A Meticulous Data Trail May Have Saved 'D.C. Madam'
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Regina Lynn Lily Hay Newman Matt von Hippel Angela Watercutter Matt Kamen Isabel Fraser Jennifer M. Wood Jason Parham Condé Nast
Deborah Jean Palfrey walks alongside her attorney. Photo: AP / Chris Greenberg At first look, the "D.C. Madam" case had all the elements of a juicy political scandal. A feisty broad. A foot-high stack of phone records. A State Department official who resigned suddenly after admitting that he hired escorts to give him massages. The […]
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Deborah Jean Palfrey walks alongside her attorney.

Photo: AP / Chris Greenberg At first look, the "D.C. Madam" case had all the elements of a juicy political scandal. A feisty broad. A foot-high stack of phone records. A State Department official who resigned suddenly after admitting that he hired escorts to give him massages.

The "madam" in question, California-based Deborah Jeane Palfrey, has been charged with running a prostitution ring in Washington, D.C., thinly disguised as an escort service known as Pamela Martin and Associates. She pleaded not guilty and declared that her clients would testify that they did not have "illegal" sex with the escorts. To flush those clients out, she sent 46 pages of phone records to ABC.

Raise your hand if you are surprised that people with money, power or both spend some of it on sex. Okay, now all five of you head over to Cute Overload. The rest of us will join you in a few.

When you get right down to it, the scandal isn't all that scandalous. Even ABC, promising a shocking exposé of the names behind the phone numbers, admitted after some research that few of the men on the list were anywhere near "newsworthy."

Apparently they didn't find the elected officials or larger-than-life public figures they expected, and other than former United States Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias, none of the clients was internationally promoting abstinence, marriage and monogamy as The One Right Path.

It's easy to automatically disbelieve Tobias when he says he hired the escorts to come over and give him massages but not sex.

It's also tempting to accuse Palfrey of splitting hairs when she describes the difference between prostitution and erotic escort services. She asserts that while her subcontractors -- the escorts -- were expected to perform sex-related activities during client appointments, they did not participate in "illegal" acts, which she defines as "intercourse of any kind or oral sex." Instead, she describes her business as an "adult sexual fantasy service."

Before you roll your eyes, think about what we now know about adult sexual fantasy. Even if you've never ventured into adult communities, you've heard about the creative ways in which people bring fantasy to life online with video conferencing, 3-D worlds, chat rooms, even online dating.

We know, now, that people are having all kinds of sexual experiences that do not include intercourse or oral sex. Satisfying experiences. Orgasmic experiences. Deeply emotional or pleasantly physical or both.

It takes a commitment to engage your mind and accept the parameters or limitations of the interaction, but once that happens, bodies respond without being touched.

If you can have mind-blowing sex without being in the same room as the other person, why couldn't you have an intense session with an escort that stays on the legal side of the line between fantasy or entertainment and prostitution? Unfortunately, without documentation of some kind, you can't prove it. And Palfrey was quite vocal about not keeping records.

Her regular newsletters to her team of escorts -- which are distressingly disrespectful, calling them "bimbos" and "damned fools" -- repeatedly exhorted the women to destroy any notes about the appointments, and to prevent clients from taking cell-phone pictures and videos during the session.

Ironic that Palfrey now believes her records will save her from conviction.

I wonder if clients and escorts alike would be better protected if they did document each appointment. If not in video, which can have inhibiting effects that destroy the fantasy the client wanted in the first place, then at least a write-up of exactly what transpired. Store it privately but drown 'em in data if they come after you.

All the care the escorts and client took to cover their tracks didn't save them, although they lucked out that ABC decided they weren't important enough to name. Destroy all the evidence you want -- the phone company and your ISP still have enough data to make a difference. And eventually someone will blog, someone will e-mail, someone will snap a cell picture or identify you in IM or comment on your MySpace page or otherwise blow the secret, by accident if not by malice.

We get in trouble when our digital trails reveal a conflict between what we say about sex in public and what we do when we think we're private.

Tobias was "newsworthy" because he campaigned against prostitution while patronizing an escort service -- and most people don't see much, if any, difference between the two. Other clients, described as NASA officials, military officers, chief executives and the like, are not worth outing because they weren't visibly working to shut down the kind of business they were participating in. The data didn't trip them up.

I'm not naïve enough to believe that escort services never include sexual activities that render the sessions illegal. But I also don't think we can automatically assume that every "sexual fantasy" service includes sex.

Maybe Tobias called an escort service for a massage because he wanted the woman to wear something fetishy or skimpy or even nothing at all -- not something you can ask of the therapist at the gym. And maybe he prefers that we assume he's covering up sex because he doesn't want us looking too closely into the theatricals that really took place.

Meanwhile, I will say this: a masseur who makes house calls figures highly in my personal fantasies these days. And the sex bit is optional.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

Regina Lynn blogs at reginalynn.com.

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