Glass houses, the 15,000 and the Hill
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“I think it is somewhat ironic and hypocritical that he [Randall Tobias] would patronize an escort service while he was denying funding to organizations who want to help prostitutes, and supporting a policy that obviously forbids fraternizing with prostitutes.”
~ Jodi Jacobson , executive director for the Center for Health and Gender Equity
Well, how fun is this! Illicit sex comes to the Hill. Since I note that news is covering other topics today, I’ll assume that it won’t take too much oxygen away from what’s critical, but it has the potential to be another Gate — HypocrisyGate, for sure. We have a little DC Madam with a phone list of 15,000 or so customers she’s given to ABC who is going over it with a fine tooth comb in preparation for a 20/20 episode. She says nothing illegal took place, the courts disagree.
“Miz Julia’s” phonebook can cast a net with the potential to blow the hypocrisy dome off the Hill … we’ll see where it goes but I suspect it will go somewhere; giving all those numbers to the press seems too juicy a prospect to ignore. We certainly have the fodder for more uniquely-American Puritanical mythology blowing to bits, here — that all the morality rhetoric coming out of Washington DC means diddly, that those put on a pedestal are less than human. It’s probably time to take a look at sex-for-hire, as well … ready or not, here it comes!
We’ll file this story under “Oh, Grow Up!” and keep an eye on it — the 20/20 is due to air next Friday night.
When I was a kid, my father was big on “Do as I say, not as I do.” When I was about ten, I told him that statement made no sense to me, that it was the definition of hypocrisy. After a blustering bit of explanation, rationale about things being “age appropriate,” we moved on — but he stopped saying it. [He never made much headway with the "Children should be seen and not heard" business, either. I'm sure he wanted a tractable child ... instead, he got me.]
Another of those maxims that we throw around is “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” At least that one does make sense. I’m thinking we’ll be hearing more tinkle of shattered glass in the coming days. And I’d bet they’re sweating on the Hill today — probably more of the Red than the Blue. The Dems, after all, are more likely to think of prostitutes as working class constituents while the Red would have some real explaining to do, Jimmy Swaggart style. Will we have yet another of those national conversations discussing what the definition of “is” is?
We need a lot of sexual healing on this planet — and we can’t even begin that until we look at the topic with a bit of maturity. Perhaps a necessary step in this nation would be the heaving of a brick through the Big Glass House of Illusions in Washington, DC.
Big fun!
Jude
Prostitution scandal has Washington in new ’shock and awe’
Raw Story
Saturday April 28, 2007
The demise of a call-girl ring and pending trial of an alleged madam claiming thousands of clients has the US capital riveted by the chance powerful men may now be caught with their trousers down, with a senior state department official apparently first to fall.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 50, dubbed the DC Madam in local media, has been arraigned in federal court on charges of operating a Washington prostitution service for 13 years until her retirement in 2006.
Palfrey has denied she ran a prostitution ring. Her company, Pamela Martin and Associates, was simply a “high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior and did so without incident during its 13 year tenure,” she said.
Palfrey contends her escort service provided university educated women to engage in legal game-playing of a sexual nature at 275 dollars an hour for a 90 minute session, the Washington Post reported.
But Palfrey has also hinted that she has a record of the phone numbers of thousands of more than 10,000 customers that could embarrass more the a few of the US capital’s high-fliers.
Friday, the US State Department announced that Randall Tobias, the embattled head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), was resigning for unspecified personal reasons.
However ABC News, which said Palfrey has provided it with a record of the numbers of calls to her private cell phone, reported that Tobias stepped down after they spoke to him about his allegedly contacting her number.
Tobias since 2003 also was President George W. Bush’s first global AIDS coordinator, a job which drew criticism for his emphasis on faithfulness to partners and abstinence over condom use in trying to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus.
Before entering government he was chairman, president and chief executive of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, and also, from 1997-2000, chairman of the board of trustees at Duke University.
His now-reported links to a firm accused of prostitution have raised more than a few eyebrows.
Palfrey’s California home and other assets were seized by US tax authorities in October, and Palfrey has been trying to raise funds for her defense through an appeal on her website.
Her lawyer, Montgomery Blair Sibley, told Fox television last month: “The statistical certainty (is) that there are a fair number of high-profile people who used this service across the government and private sector in the metropolitan DC area.”
And the Post reported Saturday that local jitters appear to be multiplying. It said Sibley claimed that “he has been contacted in the past few days has been contacted by five lawyers asking whether their clients’ phone numbers are on Palfrey’s list of 10,000 to 15,000 customers from 2002 to 2006.”
That may have something to do with the fact that Palfrey already has named her first name, as it were, on her website, where she has posted a court document from April 12 in which she alleges formal US naval commander Harlan Ullman was a “regular customer” whom she needs to subpoena.
With James Wade, Ullman developed the military doctrine of “shock and awe” used by US government in its invasion of Iraq. According to one definition, it is shorthand for rapid dominance based on the use of “overwhelming decisive force,” “dominant maneuvers,” and “spectacular displays of power” to subdue the other side.
Earlier this month Ullman told CNN that “The allegations do not dignify a response,” and referred any other questions to his lawyer.
Deputy Secretary of State resigns after admitting escort link
‘Condi loves him,’ friend tells Washington Post
John Byrne, Raw Story
Friday April 27, 2007
WASHINGTON — Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias submitted his resignation Friday after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington escort service, multiple media outlets reported Friday.
Tobias, 65, said “that he must step down” from his post “effective immediately,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement Friday that did not disclose his escort service link.
“He is returning to private life for personal reasons,” the statement added.
Within minutes, Tobias’s biography was deleted from the USAID Web site, the Washington Post reported on Saturday’s front pages.
ABC’s ‘Blotter’ reported that Tobias told the network Thursday “he had several times called the “Pamela Martin and Associates” escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Tobias, who is married, said there had been “no sex,” and that recently he had been using another service “with Central Americans” to provide massages.”
“Tobias’ private cell number was among thousands of numbers listed in the telephone records provided to ABC News by Jeane Palfrey, the woman dubbed the “D.C. Madam,” who is facing federal charges,” ABC said.” In an interview to be broadcast on “20/20″ next Friday, Palfrey says she intends to call Tobias and a number of her other prominent D.C. clients to testify at her trial.”
“I’m sad today,” said one person close to Tobias, according to Saturday’s Washington Post. “The president loves him and Condi absolutely loves him.”
Tobias was also director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Tobias’ tenure was strongly criticized in a hearing in the US House of Representatives in March, especially by California Democrat Tom Lantos, who was angered by USAID’s role in the West Bank and Gaza, Russia and India.
Until he took the USAID post in January 2006, Tobias was responsible for coordinating the US government’s international HIV/AIDS assistance efforts.
Before entering government Tobias served as chairman, president and chief executive of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company.
USAID, founded in 1961, is the US government agency in charge of sending humanitarian aid in disaster situations around the world.
State Department officials declined to comment further on the reasons for Tobias’s resignation.
“I’m sad today,” said one person close to Tobias. “The president loves him and Condi absolutely loves him.”
White House officials said Rice briefed Bush on the matter early yesterday before he met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The president “was saddened and disappointed and wished Dr. Tobias and his family well,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who operated the escort service, was indicted on federal racketeering charges in February and has threatened to expose her high-profile client list.
Palfrey has contended that her escort service provided clients with college-educated women who engaged in legal, sexual game-playing for $275 per 90-minute session in their homes or hotel rooms. Prosecutors allege she ran a prostitution ring.
Palfrey’s attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said yesterday that he has been contacted in the past few days by five lawyers asking whether their client’s phone numbers are on Palfrey’s list of 10,000 to 15,000 customers from 2002 to 2006. Some have also asked about whether an accommodation can be made to avoid identifying their clients, which Sibley said he is not able to promise. ABC’s “20/20″ is mining that database of phone numbers, Sibley said, for a news report on the more notable of Palfrey’s customers.
“I presume ‘20/20′ crews running around with cameras has led to this flurry of activity,” Sibley said. “That may cause some people to worry.”
D.C. Madam Wants Washington Clients to Testify
Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz & Justin Rood, ABC News
April 30, 2007
The woman charged in a federal indictment with running a high-class Washington, D.C. call girl service says she plans to call her prominent clients to testify at her trial.
Jeane Palfrey, dubbed the D.C. Madam, says among those she will call to testify are Randall Tobias, who resigned Friday as deputy secretary of state after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of Palfrey’s escort service.
Tobias said he “had some gals come over to the condo for a massage” but denied any sex was involved.
Also on Palfrey’s list of customers who could be potential witnesses are a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials.
“I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever,” Palfrey told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross in an interview to be broadcast Friday on “20/20.” “I’ll bring in every last one of them in if necessary,” she said.
Palfrey is due in federal court Monday morning to ask the judge to replace her current lawyer, a public defender, with a lawyer who she says “will be more aggressive in fighting the government.”
The indictment of Palfrey alleges she used more than 100 women over a period of 13 years “for the purpose of engaging in prostitution activity with male clients, including sexual intercourse and oral sex in exchange for money.” She made more than $2 million running the operation, known as Pamela Martin and Associates, according to the federal indictment.
Palfrey, who ran the service by phone from her home in Sonoma County, Calif., is the only person charged. None of her male customers is named by the government.
“That’s very hypocritical,” she says. “Why aren’t these people under arrest? Why just me?”
Palfrey claims she ran a legal operation that offered sexual fantasy but not “illegal sex” of the kind described in the indictment.
She says she hopes her prominent clients will testify they did not engage in actual sex when they hired her escorts.
“This was a sexual fantasy service,” Palfrey told “20/20.” “Occasionally a client would want to go to the Kennedy Center or go to dinner, but generally speaking they went straight to the homes, or they went straight to the hotels,” she said.
Palfrey provided ABC News with phone records from her business going back four years.
‘I Abhor Injustice,’ Alleged Madam Says
Sue Anne Pressley Montes, Washington Post
Sunday, April 29, 2007; Front Page
“Miz Julia” doled out a steady stream of advice, both practical and philosophical.
From her California home, she e-mailed tips to the 132 women who worked across the Washington area for the firm Pamela Martin & Associates. Her newsletters, now excerpted in court records, were a virtual how-to manual for avoiding all kinds of trouble in a business said to specialize in erotic fantasies.
“One never quite knows where evil, i.e., the vice squad is lurking in this business,” read one arch entry from 1995. “The misogynists get a real kick out of surprising (shocking) you girls, when you give them the opportunity!!! . . . Therefore, you are to lock, double lock, triple lock all doors!!! . . . Figure it out, before they ‘get cha’!!!”
Miz Julia was the pseudonym for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman at the center of a sex scandal that has caused a deputy secretary of state to resign and has lawyers calling around town trying to keep their clients’ names out of public view. A one-time law student, Palfrey ran for 13 years what she insists was a legal escort service. Federal prosecutors allege she was providing $300-an-hour prostitutes, and a grand jury indicted her in February on federal racketeering charges.
Palfrey piqued fascination — and anxiety — by first threatening to sell phone records that could unveil thousands of clients, and then handing them over, apparently for free, to ABC News. She is scheduled to appear tomorrow in U.S. District Court in the District.
On Friday, Randall L. Tobias resigned as deputy secretary of state one day after confirming to Brian Ross of ABC that he had patronized the Pamela Martin firm. Speaking yesterday on “Good Morning America,” Ross said Tobias told him Tobias’s number was on Palfrey’s phone records because he had called “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” There had been “no sex,” Ross quoted Tobias as saying, and that recently he has used another service, “with Central American gals,” for massages.
Tobias, who is 65 and married, was director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously held a top job in the Bush administration overseeing AIDS relief, in which he promoted abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they oppose prostitution.
Palfrey’s flamboyant attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said Friday that he has been contacted by five lawyers recently, asking whether their clients’ names are on Palfrey’s list of 10,000 to 15,000 phone numbers. Some, Sibley said, have inquired about whether accommodations could be made to keep their identities private. ABC is expected to air a report on Palfrey and her clients on “20/20″ on May 4, during sweeps.
More revelations are in the offing. Ross said the list includes the names of some “very prominent people,” as well as a number of women with “important and serious jobs” who had worked as escorts for the firm.
The disclosures have been made sparely and artfully. Two weeks ago, in court documents about calling former clients to testify on her behalf, Palfrey named Harlan K. Ullman, an academic whose main claim to fame was a scholarly paper he wrote more than a decade ago on the military strategy known as “shock and awe.” Responded Ullman: “It doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.”
Sibley also filed notice that he intends to depose political consultant Dick Morris in a separate civil proceeding. Morris would not comment.
Palfrey also declined to comment on either Tobias’s resignation or other names that could arise.
“As the old saying goes, ‘I need to dance with the guy who brung me,’ ” she wrote in an e-mail to a Washington Post reporter. “I have promised ABC News that the ‘20/20′ interview will be an exclusive one. I am sure you can understand my situation.”
For all the attention she is attracting, Palfrey retains an air of mystery. She has dropped intriguing hints about herself over the years but demurs when asked for an interview about her life.
“I am not a quitter,” Palfrey wrote in another e-mail to The Post. “Additionally, I abhor injustice, on any level and in any forum. I frankly persist despite life’s barriers. It is no more complicated than this.”
She sees herself as an entrepreneur being railroaded by an all-powerful government, in a “David and Goliath scenario.” Prosecutors have made much of her history: In 1992, she pleaded guilty to attempted felony pimping. She started her Washington business while on probation in California.
The little that is known about Palfrey comes from court records in California and Washington, interviews with acquaintances and a series of e-mails. Through her writing — facile, self-assured, with triple exclamation points for emphasis — she shows contradictions and gumption, a woman who says she lives by “the Golden Rule” and who describes herself as sophisticated, a perfectionist and “a cat person” who will not go away without a fight.
Old friends can’t decipher the contrasting images.
“I thought I was a pretty good friend in high school,” said Debbie Blozik, who lives in Birmingham, Ala. “But I’m thinking now how many things I really didn’t know about her.”
Home was Charleroi, Pa., population 5,000, which sits on a hillside overlooking the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, its older homes clustered on steep streets.
The elder of two girls, Palfrey was born in 1956 to Frank Palfrey, who worked for a grocery company and died in 2002, and Blanche, a homemaker now living in Florida. The family resided for a while in Orlando but returned to Charleroi when Palfrey was 10, to a modest house with striped awnings on Shady Avenue.
Neighbors viewed “Debbie” as a bright, attractive girl. In high school, she was a majorette. She performed a modern dance solo in the senior talent show. But before graduation, she left abruptly, finishing in Florida. She said that she couldn’t take the bullying anymore.
Palfrey graduated with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., attended a year at what is now Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and completed a nine-month paralegal course.
She got into the escort business in San Diego, she said, because she was “appalled and disgusted” by how “seedy, lazy and incompetent” other escort agencies were, she wrote in court papers. An avowed teetotaler, she said she did not like the drug-related atmosphere in the other agencies.
“I decided to branch out, so to speak, from my solo state and began working with one or two (maybe three at the most) other women,” she said in her California legal pleadings.
She told Thomas Czech, a career Marine who said he dated Palfrey for about two months, that she was an interior designer. Things ended badly, and Czech took out a restraining order against her in San Diego County in 1989.
Palfrey’s professional life also took a turn for the worse. Her business crashed when she was arrested in 1990; an employee’s angry mother apparently tipped off police. Palfrey employed about a dozen women and would have made $100,000 that year, she said.
She said her employees were “independent agents” and allowed that she should have “done something to police/eliminate such conduct from occurring.”
Palfrey was a no-show at her scheduled trial in August 1991. She was captured that October in Montana. She explained to the court that the stress from the criminal proceedings had caused her to flee. Her mother, she said, was so upset that she developed a life-threatening aneurysm and required surgery. She said her parents “just can’t comprehend how my offense could be viewed so harshly.” Once free, she said, she planned to go into business exporting “authentic American Western and Indian art to the United Kingdom.”
Instead, after 18 months in state prison, Palfrey started Pamela Martin. The firm recruited escorts through the University of Maryland student newspaper and Washington City Paper. It advertised in the Yellow Pages and on Web sites, touting itself as “undoubtedly the best adult agency around.”
Her career path apparently was lucrative, but not spectacularly so. Prosecutors say she made about $2 million running Pamela Martin over 13 years — on average, less than $160,000 a year. Her Escondido, Calif., home was valued at about $480,000 last year, and her Vallejo, Calif., house at about $495,000, according to court papers related to their seizure by the federal government.
Recently, Charleroi has exerted a pull on Palfrey as she returned, quietly. In late 2002, she launched a Charleroi Area High School alumni association Web site. On it, she expressed her interest in the Innocence Project for wrongly convicted prison inmates: “Never could stomach injustice, social or otherwise,” she wrote, adding a photograph of herself as a young girl with shiny bangs by a Christmas tree.
In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal Service launched a joint investigation of Pamela Martin & Associates. Palfrey, who conducted most of her business by e-mail and phone, allegedly instructed her “subcontractors” to convert her share of fees into money orders and mail them to her post office box in California.
Palfrey’s legal strategy is to aver she had no idea that the women working for her ever engaged in prostitution. In papers filed in U.S District Court, Palfrey alleged that a former escort identified as Paula Neble and 15 “Jane Does” breached their contracts by engaging in illegal sex. Neble’s attorney, Kathy Voelker, said she has “no comment at all.”
Palfrey has had a lot of setbacks lately. She says she is “indigent.” But she is not likely to go quietly.
“I should just ‘cave’ and defend myself,” she wrote in a recent e-mail. “Otherwise, this ridiculous caricature people seem to have of someone in my position . . . sadly will be at my expense.”
Staff writers Carol D. Leonnig and Sonya Geis and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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1 comment April 30th, 2007