Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law by Bass Alison

Author:Bass, Alison [Bass, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: ForeEdge
Published: 2015-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

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 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.

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