Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  While Elle is talking, Jessica wanders in and out of the room. She is wearing a black silk blouse unbuttoned almost to her navel and a very short, frilly black skirt riding low on her hips. Like Elle, she has a French manicure, her nails painted deep blue with white at the tips, and she is sporting a huge rock on her left ring finger, which Jessica assures me is a real diamond.

  Elle and Jessica’s cell phones sit on the table in front of them. At one point, Jessica’s cell phone starts jangling, and Elle says calmly, “We’re going to have to pause here. Clients don’t like to hear voices in the background.” Jessica gets up and walks into the kitchen, and I hear her say, “I’m sorry, I’m booked for the day.” And then she hangs up and walks back to the table. “I didn’t like his attitude,” she says. “He didn’t address me like a lady. He said, ‘Hey, you available?’ That’s not acceptable. I’m picky about who I’ll meet with.”

  Both Elle and Jessica say they routinely turn down clients who they don’t think meet certain “basic standards of etiquette” or who refuse to give them their phone numbers so that the sex workers can verify that the clients are who they say they are. After an appointment is booked, both women run the client’s phone number through the online bad-client database they share with other sex workers in the area. “I don’t accept blocked calls because I have no way to put this person through the bad-clients list,” Jessica says. “You go on the list if you’re a jerk, you’re uneducated, you’re rude, or you have no respect for the girls in the industry and you blow them off.”

  Elle says she and Jessica get phone calls almost every week from police checking their online ads. But because they always check the phone numbers and verify the callers’ identities, she says they have never been arrested for sex work. “Once I was arrested for a bounced check,” Elle says. “But that’s it.” (A check of her criminal record at the courthouse confirms this.)

  Indeed, just like Margo St. James and many other sex workers, Elle says she has had clients who are in the FBI, the CIA, and local law enforcement. She and Jessica consider themselves “good citizens,” and on the rare occasion when they do have to deal with a stalker, they say they can rely on the police for help. “If someone is parked outside and staring at the house or driving by too much, we’ll call the police and ask if maybe an officer could drive by,” Elle says. “And as soon as a police cruiser drives down the street, off they go.”

  The local police, Elle says, know her and Jessica as “porn stars,” and since pornography is not illegal, the police respond to her complaints as they would to those of any other ordinary citizen. The two women, of course, don’t call the police when they are having a problem with a john. They handle those problems themselves. Their house is rigged with a number of security cameras as well as an intercom system.

  “We listen to each other, so if something happens [during a session], I’m up the stairs with a claw hammer in my hand,” Jessica says. “If anyone doesn’t pay up front, he will get hurt.”

  Elle admonishes her mildly. “I don’t like to talk about violence,” she says, adding that there are other ways to ensure compliance. One time a client of hers took off down the stairs without paying her. Jessica, who had been monitoring the conversation via intercom, raced out and snapped his picture from the front porch. “I told him it would be on the Internet tomorrow if he didn’t pay up,” Jessica says. “He ended up coming back and giving Elle what he owed.”

  Elle goes into the bedroom and comes out dressed in a short, black, belted silk robe, her long legs bare. Jessica looks at her and says, “Girl, you better cover it up.” She stands up and walks away, and Elle sits back down at the table and takes out another cigarette. We resume our conversation, but a few minutes later, her doctor-client calls and she tells him to go right on up. “If you’ll excuse me,” she says, just like the lady she is, and disappears up the back stairs to meet him.

  The Truth about Sex Trafficking

  In the winter of 1997, one of Julie Moya’s working girls, a dark-haired Russian émigré who went by the name of Natasha, said she knew of several other Russian women who might be interested in working at Julie’s place. Julie was intrigued — if these women were as good-looking and popular with her clients as Natasha was, they would be good for business. A few days later, Natasha introduced Julie to a couple in their thirties, a Russian American husband and wife who spoke both Russian and English. “I remember the woman’s name was Lisa,” Julie recalls. “They said they knew some girls who were interested in working for me.”

  But when Lisa brought two Russian women over to one of Julie’s brothels — at that time, an apartment on 74th Street between York and First Avenues — Julie discovered that they didn’t speak a word of English. They were, as advertised, beautiful. One young woman, whose name was Alana, was very pretty and slender, with blue eyes and long blond tresses; her compatriot, Marina, had long dark-brown hair, porcelain skin, and a fine figure. Both said they were in their twenties. But almost immediately, Julie sensed that something was not right. Both girls seemed afraid of the Russian couple, who delivered them to her place and picked them up when their shifts were over. And unlike her other girls, who were always running out to buy cigarettes or other essentials whenever they had a break, Alana and Marina never left the apartment except when accompanied by Lisa or her husband. It didn’t take long for Julie to discover that neither of them had ever sold sex before.

  The first time Marina went into a private room with a client, a regular by the name of Brian, he soon called Julie into the room. “This girl doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Brian said. “She doesn’t know how to use a condom.” At first, Julie thought Brian was kidding. The Russian-speaking couple had said that both girls had done sex work before. So Brian’s assertion confused Julie, and at that moment, she didn’t have time to deal with it. She had to get over to her other brothel, where she and her girls there were hosting a private party for some Wall Street high fliers. “Well, can you show her how to use a condom,” she replied and left.

  But the next time Brian came in, he took Julie aside. “You know that girl, Marina?” he whispered. “She was a virgin.” Julie stared at him and finally said, “You’re joking.” Brian shook his head and walked away, and Julie tried to put the episode out of her mind. But then she saw Alana crying in the lounge one evening, and a few days later, when Marina came to the apartment, she had bruises on her arms and legs. Something was very wrong, but Julie couldn’t figure out how to communicate with the two women, who didn’t speak much English. How could she find out what was going on? She didn’t trust Natasha enough to ask her. She knew that Natasha and Lisa went to the same Russian Orthodox Church in Brooklyn. Whatever she said to Natasha would find its way back to Lisa, of that Julie was sure.

  The next morning, Julie was absently watching her twelve-year-old son, Jerry, draw something for a school project when the idea struck her. That evening, she took Alana aside, gave her a piece of paper and a pen, and indicated that she should draw something. What Alana drew made Julie’s stomach turn over. First, Alana drew crude stick figures of herself with her younger brother and mother, smiling. Then she drew a picture of her mother and brother, tears in their eyes, being pounded by another, bigger stick figure. Finally, she drew a stick picture of herself, big loopy tears falling from her eyes. The truth hit Julie with the force of a sledgehammer — these women were being trafficked, held against their will and forced into sex work. Why had she not seen this before? She realized that she had been in denial; the truth had been staring her in the face from the first day Alana and Marina were brought to her place, but she had been unwilling to face up to it. She had wondered why Lisa or her husband always turned up at the end of the night (or more accurately, at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning), when Julie and her managers toted up the day’s earnings and doled out cash to the girls working that day. Even though Alana and Marina were paid directly, their money always ended up in Lisa’s hands.

  So now the question was, wha
t could Julie do? She could, of course, refuse to let Alana and Marina continue to work for her, but she knew that their traffickers would simply beat them bloody and force them to work somewhere else.

  Julie spent a sleepless night wrestling with the dilemma, and by morning, she knew what she had to do. She picked up the phone and called a longtime friend of hers, Vincent DeFilippis, a high-ranking probation official with the New York Division of Parole. She had met him during her own run-in with the law, and he had treated her with dignity and respect. DeFilippis said he would send over an immigration official who spoke Russian. Could she somehow arrange for this official to meet one of the Russian women outside the apartment? Julie promised to see what she could do, and the next time Lisa dropped off Alana and Marina, she took Lisa aside and explained that there was a client who really wanted to take Alana out for a few hours on the town, go to dinner and maybe a hotel — an outcall, as it was known in the trade. Lisa said she had no problem with an outcall. A day or two later, the immigration officer, disguised as a client, arrived and whisked Alana away.

  A few weeks later, Lisa dropped by Julie’s place and said she needed to talk to her in private. Julie’s stomach lurched; had Lisa found out about what she had done? But Lisa only wanted to confide in her. She and her husband also ran a brothel out of an apartment in Manhattan; Alana, Marina, and several other Russian women were forced to work there as well. “Lisa told me that she was being followed by the feds,” Julie recalls. “She didn’t know that I had turned her in.”

  A month or two later (Julie doesn’t recall the exact time frame), DeFilippis called her. Federal immigration officials had swooped in on Lisa’s brothel and taken a number of Russian women, including Alana and Marina, into custody. They also grabbed Lisa, but her husband, who was not on the premises at the time, was still at large.

  It was months before Julie learned the full story. “Apparently, these women thought they were coming here to be nannies, but they were thrown into prostitution, and their families were threatened and their visas were taken away,” she says. “They were being trafficked.”

  Alana and Marina were sent back to their families in Russia, and Lisa was eventually convicted of trafficking, although she spent only a year in prison. Natasha disappeared, and Julie later heard she had gotten into drugs and died of an overdose. “It was such a shame,” Julie says. “They were really sweet girls.”

  Julie was not the only madam dealing with this issue. By the late 1990s, trafficking had become a growing problem in the United States and Europe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of women being trafficked into Western Europe and the United States from Eastern Europe had multiplied. Globalization and the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots had spurred a broader rise in the trafficking of women and men (for all kinds of labor) from poor to wealthy countries.

  Some feminists soon seized on trafficking as a new weapon in their fight against a trade they considered inherently harmful to all women. In 2000, Donna Hughes, a women’s studies researcher at the University of Rhode Island, published a seminal paper titled, “The Natasha Trade,” in which she detailed the trafficking of women from the former Soviet bloc countries.1 Hughes talked about how the trafficking of women had become a highly profitable market for organized-crime networks and labeled trafficking a “modern-day slave trade.”2

  Later the same year, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which separated sex trafficking from other forms of labor trafficking and defined human trafficking as a commercial act induced by “force, fraud or coercion.” And then came 9/11, which spawned a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government’s efforts to monitor and keep out potential terrorists, along with illegal immigrants trying to gain access to the wealthiest nation in the world.

  At first, Julie Moya didn’t notice the chill. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, her girls gave free sessions to firefighters and others volunteering at Ground Zero. She even turned over one of her apartments in lower Manhattan to volunteers who needed a place to bunk. It was a time, she recalls, of great warmth. New Yorkers drew together, united against a common enemy. But that feeling of camaraderie didn’t last long. As the country geared up for war and Congress passed the Patriot Act and other laws aimed at helping the United States fight terrorism, the mood of New Yorkers seemed to change. “Before 9/11, the clients all wanted to hang out and stuff,” Julie says. “But afterwards, they just wanted to be serviced and leave. I would be driving home to Long Island, and I’d go through the midtown tunnel and see soldiers with guns and all the military vehicles, and you could see the whole city becoming kind of paranoid.”

  A similar mood shift was occurring nationwide. The State Department’s escalating war on illegal immigrants dovetailed nicely with the Bush administration’s morality-based attack on the sex industry. Conservative groups, allied with feminist scholars such as Hughes, argued that all prostitution was trafficking, that women were never in the trade by choice. All sex workers, they insisted, were victims of exploitation by some third-party person. By 2005, the official U.S. position had locked onto this conflation, with federal officials stating in one position paper “that prostitution is inherently harmful for men, women and children, and that it contributes to the phenomenon of trafficking in persons.”3

  Even today, the State Department and other federal and state agencies conflate voluntary prostitution by adults with trafficking cases, according to criminal justice experts. “There is an underlying conceptual problem distinguishing between consensual prostitution and human trafficking,” says Jay Albanese, a professor of criminology in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied trafficking and worked with law enforcement on this problem. “These terms are mixed together on the State Department website.”

  Albanese and other researchers say the statistics bandied about by federal officials and antitrafficking activists on the number of people trafficked in the United States and globally are inaccurate and highly inflated. In 2003, for example, the U.S. State Department estimated that 600,000 to 800,000 people were being trafficked across international borders each year. But as Albanese notes, that estimate was not based on an actual count of trafficked persons, and a few years later, a federal oversight agency, the Government Accounting Office (GAO), concluded that such estimates were flawed. “The accuracy of such estimates is in doubt because of methodological weaknesses, gaps in data and numerical discrepancies,” the 2006 GAO report concluded.4

  According to a report on trafficking from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the total number of victims identified in a sample of seventy-one countries (which had the best data) was 14,900 in 2006.5 Another reputable source of information, the International Organization for Migration, reported assisting 7,771 victims of trafficking between 1999 and 2005.6

  Yet these more realistic estimates haven’t prevented sensationalistic accounts. Antitrafficking activists continue to argue that millions of people are being trafficked globally and that hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked into and around the United States every year. A recent U.S. Department of Justice report, however, could identify only 389 confirmed trafficking cases (which led to 144 arrests) and 527 victims between 2008 and 2010.7 Another comprehensive study, involving 1,515 municipal police agencies around the country, found that of 2,397 cases investigated for trafficking between 2000 and 2006, only 876, or 37 percent, resulted in an arrest. And of those arrests, only 43 percent (or 377 cases) resulted in a conviction for trafficking.8 These numbers, of course, represent only trafficking cases that came to the attention of municipal law enforcement.

  As many researchers note with chagrin, there has yet to be a trustworthy count of victims trafficked to the United States or globally. “When it comes to this crime, never has there been so much written based on such little data,” Albanese says. “There is no good count. A worthy estimate is based on an underlying actual co
unt and there has been no such count done for human trafficking.”

  The 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act brought all juvenile prostitutes, even those who were ostensibly in the trade by choice, under the trafficking umbrella. It stipulated that anyone under the age of eighteen who was caught selling sex should be legally considered a victim of trafficking. While this part of the law was well intentioned — no reasonable person would consider child prostitution permissible — many experts say that the provisions of the law and the way in which it reframes underage prostitution have contributed to a growing misunderstanding of why and how most minors end up on the street selling sex.

  “Trafficking conveys this notion that most of these kids are being taken around from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, if not imported into this country, and that is not true,” says David Finkelhor, a professor of sociology and director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “Our research suggests that most of these kids are operating in their home cities and towns.” Other research reveals the same pattern. A 2008 study of 226 youth who began selling sex as minors on the streets of New York City found that 92 percent of them were born in the United States and 56 percent were New York City natives.9

  Finkelhor, a slender, genial man in his midsixties with two Harvard degrees (one in social relations, the other in sociology), has been studying the problem of child victimization for over thirty-six years. He began examining the issue of child sexual abuse for his dissertation and received his first National Institute of Mental Health grant to study familial sexual abuse in 1978, the same year he was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology. These days, Finkelhor finds himself both irked and astonished at the level of misleading information spread about underage prostitution.