I knew a woman fairly well who worked as an escort. She was the mother of a friend of mine, and by day she worked in a high-end dress shop. My friend also worked at the escort service, and it was legit. They wanted well put together, intelligent college grads who would be comfortable in all sorts of social situations, and in the case of my friend’s mother there were no closed doors. She had one client and he paid her to have dinner with him at a nice restaurant three or four times a week. He paid the agency, paid for the meal, and he also bought her a car, eventually. She did a few others, but this guy ended up as the only one she had an ongoing (years) relationship with. She (the mother) was in her 50s at the time, but very well put together. The mother was not a college grad but even in her 50s (and 60s, and 70s) she was a lovely woman and the kind of woman men liked to talk to even if she’d made a fool of herself when she opened her mouth, which she didn’t.
This side job paid well enough that she could afford to buy clothes from the place she worked. Well, that and her employee discount.
My friend (the daughter), who did this for a much shorter time, did get a couple of guys who wanted more than just a presentable woman, but the agency made it pretty clear that anything over and above the three-hour minimum, all of which took place in public, was at the discretion of the client and the escort. The problem being that once you went out with a client, you apparently were never, ever supposed to go out with the guy as a non-client, even if it turned out that you were soulmates. Kind of like how you’re not supposed to go permanent in your temp job without paying the temp agency a hefty finder’s fee.
There are other escort services that have a different agenda, but this one didn’t. I have no idea if it’s still around. It handled both male and female escorts.
I knew her about as well as two people could know each other. We were never officially ‘a couple’ but we both respected and trusted each other completely. Consequently she would not have hesitated to tell me if she had in fact slept with any of her clients. She wasn’t a prude, but she wasn’t a slut either. She was just a very confident, worldly, and attractive woman and, like I said, not at all the type that ever had the want or need to sell herself. She only did escorting for a brief time and stopped basically because she became bored with it and wanted to do other things.
As far as money goes the clients didn’t pay huge amounts for the service, and if they did want sex for hire they knew of other places where they could get that.
It’s my guess that over time, regardless of how much it really is or not, the escort business has become viewed as being a part of the grey-market ‘massage parlor’ side of things. So much so that today a respectable guy can’t hire an escort without it being synonymous with paying for sex. But it didn’t used to be that way.
No, she couldn’t have avoided prison. She tried her best. She released her telephone records to the public and they were reviewed by a lot of people online who discovered Vitter and other clients’ identities. (Her argument, incidentally, was that her service was not a sex service and if you can contact my clients, they will gladly tell you that they didn’t get sex from my escorts.)
She was already convicted and the government had no interest or need for her to “finger” anyone. She asked for clemency from the judge, but he sentenced her to prison. She had served a prison sentence earlier in her life and said she could not go through that again, so just before she was supposed to report to be taken into custody, she killed herself.