed himself, so she had gone to live with a relative who turned out to be abusive. The rap contest, with its offer of prize money, sounded like the answer to her prayers. But when she arrived at the posh D.C. hotel where the contest was supposed to be taking place, she realized she had been duped. She was assaulted by several men and forced to engage in commercial sex. Seeing no way out, she pretended she was into it and eventually convinced the pimps to give her a cell phone so she could make her own appointments. Then, when her captors got drunk and sto
ned on the Fourth of July, she called the police. They arrested the men and called FAIR Girls to help the girl. Powell herself answered the summons. (Her organization has a staff of seventeen, but on holidays, including the Fourth of July, she is on call.) In order to keep exploited girls out of harm’s way until FAIR Girls can find them more permanent housing or get them back in touch with family, someone from the nonprofit usually stays with the girl overnight at a safe location, such as a hotel or rented apartment. “All the hotels were booked on the Fourth of July, and the only hotel I could find with a room was really expensive,” Powell recalls. “I begged and pleaded and got a really good rate. She was starving, so we had to find her food. It gets pretty crazy on these emergency responses.”

  Police were not able to build a case against the eighteen-year-old’s traffickers (there was no evidence, no photos of her posted on adult websites), so after a few days in jail, they were released. However, Powell says FAIR Girls was able to help the girl find a better place to live. “She is now in college in Texas, but it’s hard,” she says. “She doesn’t have any family.”

  Powell says that most of the clients her organization works with began doing sex work while they were underage. “The majority of girls who are trafficked today are not chained to their beds or kidnapped,” Powell says. “They’re lured by someone who is offering them a false sense of love and security. But when it goes south and becomes violent and abusive, they have no one else to turn to.”

  Since all underage prostitution in the United States is defined by federal law as trafficking, it will be discussed in greater depth in the next chapter, which focuses on human trafficking. But let me say here that underage prostitution is an unacceptable problem, which demands our urgent attention and best minds to solve.