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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
In the past few days, I've begun to atone for my private failings with my wife, Soda, my children, and my entire family. The remorse I feel will always be with me. Words cannot describe how grateful I am for the love and compassion they have shown me. From those to whom much is given, much is expected. I have been given much. The love of my family, the faith and trust of the people of New York,
On March 12, 2008, New York's Democratic Governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned from office in disgrace amid a prostitution scandal.
It was discovered that in the span of six months, Spitzer had hired escorts on at least seven different occasions from an agency named Emperor's Club VIP, and he had paid a total of more than $15,000 for their services. Federal agents had begun monitoring Spitzer after a bank reported suspicious activity in the governor's personal accounts.
Spitzer had attempted to transfer more than $10,000 to various and obvious offshore shell corporations in a series of small transactions that would avoid detection. The bank flagged the transfers anyway because they feared that Governor Spitzer was being extorted by some kind of organized crime network. But after an FBI surveillance campaign caught the governor with his pants down, it became clear that Eliot Spitzer had been paying up to $5,000 an hour for sex.
Everything truly is more expensive in New York. Hiring escorts was a bold move for a politician that spent so much time and resources punishing sex workers. In fact, while governor, Eliot Spitzer had signed laws that made it a felony to get caught hiring a prostitute in New York. Yet, even though he had broken several laws by paying for his prearranged tryst, Spitzer was never charged with any crime.
Instead, once out of office, the former governor was given his very own talk show on CNN, while the operators of Spitzer's favorite escort service spent years behind bars. And come to find out, Spitzer's rash of escort encounters during 2007 and 2008 was not the result of some sudden moment of weakness for the former governor. It was more like a lifestyle.
A huge level of hypocrisy. According to Kristen Davis, the woman in that clip, Spitzer had been hiring escorts for years. Kristen knew this because she was the one fielding his calls.
She said Spitzer always paid cash, and her escort said he could be too rough in a scary way, and always kept his socks on in bed. Of course, Eliot Spitzer has denied those allegations, and the information Kristen Davis dispersed publicly has never been independently verified. However, it is true that Davis had owned and operated her own escort service.
In fact, she was arrested in the on-swing crackdown prompted by the Spitzer scandal and spent four months in prison on charges of promoting prostitution. Davis thought that since she was being charged with the crime, it was only fair to dish dirt on hypocrites like Eliot Spitzer, a hypocrite who would legislate morality during the day, sleep with an escort at night, and then return home to kiss his wife with that mouth. Investigators estimate that Eliot Spitzer had spent $80,000 on escorts over the years.
He was just one of many reasons why Kristen Davis's escort business was reportedly netting more than $2 million a year. He was one of the reasons why Davis had half a million dollars in her checking account. And Eliot Spitzer was also one of the reasons why Kristen Davis walked out of prison without a penny to her name. The government had seized all of her assets, yet Spitzer walked away scot-free for another round of the board. How do you feel about Eliot Spitzer?
I think he's symptomatic of the problem that we're experiencing here. He set a precedent that these career politicians can betray the public trust and commit crimes and go unpunished. And we've seen it, I mean, even Patterson now. So it's unfortunate that the New Yorkers don't take their state back. A year and a half after her release from prison, Kristen Davis decided to try and help New Yorkers take their state back.
She threw her hat into the ring of the 2010 New York gubernatorial race as a libertarian protest candidate seeking to upset the establishment. Well, I think New York really is in desperate need of reform. I understand that my ideas might be radical. However, with a seven plus billion dollar budget deficit, I think we need to start looking at some radical solutions in order to curb that gap. Kristen Davis was no slouch either.
She graduated from high school as a valedictorian at age 15 and started working at a hedge fund three years later. By the time she left the world of finance at age 28, she was managing her own multi-billion dollar fund. But after seeing how much her colleagues were doling out for sex with strangers, Kristen decided she wanted a piece of the pie. She quit her job and launched her own escort agency.
and sold it five years later to a gentleman named Benjamin Lovell, who reportedly paid for it using a portion of $5 million cash that Commerce Bank had accidentally deposited into his account that he later had to repay. Just a reminder that there are no bank errors in your favor. Kristen's follow-up venture was a home run. Her new agency named Wicked Models was the self-proclaimed most successful escort agency in the world.
According to Davis, she employed over 120 escorts across five international cities. The agency even had an overseas call center, just like every other major corporation that doesn't want to pay a living wage. But it was all gone in the blink of an eye. Everything Kristen had worked for was now government property, which is why she decided to fight the corrupt system from the inside by running for governor, and she had no issue funding her bid.
Turns out raising money is easy when you have access to a big black book of former escort clients with deep pockets and dark secrets who wouldn't want their names leaked to the press.
Hi, I'm Kristen Davis, independent candidate for governor. It's outrageous that New York has not legalized same-sex marriage. Andrew Cuomo says he supports it, but when the marriage equality bill was before the Senate, he was asked to call three undecided Democratic senators and declined. A vote for me sends a strong message to Cuomo: We demand gay marriage now. In other words, vote homo, not Cuomo.
By today's standards, Kristen Davis' 2010 policy proposals were not that radical. Legalized gay marriage, legalized marijuana, legalized sex work. They were policies that would generate revenue for the state which could be used for public good. Things like education or infrastructure. They were policies that would provide safer options for those who were going to partake regardless, as opposed to trusting a black market.
Policies that when introduced are often dragged to the bottom by the puritanical anchor that remains chained around the neck of civilized society. The dead weight that we drag behind us as we inch our way along the endless march of progress. Logical solutions are dead on arrival because certain ideas make some people feel yucky thanks to pseudoscience and ancient biblical texts. It's like waiting for a stubborn toddler to put on its shoes when you're trying to leave the house.
Until those laces are tied, I guess we can just keep pretending that prohibition actually works. But as popular as her policies might have been, there was no sense in pretending that Kristen Davis had a realistic chance of winning that election. In the end, she wouldn't even appear on the ballot. It's almost like Kristen and her third party progressive policies were being pushed by an outside force in an attempt to steal votes from the establishment candidates.
Sounds crazy, until you discover who was pulling the strings behind Kristen Davis' campaign. Kristen Davis is a brilliant woman, a friend of mine, someone who has made mistakes and has paid her debt to society. That's the voice of Roger Stone, the infamous political strategist, lobbyist, and terrible dresser, who has never been one to shy away from pulling tricks of his own.
Roger Stone met Kristen Davis during her post-prison media blitz and took the Manhattan Madam under his wing. Stone managed Davis' campaign for governor as well as her follow-up bid in 2013 for New York City Comptroller, in which Davis was running against an old friend. "Elliot Spitzer is back in the political game. The former New York governor plans to run for the New York City Comptroller's office. That's according to an interview released Sunday night by the New York Times.
A full circle that soon spiraled out of control. Two weeks after Spitzer entered the comptroller race, Kristen Davis was forced to drop out when she was arrested for selling hundreds of prescription pills to a police informant. She pleaded guilty and spent another year and a half in prison.
If it's any consolation, Eliot Spitzer didn't win the comptroller race either. Instead, he returned to private life a political failure.
and was relegated to taking over a multi-million dollar real estate empire that his father left for him when he died in 2014. Poor guy just can't catch a break. As for Kristen Davis, she came out of prison a second time with a bun in the oven. She gave birth to a child fathered by a man she met in a halfway house, a sentence that no parent ever wants to hear about their daughter. Now a single mother, Kristen moved into an apartment leased by best friend and new boss Roger Stone,
Davis had basically become Roger's personal assistant. She designed his websites, scheduled his travel, and other duties as assigned.
An honest day's pay for an honest day's work. Or maybe not. Why would Robert Mueller want to talk to Kristen Davis?
Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
Roger Stone, the man that has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, was one of 34 individuals indicted during the Mueller investigation. Stone apparently traded private messages with Russian intelligence officers on Twitter regarding emails stolen from the Democrats, and he coordinated the release of those emails with WikiLeaks. But that's a different story for a different day, because this story is about prostitution, the world's oldest profession.
It's a story about how it takes two to tango, yet it's a common theme for only one half of the party to end up in handcuffs, and usually it's not the one that paid $5,000 an hour for that kind of treatment. This is a story about Debra Jean Palfrey, a madam who, like Kristen Davis, was prosecuted for her crimes while her powerful clients washed their hands clean. It's a story about desperation.
The owner and operator of a Washington, D.C. escort service becomes the target of a federal investigation and is faced with the fight of her life on this episode of Swindled.
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Good sense of humor.
Charming disposition. I think a lot of these men enjoyed women who were strong personalities, who were smart and engaging. That is what they were looking for, and that's who I hired. Deborah Jean Palfrey knew what she wanted. More importantly, Deborah Jean Palfrey knew what men wanted. At least, she thought she knew. And judging by the sustained success of her escort service, Pamela Martin and Associates,
Ms. Palfrey might have been correct in her assessment. Jean Palfrey founded Pamela Martin in 1993, right after her release from a San Diego prison where she had served 18 months on felony pimping charges. Jean had begged the judge for leniency and promised that she would never be involved in the prostitution business again, but no leniency was given since Jean had tried to flee to Canada before her trial. So she served her time and, upon her release, went right back to work. She didn't have much of a choice.
Jean was free again, sure, but she now had a felony on her record. Her employment options were non-existent. In a 2007 interview on the Audible show In Bed with Susie Bright, Jean Palfrey described to Susie what it was like to rejoin the workforce after prison. Quote, You come out of prison with a scarlet F, felon, across your forehead. Despite the fact that I had a four-year degree and a little less than a year of law school,
I was a fairly well-educated, well-traveled, well-read, sophisticated young woman in my mid-thirties. There was no chance in hell for me in this society, certainly not back in the early nineties, to go forward, to get any kind of a job, or to do anything. I had no choice. My life was in tatters, financially, emotionally. And besides, when Jean Palfrey had worked a traditional job, the money just wasn't there. She had been a receptionist, a waitress, a paralegal, an interior designer.
All perfectly acceptable jobs, but as a single woman in San Diego, Jean was never able to close that gap. She told Vanity Fair, quote,
So Debra Jean Palfrey became involved in the escort business and quickly discovered how much she could have made. Keywords, could have. Jean also discovered how mismanaged and seedy the industry really was. Full of streetwalkers with scabs on their legs and needles in their arms. Being abused by insecure pimps and pre-owned Cadillacs. Needless to say, the business wasn't reaching its full potential. My God, they're nincompoops. There had to be a better way, and there was.
So in 1990, at 36 years old, Jean Palfrey started her first escort company. She managed the comings and goings of more than a dozen escorts and kept a percentage of the proceeds for herself. Jean was on pace to earn a six-figure income in her first year of operation until a mother of one of her escorts ratted her out to the authorities which led to her arrest and the closure of her first foray into the world of sex work. Jean Palfrey had learned a lesson. Well, kind of.
Even though she was diving right back into the industry that had landed her behind bars, Palfrey vowed to not repeat the same mistakes with her new venture, Pamela Martin and Associates. For starters, Jean professed never to hire younger girls with angry mothers. Instead, Palfrey made it her mission to recruit a more sophisticated woman. A Pamela Martin escort would own a car and a cell phone. She would have some form of employment outside of her escort work.
and she would possess or be in the process of obtaining a college education. I employed independent contractors ages 23 to 25 years of age and up to age 55. With two to four years of college education, many had graduate school educations. Palfrey wanted her escorts to have what she referred to as the Ann Taylor look, classy, well-groomed, and drug-free.
weight proportionate to height, a businesswoman in the streets, an animal in the sheets kind of vibe. Except according to Jean Palfrey, she wasn't in the business of selling sex. No, Pamela Martin and associates offered quote, "fantasy services." The only two things that are considered basically illegal are prostitution, intercourse of any kind, and oral sex. Otherwise, everything is absolutely legal for all intents and purposes.
Right. Fantasy services. Anything but intercourse or oral sex. For $300 an hour. 90 minutes at a time. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Of course, offering fantasy services instead of sex seems like some kind of legal loophole that would keep Jean from going to prison again if the police ever came sniffing around. But it was obvious to anyone with a penis what Pamela Martin and Associates was selling.
If it ever came down to it, Jean would simply plead ignorance to what happens behind closed doors and stand behind what she advertised. Jean even had her escorts sign contracts that guaranteed their termination if they ever participated in illegal activity on the job. That's not to say that Jean treated her escorts poorly. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pamela Martin escorts were paid fairly and retained full control of their schedules and appointments. All Jean asked is that they work at least three nights a week.
Madame Palfrey also offered her gals, as she called them, "guidance and empowerment." She distributed newsletters containing safety tips and ways to avoid the quote "misogynists" who were out to get them. The whole operation was built on mutual respect and consideration between the owner and the escorts, a philosophy that the escorts seemed to appreciate. One of Jean's former employees told Vanity Fair that she was treated better at night than during the day.
when the men in the office would refer to her as the blonde and slap her on the ass. Also, it should be pointed out, it was never about greed. I think it's about leveling the playing field a little bit financially. To recruit new escorts, Jean advertised in student newspapers and alt-weeklies, and she received responses from the exact demographic that she was targeting. There were real estate agents, college professors, and naval lieutenants.
Professional women in need of a supplemental income. Highbrow women that appealed to highbrow men because that's the type of client Jean had targeted. No longer would her business service the San Diego area. Instead, Pamela Martin and associates would cater to the lonely men on the hill in Washington, D.C. "Both the independent contractors and the clientele were upscale and came from the more refined walks of life here in the nation's capital."
and business was booming. You could drive down the streets of Washington and look at every building on your left and your right, and in each and every one of those buildings, we had clients. Think about that the next time your husband has a late night at the office. Speaking of offices, even though Pamela Martin operated in the D.C. metro area, Jean Palfrey remained stationed on the West Coast.
Anyone who called the Escort Services DC phone number was forwarded to a line set up in the laundry room of Palfrey's Vallejo, California home. Palfrey would answer using the persona Miss Julia and take down the client's name and preferences, and then match those preferences with one of her escorts on call. The time and place would be scheduled, a financial figure would be agreed upon, and the date would take place.
When it was over, half of the fee would be sent back to Jean in the form of a money order to her post office box in California. The client's information would be shredded. Business as usual. It was a foolproof system and it worked flawlessly for the next 13 years until there was a knock on Jean Palfrey's door on October 4th, 2006. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money.
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Neighbors on Capitol Avenue here in Vallejo say they knew something was up when federal agents raided this home last week. We heard a banging on the neighbor's door and shouting. I saw all these cops out there.
And so I didn't know what was going on. Then today they found out something about their neighbor, Deborah Jean Palfrey, that sent shockwaves throughout the neighborhood. Federal agents allege for the past 13 years, Palfrey operated a Washington, D.C. escort service. Under the name Pamela Martin and Associates, she allegedly sent college-educated prostitutes to the homes and hotel rooms of well-to-do clients. Deborah Jean Palfrey was in Germany when the police raided her home in Vallejo.
Jean had shut down Pamela Martin and Associates about two months earlier, in August 2006. She was officially out of the business and in the process of selling her house and moving overseas. Not for any nefarious reasons, Jean was just retired, had money in the bank, and wanted something different.
Jean needed excitement in her life. She just didn't expect that it would come in the form of a search and seizure. Well, first of all, it came as a tremendous shock. I mean, this came absolutely out of nowhere. I had no concept whatsoever that this was about to hit. What hit was the culmination of a two-year joint investigation of Pamela Martin and associates by the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Postal Service.
Since Jean conducted most of her business via phone lines, email, and mailboxes, she was about to be indicted on felony charges for wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering. Notably, there were no charges for anything related to prostitution. Meanwhile, Jean Palfrey was 5,000 miles away, reading articles about herself online and trying to make sense of it all. She had operated Pamela Martin and Associates for 13 years. So why now?
Well, Jean had her own theories. And I think when I made that wire transfer, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Because as soon as I made that wire transfer on September 28th of last year, the next day, this languid, non-investigation investigation went into warp mode. The wire transfer Jean is referencing was in the amount of $70,000, and it was for the purchase of a small apartment in Germany.
That international transaction, combined with dead phone lines at the escort service and putting her house on the market, must have forced the people who were watching Madame Palfrey to act. Jean's recent behavior must have suggested to them that she had something up her sleeve. In fact, federal agents had tried to gain entry to Palfrey's house earlier in the week under the guise of interested buyers. The agents saw the forced sell sign in Jean's front yard and approached her real estate agent about a tour.
When they were denied entry because of Jean's overseas absence, the authorities traveled to Sacramento and secured a search warrant, which they executed a few days later.
After a two-year investigation, Jean assumed that the government already knew everything about her, and
and that they had concluded that she knew too much. One does not simply operate an escort service in the nation's capital without crossing paths with a few familiar faces, a presumption authorities were able to confirm through interviews with some of Jean's former employees. Jean assumed that they, whomever they were, could not afford to take the risk of some madam flinging the country and exposing her former clients. Even though Jean had no intention of doing so, they could not afford to be blindsided by scandal so close to an election.
They wanted to know what she knew. Why me and why me alone? Well, there was obviously something, and I think it's a logical conclusion, that there was something about me that they, who are they? We don't know. Is it the GOP? Is it this administration? Is it Homeland Security? Is it the CIA? Who is they? We don't know who they are. Thought that there was something that I had or knew that I had that they found to be very valuable.
It was unclear who they were, but it was pretty clear what they wanted. Information. And there was plenty of information to be found. In a four-hour search of Jean Palfrey's home, more than ten boxes of bank records, employee applications, newsletters, notebooks, and laptops were seized. However, it was later discovered that the authorities had left behind the exact thing they were probably looking for in the first place. When Jean returned from Germany, she found her house in shambles.
It had been completely ransacked, except for the 46 pounds of Pamela Martin and Associates' phone records that she had stored in her basement. They sat exactly where she had left them, collecting dust.
Palfrey says this was all on the up and up. She says she reported all of her revenue to the IRS and even had 1099s prepared every year for her workers. Now, she is alleging that she's broke, that she can't afford to put up a defense. And so in order to raise money, she says, or her lawyer, rather, in these civil proceedings, says she wants to sell phone records from her company. Her lawyer says this amounts to as much as $1,000.
Having returned to the United States, Debra Jean Palfrey scrambled to defend herself. Unfortunately, the federal government has seized all of her assets, totaling about half a million dollars, which left her with no way to retain counsel.
Jean was relying on uninspired and overworked public defenders before she contacted Montgomery Blair Sibley, a kilt-wearing civil forfeiture expert who agreed to represent her and put up a fight. But in order to put up a fight, Jean Palfrey would need money, so she decided to auction off the only thing she had left of value, 13 years of Pamela Martin and associate phone records. There was great public interest in whose phone numbers were on that list.
but that plan was foiled when a judge ruled that the government would collect any proceeds from the sale. In response, in March 2007, Jean Palfrey just gave the phone records away. Four years worth to ABC News, Jean hoped that the media would identify some of her former clients who could testify on her behalf that the services they received were merely fantasy services and perfectly legal. She was so confident that it would work out in her favor that she turned down a plea deal that included a four-month prison stay.
Jean Palfrey did not want to go back to prison. Jean Palfrey wanted to go to trial. Jean Palfrey wanted a war. "Nonetheless, the decision ultimately was made to hand over the records to a responsible media outlet, in this case, ABC News in New York, without compensation and/or promises or guarantees of any sort."
Even though ABC News is under no obligation whatsoever to me, I do expect their reporting to help identify potential witnesses for my defense. For me, this is an absolute necessity since the government has placed me in the untenable position whereby I do not have sufficient monies to undertake this extraordinarily expensive task. I would ask the press and the media
to put aside the titillation of the who's who's list, at least in part, and instead investigate the disturbing genesis, the confounding evolution, and the equally alarming continuation of this matter. I believe there is something very, very rotten at the core of my circumstance, and without money to hire my own investigators, I must rely upon your acumen and talent
The first client from the Pamela Martin phone records to be identified was 67-year-old military specialist and Pentagon advisor Harlan Ullman. Jean Palfrey had identified Ullman herself in court papers she filed because she remembered him being so, quote, unpleasant. Ullman was famous for developing the military strategy used in Iraq known as shock and awe.
Which became a buzzword that cable news threw around a lot to entice viewers to tune in to the latest season of televised war. Harlan Ullman responded to the outing with, quote, It doesn't deserve the dignity of a response. No criminal charges were filed against him.
ABC News followed up Palfrey's leak with one of their own, and it was a big one. 65-year-old Randall L. Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice. Tobias' private cell phone number was on the madam's list. Ironically, one of Randall L. Tobias' jobs was directing foreign assistance programs to combat prostitution and prevent AIDS worldwide.
But while in that position, Tobias decided to cut off foreign aid to third world countries that provided condoms to its sex workers, opting to promote abstinence as the primary method of AIDS prevention instead. Debra Jean Palfrey had no sympathy for these people that were being exposed. And I sure as heck am not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, you know, four to eight years here, you know, because I'm shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever.
When confronted by ABC, Randall Tobias admitted to using the Pamela Martin service, but claimed that it was nothing sexual. He told ABC that he used to, quote, Tobias said that he didn't even know the women's names. He compared it to ordering a pizza.
It was exactly what Jean Palfrey wanted to hear. Friday's admission by Mr. Tobias that he engaged in legal activity while a customer of my firm supports my position all along that I operated a sexual, albeit legal, business for 13 years from 1993 to 2006. But if she was looking for an ally in Randall Tobias, that just wasn't going to happen.
Tobias resigned from the State Department on April 27, 2007, citing personal reasons. He was subsequently appointed as president of the board of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. The mayor of Indianapolis said of Tobias in the appointment, quote, America believes in second chances. No criminal charges were ever filed against him. And while Randall Tobias was a big name, the best was yet to come.
I want to again offer my deep sincere apologies to all those I have let down and disappointed with these actions from my past. I am completely responsible and I'm so very very sorry. No matter how long ago it was I know this has hurt the relationship of trust I've enjoyed with so many of you and that I have a lot of work to do to rebuild that. I will work every day
to rebuild that trust. Wendy and I dealt with this personally several years ago. I confronted it in confession and marriage counseling. I believe I received forgiveness from God. I know I did from Wendy, and we put it behind us. Since then, I've gotten up every morning committed to trying to live up to the important values we believe in.
That's David Bruce Fitter, the 47-year-old married father of four and first-term Republican senator from Louisiana, on television issuing a public apology for what he called a quote, very serious sin.
The phone number for Vitter, who had supplanted the previous Louisiana Senator because of a prostitution scandal, was on the madam's list. It was found by free speech advocate and pornographer Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler Magazine. Flint's agents contacted Vitter to let him know that his worst nightmare had just discovered his dirty little secret. Vitter had no other choice but to address it, and he did so with his wife Wendy by his side.
which was extra special, because a few years earlier, Wendy Vitter was asked by a reporter how she would react if her husband were ever as unfaithful as Bill Clinton. Wendy responded, "'I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,' a reference to the woman who famously chopped off her abusive husband's penis while he slept. Wendy continued, "'If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me.' "'Well?'
What happened, Wendy? Are you surprised that I have something to say? You know, in most any other marriage, this would have been a private issue between a husband and a wife. Very private. Obviously, it is not here. Like all marriages, ours is not perfect. None of us are. But we choose to work together as a family. When David and I dealt with this privately years ago, I forgave David. I made the decision to love him.
I agree. Forgiveness is a better choice than body mutilation. But Wendy may have made that decision before she heard the rest of the news. Sex workers in New Orleans were alleging that David Vitter was well known in the local industry. So well known that they even had a nickname for him.
They called him Vitter, the shitter, because he had a diaper fetish. I mean, hey man, that's cool, whatever you're into. But it does make this campaign ad where Wendy tells David to change a diaper seem kind of weird in retrospect. Bottom line, for the sake of our children, there are a lot of things I'm going to change. Great, David, you can start by changing Jack. I'm David Vitter, and I approve this message. Yeah, I bet you do approve that message, David. You bad boy.
Anyway, Debra Jean Palfrey was enjoying the shit show. Again, she felt no remorse for what was happening to these people. I don't wish to ruin anyone's life. However, you know, I do share the same mindset as Larry Flint, expose the hypocrites. And for those few dozen to a hundred or so that ultimately will be revealed like David Vitter, I
I go to sleep very, very easily at night without any guilty feelings whatsoever about the David Vitters of the world. But he has the ability to send us to war, in part. He has a vote. We don't have a vote, but he has a vote. So these people not only are hypocrites, they're kind of dangerous. And these people can and should die.
But David Vitter's life wasn't ruined. He faced no criminal charges and did not even bother to resign from office. In fact, David Vitter, the serial adulterer, just apologized to God and then ran for re-election in 2010 and won. Score another one for the party of family values. Vitter finally left Congress when his term ended in 2017.
And now, like every politician, the former senator currently works as a lobbyist for Mercury LLC, where he continues to live out his sexual fantasies by fucking the rest of us. But that's where the bombshells ended. According to ABC News, Harlan Ullman, Randall Tobias, and David Vitter were the most noteworthy names on the list.
There were other business executives, NASA officials, and military officers, but again, according to ABC News, none of them were well-known enough to bother publishing. And unfortunately for Jean Palfrey, none of the men identified from the phone records would agree to testify in her defense that they had procured perfectly legal and sexless dates with her escorts. Instead, the men just slithered away like snakes in the grass while Jean Palfrey faced the music alone. I just keep my head high.
Brandy Britton was a mother of two. She had a doctorate in sociology and was a former professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Brandy Britton was also an escort.
She had even worked for Deborah Jean Palfrey for a short period of time before she branched out and started her own operation where she worked for herself under the name Alexis Angel. Brandy ran her business out of her house in an unsuspecting neighborhood in Baltimore. Her neighbors claimed to have noticed cars coming and going all the time but thought nothing of it. They were more annoyed by the two pot-bellied pigs that Brandy kept as pets. However, Brandy's neighbors did notice more activity than usual one day in January 2006.
They saw Brandy being escorted out of her house in a pair of handcuffs by a pair of vice cops. Apparently, Alexis Angel had scheduled an appointment with an undercover officer. She was charged with four counts of prostitution-related crimes, and the story went public. Brandy Britton was exposed and humiliated, and her upcoming trial weighed heavily on her mind. But more immediate, Brandy had no sorts of income. She had no way to pay her mortgage. Brandy fell so behind on payments that her house was sold in foreclosure.
But before she could be evicted, Brandy Britton walked into her living room, tied a noose around her neck, and hanged herself from the rafters. Of course, since their stories were similar, Jean Palfrey was asked about what she thought happened to Brandy Britton. Palfrey told ABC News, quote, It was tragic.
Not everybody can be as strong as Jean Palfrey, who made her intentions clear in conversation with famous Sandy Hook school shooting denier, Alex Jones.
The fact that you're so visible really protects you going on Larry King and other big shows, but you want to put it on record that you're not planning to commit suicide? No, I'm not planning to commit suicide. I'm planning to go into court on April 7th if indeed we do have the trial, and I plan on defending myself vigorously, and I plan on exposing the government's...
Debra Jean Palfrey's trial began on April 7, 2008. Both clients and escorts served as witnesses for the prosecution. They testified under oath that they had engaged in sexual acts in exchange for money with Palfrey's knowledge.
The escorts even detailed how Palfrey's screening process included sleeping with the man of the madam's choosing for no money, because that's not something a cop would do. One of the escorts that testified at Palfrey's trial was 38-year-old Rebecca Dickinson, more formally known as Lieutenant Commander Rebecca Dickinson. She had served 19 years in the Navy and was currently an instructor at a naval school in Georgia. But to earn some cash on the side, Rebecca had worked for Gene Palfrey,
Lieutenant Commander Dickinson gave a detailed report about her involvement in the escort business to her superiors in the Navy, and for her honesty, Lieutenant Commander Dickinson was promptly fired from her job. Navy spokesman Captain Jack Hanslick addressed her dismissal, "...we expect the men and women who serve in our nation's Navy to adhere to a standard of conduct that reflects our core values of honor, courage, and commitment."
Lieutenant Commander Dickinson's conduct will prevent her from wearing this uniform ever again in the service of our country. After four days of testimony from dozens of escorts and three clients, the jury deliberated for less than a day. They found Debra Jean Palfrey guilty on four felony charges of money laundering, racketeering, and two counts of mail fraud.
She faced a maximum sentence of 55 years in prison. The so-called D.C. Madam sighed when a federal jury found her guilty of running a high-end prostitution ring. The 52-year-old repeatedly denied the escort service she ran for 13 years engaged in prostitution and said if any of the women engaged in sex acts for money, they did so without her knowledge.
After the verdict, Debra Jean Palfrey traveled to Florida to stay with her mom, and she reportedly cried in her room for two weeks straight. Jean felt so betrayed by her gals that testified on the stand. She felt so discouraged by the whole appeals process. It was never going to work. Debra Jean Palfrey just felt so defeated, and she would have to wait almost three full months before learning her fate, and she knew it wasn't going to be good.
even though 55 years was the maximum sentence. Realistically, she would probably receive 8 to 15 years. But still, at 52 years old, 8 to 15 might as well be a life sentence. Thinking about it all just made Jean feel so tired. On May 1st, 2008, Jean's mother, Blanche Palfrey, woke up from a nap around 10 a.m. She noticed Jean's bedroom was empty, and outside, a tricycle that was typically stored in the shed was sitting on the lawn.
Blanche walked outside to see what Jean was doing and called out her daughter's name, but she was nowhere to be found. A bit befuddled, Blanche slid the door to the shed open to put the tricycle back inside. And there she was. There was Jean. There was her daughter, with a nylon rope wrapped around her neck, hanging from the ceiling, gently swaying side to side.
Upon entering the shed located on the west side of the residence, Blanche Palfrey discovered her daughter, Deborah, had apparently hung herself using a nylon rope from a metal beam on the ceiling of the shed. She then called 911. Obviously, you know, the mother's very distraught, you know, discovering your child, you know, in this state's not something anybody wants to go to. And we feel for the family as their victims in this case, just as in any other case where suicide leaves behind
Suicide leaves behind a whole mess of victims, and in some cases a whole mess of conspiracy theories. People like Alex Jones, who suffers from chilly amnesia, latched onto the story and touted it as proof of a murderous deep state. They claimed that Jean Palfrey's death was proof that there were some powerful names in those phone records who wanted her silenced.
Names like Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and even human senator Ted Cruz have been floated around. Of course, that's all unsubstantiated rumor and hearsay. But Jean Palfrey did publicly announce that she was not planning to commit suicide. So, maybe it was true. Maybe it was all true. Maybe Deborah Jean Palfrey just knew too much. She was in too deep. Dead women tell no tales. But Florida police found nothing at the scene that suggested foul play.
And immediately after the news of Palfrey's death made the rounds, author Dan Modaya, who was helping the madam write a book, spoke with Time Magazine about how Jean told him very clearly one day that she would rather kill herself than go back to prison. But the most crucial evidence that Jean Palfrey had taken her own life came in the form of the notes that she had left behind. In the bedroom of her mother's house on the nightstand, there was a notebook that contained two letters.
One addressed to Jean's mother Blanche and the other to her sister Bobbie. Both letters were dated April 25th, 2008, about a week prior to Jean's suicide. In the note to her mother, Jean apologized for her final action and tried to explain why it had come to this. Quote, I cannot live the next six to eight years behind bars for what both you and I have come to regard as this modern day lynching.
only to come out of prison in my late 50s, a broken and penniless and very much alone woman. In the letter to her sister, Jean described how there was no way out, no exit strategy other than the one she had finally chosen. Jean expressed love for her younger sister and told Bobby to remain strong for their mother and to help her in any way possible. On the back of one of the notes, Jean had written, "'Do not revive. Do not feed under any circumstance.'"
Truly a tragic ending for a woman who had remained so strong through it all. But I guess everybody has a breaking point. This is what Washington Post staff writer Monica Hesse wrote about the incident. Because ultimately, Poffrey's death isn't only about feminism or the justice of her sentence or the hypnotic circus of it all. It is also about one woman alone in the shed next to her 76-year-old mother's trailer deciding that the future seemed too much to bear.
Stript of meaning and analysis and cultural contexts. It's very, very... Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen. With original music by Trevor Howard.
Special thanks to Susie Bright and Audible for allowing us to use excerpts from her interview with Debra Jean Palfrey. This episode wouldn't have been the same without it. You can listen to Susie's entire interview with Jean on her show In Bed with Susie Bright, which you can find exclusively on Audible. There's a link in the show notes of this episode and on the Swindled website. I've made it easy for you. Go check it out. I highly recommend it. Thanks again, Susie.
Also, special thanks to Nana Gengadze for lending her voice to this episode. Nana hosts a podcast called Vacant Frames, which combines art history with detective work to explore the stories and mysterious fates of lost artworks. Very interesting. Go check it out. For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at swindledpodcast.
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