A woman accused of running a prostitution ring threatened to immerse Washington in a sex scandal on Friday by saying she was considering selling 13 years of phone records to raise funds for her legal defence. The threat by Deborah Palfrey, who was indicted on racketeering charges this week, saw lawyers claiming that the records would soon lead to a client list of 10 000, including some of Washington’s most influential figures.
”Statistically, when you have 10 000 clients in DC, you are going to cover a broad spectrum of the governmental and private sector that operates here,” said Montgomery Sibley, Palfrey’s lawyer in her civil proceedings.
”You can make an assumption based on these facts: the escorts only responded to private residences in good sections of DC, Virginia, or Maryland, or in four- or five-star hotels … The clientele was about 20% foreign, and it was not an inexpensive service.”
From her California home, Palfrey is accused of running a service that offered, according to her company website, ”legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behaviour”. It was a lucrative operation, earning Palfrey $750 000 over the last six years, court documents said.
Only college-educated women were recruited, and only after they had consented to have sex with a client of Palfrey’s choosing without taking a fee — a device meant to thwart a sting operation, according to court documents.
Clients paid between $275 and $300 for an encounter. The prostitutes kept half of the fees and sent the rest to Palfrey by money order. It was this transaction that appeared to have led to Palfrey’s undoing, after the postal service and internal revenue service began tracking the payments.
Palfrey’s home was raided last October, and about $1-million worth of property was seized along with $500 000 in cash and stocks. That was when Palfrey decided to fight back, implicitly threatening her client base to pay for her silence.
This unorthodox tactic is a favourite of Sibley. He attempted a similarly proactive approach last year for a client called ”Big Pimpin Pappy”, who was arrested for running an escort business in Florida. However, a judge dismissed the attempt to sue former clients.
Sibley denied Palfrey was stooping to blackmail. ”She has had 13 years to blackmail people if that was what she wanted to do,” he said. ”It is only now, when she finds herself indicted facing significant prison time, that she has to resort to this.”
Washington sex scandals are not uncommon. Only months ago a Florida congressman, Mark Foley, was forced to resign in disgrace after it emerged that he had been sending sexually explicit emails to teenage male congressional pages.
Despite the innuendo, it was unclear on Friday exactly who was on Palfrey’s client list — but as any Washington insider knows, involvement in a sex scandal hardly need spell career death.
Three years ago, a penniless intern on Capitol Hill, Jessica Cutler, caused a sensation when the blog about her sexual exploits with fellow congressional staffers and others got an airing on the internet. Now Cutler, aka The Washingtonienne, is a published novelist, and is looking at television roles. – Guardian Unlimited Â