A former brothel worker’s lawsuit raises questions about the system — and about sex work.
By Amy Westervelt March 1 at 10:39 AM A new lawsuit from a human trafficking survivor against the state of Nevada threatens the operation of the state’s legal brothel system. The suit claims that Nevada’s brothels violate a pair of laws that prohibit encouraging anyone to cross state lines to engage in prostitution.
Plaintiff Rebekah Charleston, who lives in Texas, worked in the Nevada brothels off and on in 2004 and 2005 and is now an outspoken critic of the system. Charleston advocated for a county ballot initiative in Nevada last year that could have shut down the brothels. She was recruited to the case by attorney Jason Guinasso, who has been working with the Nevada nonprofit Awaken to combat sex trafficking in the state.
D’Adamo recently returned from a meeting of a United Nations committee on trafficking, where “one of the most common refrains was that one of the most serious problems is the conflation of sex work and trafficking,” she said. “Both because it leads to the increased policing of sex workers and because it ignores various other types of forced labor that constitute human trafficking.”This is not to say that sex work and trafficking can’t collide.
Parts of Charleston’s story are easily corroborated. At most brothels, workers sleep in the room where they perform services, the house takes 50 percent off the top and shifts are typically 12 hours. And the brothels do restrict the women’s movements in some ways. They’re checked for STDs weekly; if they leave, they must be rechecked when they return. That means trips away from the brothel must be timed around brothel doctors’ schedules.
Guinasso points to stories like Cherry’s as examples of coercion. “Can you really call it choice when women are ‘choosing’ between poverty and not?” he said. For Charleston, “paid sex is coerced sex — there’s no way you can introduce an influencer like cash and say that’s not coerced.”
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