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However
riveting the reading, turn away for a moment from those
pages in the FBI affidavit concerning “Client 9” and
“Kristen.”
Flip
over to Page 15, where the man accused of running the
Emperors Club VIP talks with two employees about a
difficult prostitute in Los Angeles.
She had
missed an appointment the night before and left a
“crazy” text message, says Rachelle Lewis, an alleged
booker for the club.
The
three wonder aloud whether she is using drugs.
“A lot
of these girls deteriorate to this point,” remarked
Lewis.
Now, why
would these girls deteriorate? We are not talking about
streetwalkers trolling dark corners for $20 encounters.
The
women of the Emperors Club surely knew what they were
doing and were happy to rake in big bucks to spend time
with wealthy, powerful men. Even a governor! Of New
York, no less.
Like the
women the so-called D.C. Madam claimed to send out to
clients looking for sexual fantasy, they are classy,
independent women, not victims of brutalizing pimps who
drug them, rape and beat them—indeed, who own them.
Surely
the glamorous women the Emperors Club sent to the best
hotels in New York, Paris, London and wherever their
fat-wallet clientele travels are nothing like those
destitute girls from starving, distant villages sold by
their families or lured by promises of a better life in
America, only to find themselves sex slaves.
Ivy
League
So,
what’s with the deterioration?
If any
form of prostitution is victimless, surely it would be
the sort that authorities say operated out of the
Emperors Club VIP.
If that
libertarian streak in you screams out that the
government shouldn’t be policing this perfectly
harmless, very intimate, inevitable and ancient
activity, I understand.
And yet,
the woman the New York Times identified as Gov. Eliot
Spitzer’s “Kristen” isn’t some PhD candidate working
nights to cover an Ivy League tuition.
From all
available evidence, Kristen was abused in her youth,
quit high school before her junior year, fled her
troubled family, used drugs and spent time on the
streets without a home. This, according to the Times,
which quotes her online profile and her mother.
Bummer.
Where’s the glamour in that?
“This is
a very, very vulnerable human being,” says Taina
Bien-Aimé, executive director of Equality Now, an
international antitrafficking organization. She says
Kristen is typical.
Fits the
profile
She fits
the profile of any class of hooker, from streetwalker to
Emperors Club. Abused as a girl. Homeless.
Undereducated. Destitute.
It’s
unlikely Spitzer knew much about her, and why should he?
As Kristen herself said over a tapped telephone line
after their date, she was there for one purpose and one
purpose only.
And yet,
Spitzer, who had worked with Equality Now to push for
the toughest anti-human-trafficking law in the country,
seemed to be well aware of the physical and psychic
danger inherent in commercial sex.
“Women
engaged in prostitution face the most dangerous
occupational environment in the
United States,”
concluded a study of prostitutes in Colorado Springs,
Colorado, published in 2004 in the American Journal of
Epidemiology.
They are
far more likely to die at an early age than the average
woman, mostly from drugs or violence, the latter more
often inflicted by customer than pimp, the study found.
When you
pay money for sex, the woman becomes an object with
which the man feels free to do whatever he wants.
Portrait
of victim
The
study counted 204 homicides per 100,000 prostitutes
compared with four per 100,000 for female liquor-store
workers.
True,
that study looked at streetwalkers.
And yet,
if you doubt that clients willing and able to pay $5,000
for an hour of sex don’t turn these women into objects,
too, consider the Emperors Club marketing techniques.
The web
site rated the women from one to seven diamonds,
charging from $1,000 to $5,500 per hour according to
rank. When men called in, one of the club’s bookers
would ask what body type they preferred, “that model
look” or “a little curvier.” This one’s brunette, that
one’s blond.
It makes
perfect sense if you’re paying for sex to select your
favorite fantasy, right? It’s like picking out a car or
a suit.
Yes,
some smart women choose this life and even find it
empowering in some way. And it’s not as if it’s only men
who run these kinds of businesses, or that it’s only
women who prostitute themselves.
Feeds an
industry
But this
business, however high the fees it charges, feeds a
multibillion-dollar, international sex trade, mostly
criminal in nature, which exists by subjugating women.
The
average age a girl enters prostitution is 14. That’s
average. Not surprisingly, prostitutes are more prone to
suicide.
Even if
he’s not paying to ruin a teenager, to support a pimp
who enslaved a drug addict or to snatch a girl away from
her family, a john is supporting the system that
encourages all of that, and more.
In
Nevada, where prostitution is legal in some areas, women
are shipped in from all over the world to work in
illegal as well as legal brothels, according to a study
by Melissa Farley, a research psychologist and
antiprostitution advocate. Incidents of rape in Nevada
are four times the national average, she found.
The New
York Daily News calls Kristen the “Gal Who Brought Down
the Gov,” as if Spitzer was a hapless victim of a
powerful woman. There are those who will think she’s
doing just fine, because now the skin magazines want to
pay her big bucks to expose herself further.
But this
is a business that debases broken human beings so as to
thrill those with money. Spitzer knew this. Surely he
understood that even an emperor’s prostitute
deteriorates at some point. |
