I’ll tell you why I believe Gaye Dalton any day.
One thing in which civilians tend to fundamentally misunderstand sex workers is the depth of our communities. If you’ve worked in a parlour, if you’ve worked a stroll, you’re going to have met or at least seen other workers. Even if you’ve ever advertised in my niche, in my state, in the time I’ve been a worker, I am probably going to be able to match you to your description.
Not only this, but we read people well, and if your story doesn’t add up to doing what sex work is like in a particular place at that point in time, we’re going to have a pretty good idea. There’s a book-published Australian sex worker memoirist who is, to put it bluntly, a massive bullshit artist. We know this because it’s a small world and even though she bullshitted the details quite significantly, it didn’t take long for people to identify her working identity even though she last worked years ago. She hasn’t been outed because a) she’s not advocating anything terrible that affects us, b) she did actually work, and c) no one wants the drama of having it out with a vaguely public figure, but the truth is no secret within our community.
So, when Rachel Moran can’t produce one woman she worked with, any witness from that time who could verify her story, or any details that definitively could be fact-checked in her favour, despite claiming to work in specific places at specific times, when workers who worked those places are saying “no one matching that description ever worked here”, and workers who didn’t specifically work with her are saying “the details of how you talk about things are off, actual workers of that time didn’t use that language, and other details you include don’t add up”, that makes me dubious as shit.
I will also say that I personally know of an identical case as the story that went around about Moran, where a civilian abolitionist ripped off a story of an actual sex worker who initially went to them seeking support, and used it as their own without that worker’s consent. I don’t have the permission of said worker to out that abolitionist but if I did I’d be a hell of a lot less kind about it than Dalton was.
Laura Lee, another concurrent Dublin sex worker, also calls bullshit on Rachel Moran and her story.
the ridiculousness of Moran’s invisibility is especially ludicrously obvious given that she was in Dublin, which is so, so tiny – even in the relatively brief period that I worked there, quite a few years later when the population was actually considerably larger (and the internet was the marketplace norm, which way ups the ability to stay invisible), the idea that I could go public and have nobody come forward and recognize me is pretty unbelievable. the client pool is miniscule – it’s like being in Grover’s Corners, everybody knows (and has seen) everybody.
obviously, my experience is wildly different to what Lee’s was or Moran’s would have been – but in the direction of more anonymity, and less fact-checking abilities. so if it doesn’t look credible from here, it’s hard to see how it could be credible from there.