Getting Screwed (20 page)

Although Sheri's Ranch seems geared to fulfill any man's sexual fantasy, both management and the workers insist there are limits. “We're not forced to sleep with anyone,” Anna says. “If you get a vibe that something is off about a guy, you can hint with your conversation that you're not interested and he'll pick someone else.” Anna says that there have
been times when customers said something rude or inappropriate to one of the girls, and the staff admonished them to be more respectful, even asked them to leave.

“There is a small percentage of men who come in here to put down women to make themselves feel better,” Anna says. “They might say, ‘You're not very hot,' or ‘Your boobs aren't big enough.' If that happens, I just excuse myself and I walk away.”

For the most part, however, Anna enjoys her job. Like Joi, she sees a lot of older men who are either divorced or have lost their wives, and she says she finds it rewarding to be able to give them pleasure. “They get all emotional and they leave feeling happy. It makes me feel good too,” Anna says.

Half the men who spend time with her don't want to have intercourse. Sometimes they just want to talk or have a massage. “Many of them are lonely,” she says. “They just want to snuggle up and have a date. It's therapeutic on both ends.”

Indeed, Anna's experience at Sheri's Ranch has pointed her toward a new career. She says she is going back to school to get a master's degree in psychology so she can be a marriage counselor or a sexual surrogate. She has already been accepted into a master's program at a school in Florida. “Some people view sex surrogates as glorified prostitutes,” she says. “But the ultimate goal is to get people feeling comfortable with being touched.”

Anna says she will be working at Sheri's Ranch for only five more months, so she can begin graduate school in January. She says she has made “amazing friendships here” and will leave her stint at the brothel with mixed feelings. “It's like a big family and it's my second home,” she says.

We are now back in the airy main lounge, sitting and talking on one of the velvet couches. Soon Jeremy Lemur reappears to tell me that “things are picking up” in the bar and Anna's services are needed. Earlier, he had promised that I could talk to another brothel worker, a twenty-something who goes by the name of Tatiana and has worked at
the brothel for several years to pay for her schooling while she was in college. Tatiana now works as a biologist, but she still comes to the brothel for several weeks at a time to supplement her income. A bottle-blonde beauty with a gorgeous body and dark come-hither eyes, Tatiana was the woman picked by the Icelandic couple for their threesome. Jeremy now says she is still occupied and won't be able to talk to me after all. It is clear that he wants my visit to end, even though I still have many questions to ask Anna and she seems happy to chat. But when Jeremy reappears, she stands and so do I. She shakes my hand, smiles, and then, ever the perfect hostess, she waits for me to leave before resuming what she calls “just a job.”

Misguided Laws and Misuse of Resources

W
hen Julie Moya arrived at the police precinct on the Lower East Side on January 31, 2005, to turn herself in, she found the media camped outside. Wearing jeans and black stiletto boots, she walked inside arm in arm with her attorney, Dan Ollen, as flashbulbs went off and microphones were thrust in her face. On her attorney's advice, she said nothing. She was handcuffed, booked, and put in a holding cell jammed with other women.

“I was in shock,” she recalls. After a sleepless night sitting on a hard bench in the cell, Julie was brought in front of a judge, who listened as prosecutors painted a sinister picture of her, one in which she scarcely recognized herself. She was a manipulative madam, the prosecutors said, who ran a $3-million-a-year prostitution ring in which she trafficked in underage girls who were brought to her for the specific purpose of taking their virginity. Her attorney tried to rebut the accusations, saying Julie never knowingly hired underage prostitutes. He explained that one of her son's friends had brought in a teenage girl and told Julie she was nineteen. A few weeks later, when Julie discovered the girl was actually fifteen, she fired her immediately.

The prosecutors asked for a bail of $2 million. Ollen countered that Julie could not afford more than $25,000 in cash; she had spent most of her money supporting her family and rescuing stray animals, he said. But the judge set the bail at $500,000 in cash, and Julie, knowing she could not raise that amount even with the help of family and friends, resisted the urge to cry. She was not going to let those bastards see how
devastated she was. “That's when I started to understand that something really bad was going to happen to me,” she recalls. “But I was determined to hold my head up and not let people know how I felt.”

On the bus to Rikers Island, she was seated next to some rough-looking women who sported gang tattoos and glared at her. One big African American woman wearing shackles leaned toward Julie and said, “We're going to ‘madam' you when we get to Rikers.”

“I was really scared,” Julie says. “I had always feared Rikers Island — people get murdered at Rikers.”

After sitting in a cell at Rikers for a week, Julie was brought to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, where she and her attorney met with Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bassiur. He was a good-looking young man with an air of arrogance, Julie recalls. When he started ticking off the state's litany of accusations against her, she felt like slapping him in the face. But her attorney had warned her to sit tight and say nothing unless asked a specific question. The first thing Bassiur wanted to know was whether she knew where the kiddie porn houses in New York City were. Julie stared at him in astonishment. “If I did, I would have turned them in a long time ago,” she replied. “I would never condone something like that. You don't really know me.”

Bassiur then changed tactics. He said the underage girl who had worked for Julie for a short period of time had told them she partied with a New York State Supreme Court judge. He wanted Julie to tell him who that judge was. Julie knew exactly whom he was talking about. The judge, an older married man, had come to her brothel for many years, and she was not about to give him up.

“I could only imagine what they would do to this man,” she says. “He thought the [underage sex worker] was nineteen years old. The stories [in the press] would totally destroy his life and family as well. I decided I could not destroy this man's life to get a lower sentence for myself. I said no and that was that.”

A few days later, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office unsealed an indictment charging Julie with three counts of promoting prostitution, twenty-five counts of third-degree rape, and twenty-eight counts
of criminal sexual acts for facilitating sex between adults and minors.
¹
The judge hearing the case refused to lower her bail.

Julie spent the next three months in a cell on Rikers Island, wondering if she was going to survive. She says she saw some “pretty horrible things,” such as inmates having sex with the correctional officers and unwarranted violence. “I saw a captain kick a girl because she wouldn't have sex with him,” she says.

A friend of Julie's snuck her some opioid pills in a makeup container, and the knowledge that she could swallow them was the only thing that kept Julie sane. “I knew I could check out if I had to,” she says.

Finally, in late May, the District Attorney's Office offered Julie a plea bargain. If she would plead guilty to one count of promoting prostitution, they would dismiss the other fifty-five charges. She agreed, and on July 27, she was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison, including time served. (Although she was convicted only of a misdemeanor, because she had been convicted of an earlier drug charge, the state was able to ramp up her prison time.) The
Daily News
headline screamed, “Madam on Hook for 5 Yrs.” The story went on to say, “In addition to prison time, Moya was ordered to forfeit her Freeport, L.I. [Long Island], home, two cars, a boat and all the money in her bank account, which attorneys say is down to $3,500.”
²

Julie Moya, ironically, is one of very few sex workers in the United States who has done significant time. Like Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam who gained notoriety in the 1990s for her celebrity clientele, Julie ended up doing prison time because she refused to divulge client names. (Fleiss's original conviction for prostitution was overturned by an appeals court in 1996, but she eventually served twenty months of a seven-year federal sentence for tax evasion.)

What happened to Julie Moya and Heidi Fleiss is highly unusual. The overwhelming majority of sex workers who have been arrested in recent years are not held for prosecution or convicted; most are released within hours after their arrest, research shows. (Cook County, Illinois, is a notable exception to this rule, because in recent years its police department has hewed to a strict interpretation of an old law, allowing a
repeat prostitution misdemeanor to be upgraded to a felony, which often carries jail time.)

The most comprehensive study on the efficacy of U.S. prostitution laws was done by Julie Pearl, a graduate student at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Pearl compiled crime data from the
FBI
Uniform Crime Reports and the Bureau of Justice between 1985 and 1987 and then conducted extensive interviews with police officials in twenty of the twenty-two U.S. cities with populations greater than 300,000. She found that approximately 80 percent of those arrested for prostitution were not held for prosecution, and only half of those held were found guilty as charged. That essentially means that 90 percent of arrested prostitutes escaped judicial sanction, Pearl concluded in her study, published in the
Hastings Law Journal
in April 1987.
³

A decade later, the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, which also examined local criminal justice records, found much the same thing: the vast majority of arrests made in that city in 1994 were never prosecuted. After spending several hours in jail, the women, mostly streetwalkers, were typically dismissed. They would immediately catch a cab back to the strip to try and make up for their lost earnings. Yet that didn't stop police from doing repeated sweeps. In her field study of San Francisco streetwalkers in 1995, Bernstein found that the same streetwalker “might go to jail as often as four times a week,” particularly if she was on the stroll in the city's fashionable shopping and tourism district.
⁴

A similar pattern holds true today in many large cities. Of a total of 3,645 arrests for prostitution-related offenses in New York City in 2013, only 403, or 11 percent, resulted in charges with served time, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Statistics.
⁵

Arrest statistics in San Francisco and New York also reveal larger societal biases at work. Nationwide, female sex workers are arrested four times as often as male sex workers and are much more likely to be subject to prosecution, despite evidence suggesting that there are roughly as many male as female sex workers.
⁶
Arrest patterns also reflect an inherent racist bias on the part of law enforcement. Although women of color constitute 40 percent of streetwalkers, they make up 55 percent of
those arrested and 85 percent of those incarcerated, according to one 1993 study.
⁷
Consider New York City for a more recent example. Even though whites make up 47 percent of the city's population, blacks 13 percent, and Hispanics 26 percent, police in 2013 arrested 1,567 blacks and 1,007 Hispanics for prostitution-related charges, as compared with only 397 whites.
⁸
A 2014 study found that nearly 70 percent of defendants facing prostitution charges in Brooklyn are black, and 94 percent of those arrested for loitering are black.
⁹

The U.S. criminal justice system's strikingly uneven enforcement of prostitution laws may also have something to do with the laws themselves. While there is a federal law prohibiting the interstate movement of people for the purpose of prostitution — the Mann Act — the legal status of prostitution is largely determined on the state level, and states have different laws governing the sex industry and they enforce them differently.

While certain forms of sex work, such as child pornography, pimping, pandering (procuring a prostitute for someone else), and exchanging sexual acts for pay, are prohibited in most states, other types of commercial sex, such as phone sex, stripping, erotic dancing, and adult pornography, are permitted (and regulated to some degree.) In California and many other states, the pimping law prohibits people from living off the earnings of a prostitute, essentially criminalizing all domestic partners of sex workers, including roommates.

While most states consider the act of selling sex a misdemeanor, in several states (such as Illinois), repeat prostitution misdemeanors are often upgraded to felonies. Promoting prostitution in the second degree (compelling someone by force or intimidation to engage in prostitution) is also a felony, as are trafficking and profiting from underage prostitution. Many states, including New York, New Jersey, California, Colorado, and the District of Columbia, also regulate prostitution through vagrancy and loitering statutes, which chiefly target streetwalkers.

In many states, police are allowed to use condoms as evidence of prostitution. Service organizations have long opposed that policy on the grounds that it discourages sex workers from practicing safe sex. In 2012,
the group Human Rights Watch interviewed 197 sex workers in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and San Francisco and found that many limited the number of condoms they carried because they feared being arrested by police.
¹⁰
“Because of this policy, people are afraid of carrying condoms around,” says Cyndee Clay, executive director of
HIPS
(Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive), the nonprofit organization that does outreach to streetwalkers in Washington, D.C. “So workers are at greater risk of their health. If you can't make a case with or without a condom, I question whether you can make a case at all. Is the impact on public health worth it?”

In May 2014, advocates for the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to marginalized populations in New York, were finally able to convince New York City police and prosecutors not to use condoms as evidence in building cases against persons charged with prostitution and loitering. However, condoms can still be used as evidence against johns and in charges of facilitating prostitution. “Many of our clients are arrested for that because they work with other sex workers or share space,” said Sienna Baskin, codirector of the Sex Workers Project for the Urban Justice Center, in a June 2014 interview. “So we're pushing for something more comprehensive. We have a state bill we're trying to get passed.”

The states also define illegal sexual activity in starkly different ways. For instance, North Carolina requires sexual intercourse for the definition, while other states include fellatio, assisted masturbation, and any physical contact of the genital areas, buttocks, and breasts as sexual activity for the purposes of prostitution.
¹¹

State laws also differ on when police can make a binding arrest. Some states require that sexual activity or contact actually take place, while in most states, including New York and Massachusetts, the mere offer or agreement to perform acts is sufficient. Some states also require proof of compensation in addition to the agreement to sell sex, but most do not.
¹²
Jillian, the Jewish escort from western Massachusetts, was arrested minutes after she accepted some cash and verbally agreed to give an undercover police informant a blow job in a Springfield motel.