Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  When Joi was in sixth grade, she came home from school to find her mother bruised and bleeding from yet another beating. Her father had disappeared — “probably down to the liquor store,” she says, so Joi took her mother by the hand, and together they crawled through an overgrown field near her house to a pay phone, which Joi used to call the police. The police took them both to a battered women’s shelter in Sacramento. A few months later, Joi went back to live with her father because, as she says, “I didn’t like it [at the shelter]; I was on the dance and baton team at school and I missed that. So I went back to my dad. I mean, in my neighborhood, everyone’s dad was a drunk. It wasn’t something to be ashamed of.”

  When she was fourteen or fifteen, Joi says, her mother’s father would French-kiss her and try to fondle her. “He tried to make out like it was his French background,” she says with disdain. Joi herself started having sex with older men when she was fourteen. “I was a wild child,” she says. “No one forced me to do it. But I think it’s abusive for twenty-two-year-old men to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls.”

  After her childhood, Joi found life working in the brothels pretty tame. For each of the two months she spent at the Chicken Ranch, she cleared $14,000. She didn’t enjoy sharing her earnings with management, but she did like the feeling that she was safe inside the brothel walls. “I knew I wasn’t going to be harassed,” she says.

  Joi, who is now an independent sex worker running her own escort service, says there is still drug use among women working in and outside the brothels in Nevada. “I still keep up with things, and from what I’m seeing, they have a heroin problem really bad in Reno. Heroin and meth are kind of taking over,” she says.

  At Sheri’s Ranch, however, management says it has zero tolerance for illegal drugs. “The girls know that drugs are totally illegal at the ranch; their luggage is subject to be searched when they come to the ranch,” owner Chuck Lee says. “And we check the entire premises with trained dogs,” including the women’s private rooms. Their alcohol intake is also restricted. According to Anna, she and the other ladies are allowed six drinks a day, one per hour. And that’s fine with her. “That helps keep us sharp and not make silly decisions while we’re negotiating,” she says.

  If management does find drugs in the workers’ rooms or luggage, they are asked to leave, says the madam at Sheri’s Ranch, a plump, maternal-looking woman in her forties who wished to be identified by her first name only: Dena. “Some brothels are more tolerant,” Dena says. “I know we lose certain girls because we are so strict about it. But we don’t want them here anyway.”

  Dena first came to Sheri’s Ranch on a tour with her then mother-in-law, who was a member of a senior women’s group called the Red Hats. Dena had been working in the Las Vegas casinos and was a stay-at-home mother at the time. But she seemed so curious about life at the brothel that the general manager asked if she would like to work there part-time as a hostess.

  “It eventually evolved into a full-time job,” Dena says. The job of a hostess is to chat up the customers who walk in the door and see what they’d like. Some have already been corresponding by email with a specific woman (the women’s work emails are posted with their profiles on the Sheri’s Ranch website), so they will ask for her directly. Other customers might venture into the dimly lit bar, where they can sit and drink with several of the ladies and make their choice that way. And still others prefer the old-fashioned ritual of the lineup.

  The day I was at Sheri’s Ranch, a twenty-something couple dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts strolled in, the woman hanging nervously onto her partner’s arm. Dena greeted them in the bar and later told me they asked for a lineup. “Threesomes are one of our specialties. Usually, there’s a lot of correspondence between couples and a particular woman, but this is a very young couple and they may not have known they could do that,” she says. “They wanted to base their decision off visuals. They’ve done this before; they’re from Iceland.”

  The lineup takes place in the main lounge at Sheri’s Ranch, a large, elegant room with high ceilings, ornate light-yellow couches, and a wall of windows open to the pool and waterfall in the backyard. Several large paintings of Rubenesque nudes adorn the walls, and a black baby grand piano sits in one corner of the lounge, right next to a mounted poster explaining the services that Sheri’s offers, everything from a “straight lay” to a drag party and a ménage à trois.

  The lineup for the Icelanders occurred while I was having lunch with Dena and two other staff members in a red-leather booth in the bar. Several of the scantily dressed ladies who had been sitting in the bar began strolling out into the main lounge, although I didn’t really take note until the music was turned off and the bar grew very quiet. When I asked if I could take a peek at the lineup, Jeremy Lemur, the spokesman for Sheri’s Ranch, who had arranged my visit, said it was fine. But when I approached the curtain, a tanned security guard playfully barred my way. Dena shook her head and put a finger to her lips. She later explained why she didn’t want me peeking: “It’s a couple, and they were nervous.”

  During lineups, the bar music is routinely turned off so customers can hear each woman introduce herself. Just as they did in Joi’s days at Old Bridge and the Chicken Ranch, the women in the lineup step forward and are permitted only to say “Hi” and give their names before returning to the line; they have to rely on eye contact and smiles to convey the rest. According to Lemur, Sheri’s Ranch usually has twenty women in the house each day, and all of them have to come to the lineup, unless they are already with a customer. “But today it’s a small lineup — only eleven women,” he said and shrugged. “A lot of the ladies are on vacation.”

  Several times during lunch, Dena was approached by a tall, model-gorgeous woman with platinum blond hair and a short black dress that showed off her cleavage to advantage. The woman looked very young and seemed upset by something. Dena excused herself for a few minutes, and when she came back, she said, “You become their mom, their confidante, everyone goes through bouts of insecurity and depression. Having a good support system is very important.”

  Dena, who has six of her own children, the youngest age three at the time, did not want to discuss the private problems that the girls bring to her every day. But she did say that she had one newly arrived woman who had never done sex work before. “I will connect her with individual girls who can help her along,” she says.

  Anna says she was given the same tutelage when she arrived with no experience in the trade. “You’re set up with a Big Sister, and she teaches you the ropes,” she says. “I was very nervous about my first party. I felt like I was fumbling through the negotiation process. But then it was fine, and I felt much better afterwards.”

  At every brothel, it’s up to the woman to set the price for her services. After she has given the customer a tour of the facilities (which gives her a chance to find out where the man is from, what he’s looking for, and what his financial situation is), she takes him back to her room to negotiate. “When I get a gentleman in my room, I ask what he’s interested in doing today, how long he is interested in doing that, and what budget he is working with,” Anna says. The customer’s occupation and income don’t always factor into what he’s willing to pay. “One customer might be a doctor and drive a Corvette and then he offers you below house minimum,” she says.

  Anna says she and her client come to an agreement over price and services 75 percent of the time. The other 25 percent of the time, she lets the hostess know they couldn’t come to an agreement. “If he’s way off [in terms of price], the hostess will explain to him that it isn’t going to work,” Anna says. “But if he’s not that far off, she’ll find somebody who is more in his price range than I am. And if he wants something that I don’t do, she’ll find someone who will do that.” Anna, for instance, says she doesn’t do anal sex, domination parties, or foot fetishes. “That’s not my personality,” she says. “But we have girls here who are trained in dominatio
n [they are known as dominatrix] and they have their own whips and paddles.”

  Like Sheri’s Ranch, most of the brothels prominently display posters with a menu of all the possible services customers can buy (without the prices listed, of course), and some of the women create their own menus, which are parodies of restaurant menus, with appetizers, entrées, and dessert. These individualized menus often have prices on them, but there is usually room for negotiation. A $1,000 party, for instance, might include friendly conversation, a tour of the facilities, drinks, a strip tease or sexy lap dance, and/or a romantic bubble bath, some foreplay (with a sensual massage), oral sex, and then intercourse with one ejaculation — all within an hour. Also included are the condoms, lubricant, oils, and various sex toys. Unlimited orgasms can be negotiated for an additional price, as can extended parties, which last for more than an hour or even overnight.14

  After the price has been negotiated, Anna says she will take the customer’s money down to the office (and if the customer doesn’t want to part with his credit card, he can come along too). Finally, she performs a “dick check” to make sure the customer has no visible disease. (If he does, he is asked to leave.) Then the party begins.

  At Sheri’s Ranch and the Chicken Ranch, extended parties often take place in private bungalows set back from the main building. During our tour, Anna, who is wearing black stiletto sandals that add at least three inches to her 5'4" height, gestures out the windows toward a cluster of cabins in the rear of the large fenced-in yard. “Those are themed bungalows, and they come with a steak and lobster dinner,” she says. A series of photos mounted on the wall show off the interior of these bungalows.

  “There’s the King Arthur room [replete with a statue of a knight in armor], the safari room, where you can take a walk on the wild side,” Anna says with a straight face. “We also have a Roman room, a room with the theme of Arabian nights, and a ’60s room.”

  A 1960s room?

  “You know, it comes with a shag rug, lava lamp, we call it our Austin Powers room,” she says, with a hint of a smile.

  Walking down a hallway with sun-lit windows lining the back wall, Anna shows me the “bubble bath room” and then a second room, which also features a hot tub and is lathered with signs promoting Anheuser-Busch’s Landshark Lager. “We’re the only brothel that has a corporate sponsor,” she says proudly.

  Next up is the favorite room on the tour: the dungeon. The dungeon has black padded walls, on which chains and an assortment of other painful-looking equipment are mounted. In one corner stands a large black leather chair that Anna calls the “fem-dom worship chair for naughty girls”; in another corner is the “forced orgasm chair,” where customers can be tied up and dominated. “It’s a form of pleasurable torture for the client,” Anna explains. A large black leather couch squats in the center of the room in front of a small stage with a single shiny pole for pole dancing. “[Customers] have to sign our waiver that we’re not responsible if someone gets hurt,” Anna says. “You can also book this room for bachelor parties.”

  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

  When 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 t
o 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.