LETTER TO THERESA MAY
Dear Ms. May:
I thought I should introduce myself since it appears you don’t seem to have any researchers who would tell you there has been a hotline operating to help trafficking victims in the UK already for 30 years now this August. In 1987, I launched the hotline for what was originally called “Prostitutes Anonymous”. You can read about this at www.hightechmadam.com You can already read there about my arrest in 1984. The arrest was over the first safe house for adults in the USA. I had to take matters into my own hands to do this because the world in 1984 didn’t believe sex trafficking was real. I had just watched Linda Lovelace try everything in her power to make people believe she had been forced to film “Deep Throat” and to prostitute by her husband/pimp on a mob financed film, not a porn, but a mob financed film, only to have no one believe her. I watched as the anti-porn people sucked her up to try and stamp out pornography rather than to address the issue of being forced and knew that we weren’t accomplishing anything.
So I decided to just open a safe house myself. The victim who had just had her arm and nose broken by her pimp I had housed in the warehouse retaliated by calling the cops and claiming I was running a brothel. She testified against him and my charges were dropped, but I realized then I couldn’t operate in a bubble. I’d have to raise awareness, and change the laws, because back then we were ONLY and solely viewed as either the “Happy Hooker” or a criminal with nothing inbetween. So in August of 1987, we launched the first worldwide hotline along with our 12 step program. We chose a 12 step program because of law already established by Alcoholics Anonymous. These laws gave us confidentiality to our callers, and our members, as well as allowed any court to have any judge allow someone to attend our program instead of jail if they saw fit.
In 1988, then Mayor Tom Bradley came to me and we created the first ever task force. He gave us one member from each department from Sheriff Block, Chief Gates, the CDC, the mental health department, prosecutor’s office, social services, probation, etc. A special testing site was established for sex workers. This site not only allowed for anonymous HIV testing – but also had a backdoor for those who were being forced by a pimp. As for those being trafficked, the mayor understood they were the most likely to be infected, posed the highest public health risk, and was unlikely to come walking in the door to be tested.
So he gave us a team of people from the health department, the zoning department, and the prosecutor’s office to go out and start doing surprise inspections to the local massage parlors, strip clubs, bath house’s, swinger’s clubs, sex clubs, etc. We made it very clear we were not going to use condom as “evidence of prostitution” to arrest anyone. We went over “safe sex”practice’s and also would inspect for signs of trafficking. Through this project, we were able to start freeing a lot of these victims. Who of course needed housing, medical insurance, vocational rehabilitation, etc. So he helped us coordinate with HUD, Medicare, the state vocational rehabilitation office, local drug treatment programs, etc.
We found an empty drug treatment program and then went into the jails and cleaned out first any pregnant HIV positive prostitutes, then the mothers, and transgenders who were at high risk of rape and violence in the mens’ jail. We put them into the first residential program for adults this way. Once we got that done, we then went to the courts and started diversion and alternative sentencing programs. We cleared out 1800 female prostitute out of a jail that had housed 2000 – and thus saved the county over a million dollars this way.
A jail step study program was created for those on other charges who couldn’t be released. I got a letter from a woman in Phoenix who told me she’d been arrested 51 times and wanted to stop. So I sent her our jail study program. When she got out of jail, she turned around and took our “Prostitutes Anonymous” meetings right back into the jail. The work was so successful, Catholic Charities came to her and they created the Dignity Project. They had to because these women had no where to go when released from jail other than to prostitute. This then made them vulnerable to pimps and traffickers. So they needed housing. The Dignity house still has weekly 12 step meetings of our program where they work out of our “Recovery Guide” we created after working with over 2,000 men and women over a five year period of time. Thus we wrote the first, and only, book on how to escape and recover from the sex industry. Kathleen Mitchell was that woman who had broken her anonymity at the level of press so I’m not violating her anonymity by speaking her name.
Why do I make a distinction between pimping and trafficking? Back in the 1980’s if you had a pimp – guess what? You called 911 and he was arrested. Problem solved. There were laws on the books for that then. What we didn’t have laws on the books for was trafficking. Trafficking like I witnessed with Chuck Barris. He was producing the “Dating Game” then and would recruit girls from the local prostitutes. Then when some would win a date – they never came back home. No one would have believed then he was a CIA agent, nor he was trafficking women for the CIA either.
Guess what? No laws on the books to make what he was doing a crime. I invite you to watch this Bruce Lee video clip from 1973 where he tries to bring this to the world’s attention – there were no laws against this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PGjCWpbt4U I was watching Iran Contra during the 1980’s in Los Angeles and I also had the CIA ask me to sell them women. When I refused they threatened to ship me off on one of those plane’s.
Where do you go then? Where do you go when no one even believes that’s real? After witnessing a shipment of women leaving LAX on a diplomat’s plane with me not able to stop them – I started having anxiety attacks. I sought counseling who told me I needed to “talk about what was bothering me”. I did and they tried to lock me up for psychiatric observation. The therapist said I must be hallucinating because “things like that aren’t real”. Now how do we get help from either the police, or the mental health system if they don’t even believe it’s real. Even more to the point – how do we create a law if no one believes this is real.
THAT’S why we started embarking upon a major media campaign. I started bringing survivors of this type of trafficking on Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo, Maury, Donahue, Jerry, Oprah – any and every news show, tabloid show, talk show, etc., we could find. We had public access TV then as it was before the Telecommunications Act of 1995 – so weekly we’d appear on public access TV on cable talking about how this was real and how we needed legal recognition. Why? Because victim services was refusing to help prostitutes who were raped, or victims of domestic violence, because we were viewed only and solely as “criminals”.
I then got calls from 22 attorney general’s. The same ones fired by Bush for no stated reason. They said they wanted to work on getting the Trafficking Act of 2000 passed giving us federal recognition. They told us this would give us the money to get grants going to open up shelters, and programs, and spread our hotline, our program, our work across the whole USA.
In 1989, I got asked by Allentown, PA to bring to them what we’d brought to Los Angeles. We opened the “Program for Female Offenders” which was extremely successful. So successful we got a call from Vancouver Canada to help them open the first drop in crisis center and program which we helped Paige Latin launch in 1994. Her program later became PACE and PEERS.
So by 1999, we had chapters of our program which we renamed to “Sex Workers Anonymous” after the internet was born in every major city of the USA, and in three countries in Canada. Our hotline was processing calls from Ireland, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Amsterdam – you name it. Why? We were the ONLY hotline to call if you wanted help to leave any part of the sex industry.
Realize Ms. May that the term “trafficking victim” wasn’t even officially launched into the language until actually 2008 when Shared Hope released a report I had helped them write with the help of Melissa Farley. This is a term made up by people who want to make some kind of “distinction” between one type of victim over another. See, we broke through the barrier and got people to believe this was happening – trafficking was real. But when we did this we weren’t talking about street corner pimps. We were talking about men who were cops, CIA, and now even Homeland Security. In other words, men who were in position of authority forcing us into the sex industry.
THAT’S what we needed special help to get away from. I can’t take a woman who is being forced into sex work by a cop and put her in a local shelter ran by the Salvation Army. It won’t work. She won’t live. These types of victims have a long history of “suicides” or “accidents” – especially in jail. I can give you a long list of names – including myself. I was dodging so many death threats myself during my arrest that’s why the prosecutor gave me the name “Rene Le Blanc” so I could go in and out of my court hearings without being murdered on the courthouse steps through their liability.
Ms. May you may not remember when the tobacco industry was lying to the public about their product. They lied to Congress even. They not only used to say their product wasn’t harmful, addictive nor caused cancer – but they buy up their own research to try and prove it. They even had these campaigns where they appeared to care about us like with their “youth prevention campaign” which in reality was about marketing.
Right now even the author of the Trafficking Act of 2000, Michael Horowitz, has said this movement has been hijacked out from under us by people seeking money. Polaris is simply gathering data. They do not have survivors answering the phone as we do. They have no program. They tell callers to call the local trafficking task forces or programs anyone could look up on Google or the yellow page’s. Worst of all? Trafficking victims can’t call for help – that’s the very definition. IN THEIR OWN MEDIA they have admitted that up until 2013 their billboards, hotlines, etc., HAD NOT RESULTED IN ONE SINGLE RESCUE.
When Polaris launched their hotline in 2002, they started preparing with Randall Tobias and George Bush for the TVRA of 2003. This was a revision designed to wipe us out totally. What this revision did was (1) take all money for this work and give it to the church of which we are not a church and our research had proven that not one single faith based program had ever worked (not like ours had), and (2) it said that anyone who got money could NOT have any dealings with any person or group who did not express the view that all prostitution was rape essentially. That anyone who said “sex work was work” was on the “Forbidden” list.
Well that creates a huge problem. Because in the mining industry – you have trafficking victims. In the construction industry – you have trafficking victims. In the restaurant and hotel business – you have trafficking victims. IN ANY INDUSTRY you have a segment who are being trafficked. No I do not believe that a woman who is a stripper, and thus in the sex industry, is a RAPE victim. Nor do I believe the strip club OWNER who runs that club who is in the sex industry is a RAPE victim. Such a statement says that prostitution, or the act of sex for money, is all there is and all you have to pull a victim out of.
Would you like to know why? Because right now I’ve got members of our program who are employed by shelters who receive government funding who are instructed to “stand down” and do nothing when the pimps come by and take the women to go to work at the strip clubs, or even on porn shoots. Why? Because IT’S LEGAL. Polaris is part of a huge campaign to make people THINK, through major propaganda, that every prostitute is a “trafficking victim”. Only that’s not the case. Over 90 percent of men and women who work as prostitutes are “independent” and have no pimp and no trafficker. None. They set up ads on the Erotic Review, and they work by themselves for themselves. Polaris however came out against legal prostitution in Rhode Island BUT NOT NEVADA. They did this through a report co-written by Katherine Chon, Bradley Myles wife, and Derek Ellerman. Derek Ellerman “owes his career to Ron Paul”. Ron Paul’s career is financed heavily by Dennis Hof, the legal brothel owner in Nevada. So what Katherine did was SHUT DOWN DENNIS’ COMPETITION.
In fact, every site they’ve been a part of shutting down has been Dennis’ competition. Right now in this country I can show you case after case after case where people have gone to these task forces that have been set up with money given to them by Katherine Chon out of the Office of Trafficking in Persons that wouldn’t exist without the work I put into creating that office, and they are not only not arresting “traffickers”, but they are only arresting Dennis’ competition, and further involved in trafficking themselves. I can point you literally to case after case clear up to men like Joohoon David Lee, a Homeland Security agent, who was actively using his position to traffick women, and also shutting down either innocent bystanders to look busy, or their “competitor’s” who are the “independents”.
Polaris doesn’t want the information that’s coming into our hotline to be released, or even heard. Why? Because we caught them red handed, and have documented proof, they created a whole campaign of false trafficking in Ireland. Why? To get money to set up an office and a hotline that’s why. I have a group of members in Ireland who were reporting to me there was no trafficking there because there was no money there. No point. They also were reporting to me they were witnessing “staged” trafficking to time right with the press to make it appear there was trafficking going on that wasn’t going on normally.
When the TVRA of 2003 came out – anyone who had a job or a license coming out of the government shut us out in fear of losing their funding. That was their exact words also. Katherine Chon not only is in charge of the department funding anything to do with trafficking, who makes sure her husband gets the juiciest contracts, but also is part of the HHS, the National Institute on Mental Health, and every other governmental agency. Meaning that starting in 2003 – we had every counselor, social worker, probation officer, etc., who had been working with us effectively from 1987 to 2003 – was fired. In Nevada because the mayor was leading a campaign to bring legal brothels to downtown Las Vegas – every single cop, probation officer, social worker, etc., was told if they even spoke to us they’d be fired.
All because our definitions are very different as to what trafficking is and who needs help. If you look at any research report out there, or speak to anyone in the field, they’ll tell you the victims themselves don’t self identify as “trafficking victims”. They identify as “prostitutes” or “sex workers’. Which is why Polaris has answered about 100,000 calls to date and we’ve answered 500,000 calls. We put out there if you want to leave any part of sex work for any reason – call us. So we get five times more calls than they do for that reason. As for those pimped – many don’t even realize they were forced until we get them out of there. No different than Patty Hearst as an example. When they arrested her for robbing a bank – she didn’t think she was a “brainwashing victim”. It took her time away and deprogramming before she could realize that.
When we exposed the cases coming out of Ireland were staged and faked – that’s when Polaris got aggressive about getting our hotline shut down. You know why? Because we not only contradict a lot of information coming out of their hotline, but we further release information they don’t want heard. Such as we’re getting calls from women inside shelters who tell us they’re still being “pimped” but because it’s “legal” that they can’t do anything to stop them.
Plus there’s a bit of conflict of interest here. Polaris has partnered with Google. Google has introduced Oculus. Oculus is a 3D virtual porn application. Now the women working as performers on the other end of the camera are “legal”. However, this does not mean they aren’t “trafficked”. When Jeane Palfrey, the DC Madam, released her Black Book, the names of men like Randall Tobias was NOT as her “john” but as her “trafficker”. Now if a high class madam could be considered a trafficking victim by MY definition, but not Polaris – then you see the conflict. Why not Polaris? Because Polaris has the victim themselves call. They’re then turned over to the police for processing basically as each “task force” is headed by the local police.
Now – how would Jeane Palfrey call Polaris? First, there’s no point in her calling. What are they going to do? Refer her to the police? She’s claiming men like Randall Tobias, David Vitter, and other names in the CIA and White House are forcing her to madam to help further their government projects. So what – she’s going to call someone to get a bed in the local Salvation Army? I don’t think so. Nor could the women at the DEA owned strip club call the Polaris hotline, nor the woman trafficked by a Homeland Security agent.
In our country Ms. May we have a concept called “competition”. The reason why we have competition is that usually two competing companies keep each other honest. What Polaris has done by controlling the purse strings of this movement, and by partnering with deep pockets who don’t want to see their legal sex business scrutinized for trafficking victims such as Google/Oculus, and also Palantir Technologies, who is essentially the very CIA that many of us have said ARE THE TRAFFICKERS I charge they don’t want any information on trafficking within their circles to reach the light of day. Hence the only way to do that is to shut us down and out – who is their only competitor.
They moved into the UK and they got a grant from you for their hotline. A hotline that I already operate and have operated for 30 years now. Truthfully – how am I going to compete with them? When they have the sex industries deep pockets behind them and all I have are survivors who can barely get through a day clean if they’re lucky now – I can’t compete. That’s called a monopoly in our country.
Only who am I going to get to sue someone who is partnered with their partners such as Google, Palantir Technologies, and Dennis Hof who Is now running for Senate. Funded by Sheldon Adelson who has already declared he has a “prostitution agenda” to get prostitution legalized throughout this country. So what this is pure and simple is that they run an industry they don’t want anyone coming in checking them out for trafficking. They want everyone to stay focused on their COMPETITORS – who are the freelancers working illegally.
If I’m wrong – then they would have told you about us right? Since I’ve not gotten any phone calls from you I don’t think so. If I’m wrong – then why haven’t they even asked that their hotline phone number be posted in the legal brothels of Nevada? Yes they’ve made a huge media splash about having the hotline posted in some “sex related business” in some states such as SB1193 in California. Only I’ve tried getting that law enforced and guess what? There’s no plan in place to enforce it. I walk into a strip club in California and I see they have no signs posted. Then what? There’s no one to report this to and no one knows anything about who even issues the citation. This was a publicity stunt pure and simple and it worked. You forked over how much to them?
For what might I ask? When we get a call from someone who wants out of the sex industry – we refer them to our program. A fine one. If you read Sharon Oselin’s 10 year study “Leaving Prostitution” we have a great program. Independent journalists have investigated us and written wonderful things about us including John Quinones from ABC. Oprah gave a grant and a two hour documentary to our Chicago chapter. I have interviews up at www.leavingtheliferadio.com talking about how we helped them.
If they’re being trafficked or pimped or need help to leave – we have a separate program which goes into effect to organize their rescue. I’ve been working on a project right now since 2007 where I can show you a string of arrests we’ve helped to get done against the “League” who was part of the operation that Joohoon Lee was with, and goes clear back to China with Liang Yaohui. We’ve helped release many victims who would not have been able to be released otherwise because of them and the Triad trafficking them together.
I’ve tried working in partnership with Polaris since they opened. They refuse to acknowledge us in any public way and it’s because they’re doing everything they can to shut us down as their competition. Well I’m sorry but when the fox is in charge of the chickens – it doesn’t go well for the chickens. So I wanted to reach out to you to let you know if you want to hear any “alternative” reports of what we’re hearing out of the UK – I’d love to fill you in. We have many members and groups in the UK of our program.
Haven’t heard of them? Good. That means the pimps and traffickers aren’t either. That’s why we’re an “anonymous” program. Means we’re doing our job. We do our outreach to those who need us – not politicians and not people who are giving us million dollar checks. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love to but I don’t have the time. Every day I answer our hotline and I’m speaking to victims all over the world. So I don’t have time.
Thanks for listening.
Jody Williams
(702) 488-1127 Cell
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