Death and the D.C. Madam

When the call girl I spoke with worked at an agency, she says, she was kept isolated from other women. Then, when she started writing online about sex work, all that changed. "I know the moment I started blogging about it at length, I started connecting to other women online. It made a huge difference. I stopped feeling alone. I stopped feeling like I had to hide everything from anybody. It felt as though I had a connection to the outside world that I didn't have before." After all, sex work is not easy. "You have these very intimate connections, but you're totally disposable with clients. You're a ghost moving through their world."

Palfrey's story, she says, is "heartbreaking," but at its core, she believes, Palfrey's final act reveals more about America than the madam. "It's sort of unsurprising that somebody like Palfrey could feel driven to suicide -- because of the shame of being in the sex work world."

Bree Daniels, a former call girl who named herself after the prostitute who helps a private detective catch a call girl killer in the 1971 film "Klute," blogs at One Shady Lady about the three years she spent as an escort in New York and California. Or at least she blogged until recently. (Her boyfriend isn't crazy about her blogging in the present tense about her past life.) She launched her site after the Spitzer story broke because she was sick of the way sex work and sex workers were being depicted in the media. "I think I was feeling extremely angry at all the misinformation and the double standard that it's acceptable for boys who will be boys, but women who do this are basically like the devil's minions." Instead, she says, "I wanted people to understand more about the business from someone who had been in the business." Daniels worked in the corporate world before getting into escorting for the money. "I think there's a misconception that women in the business are all sexually louche, and that we're damaged. When I started I'd had sex with eight people." In high school, she could have been voted least likely to become a call girl. "Most people always said I looked like a librarian."

When Palfrey was indicted, Daniels wrote her a letter. "I wrote to her when it all broke out last year, just saying if you hadn't made a copy of your records, you should leave them with everyone you know, just in case." The dangers inherent to sex work are very real, Daniels underscores. "You can lull yourself into a false sense of security, and then when something happens, you realize that you're totally expendable, that nobody cares. You feel so powerless. And I think a lot of women just choose not to think about it -- because it's the only way that you can get through it and do the job." In the beginning of her escort career, before setting out on her own, Daniels worked for a madam. "I came to two realizations," she says about that experience. "I could do what she was doing myself and keep all the money. And the second thing was if I turned up dead, she would be calling up her Mafia buddies to have my body dumped in Jersey. She didn't care about me."

Madams -- who are, essentially, female pimps -- can be "the most mercenary individuals on the planet," she says. She adds, however, "Not all of them are that way."

In the end, Daniels quit the business because she was "burned out." Sometimes, she misses the camaraderie among the women she worked with in the sex business. "They say there's no honor among thieves, but there's a lot of honor among these women. And that to me is the best thing that I take away from all this."

Melissa Gira, for one, is optimistic that one day Americans will see sex work as real work and sex workers as real people. After all, she says of Palfrey's death: "I don't think this was a suicide of concession. If anything, it's 'You're not going to take me alive.'"

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