Across the US, the decriminalization of

sex work has become increasingly popular,

provoking intense debates within communities.
But what role, if any, will the police play?

The Right
to Work
Essay by Jenna Krajeski
Illustrations by Chloe Cushman
 39
T
amika Spellman grew up in a
working-class neighborhood in
Buffalo, New York, the child of a
steelworker father and a home-
maker mother. Although both of her parents
were devoutly religious, when the teenage
Spellman—who hadn’t yet begun her gen-
der transition and was still living as a male—
impregnated her girlfriend, their main concern
was that she wouldn’t finish high school. They
offered to help support her child, who was living
with his mother, but Spellman’s older brothers
also relied on the family to get by, and Spellman
hated feeling like a burden. “That’s my kid,” she
said. “My parents didn’t raise me to shirk my
responsibilities.”
For a while, Spellman had trouble finding a
part-time job—unemployment plagued upstate
New York in the 1980s. She moved between
low-paying gigs, struggling to make enough
money to care for her baby while continuing her
schooling, but eventually graduated and began
plotting her next move.
One night, on a whim, Spellman had sex with
an older man who gave her some money as he
left. That brief, surprise exchange, both exhila-
rating and casual, revealed what seemed like a
practical path to survival, one she was willing to
follow without self-judgment. Recalling it, she
channels her younger self. “I was like, hmmm,”
she said. “Pretty sweet.”
Spellman didn’t think of herself as entering
“the life,” a preconceived idea of sex work that
would take over her own, or assuming an iden-
tity that would eclipse everything else about her.
Sex work was, simply put, work. And in the time
since then, Spellman, who is now fifty-four, has
supported herself, her son, and, eventually, her
widowed mother largely through sex work. She
used sex work to pay for college, and, later, for
her gender transition. When she had another
baby, she began supporting him as well. She
stayed close with her parents, despite her moth-
er’s refusal to call Spellman by her chosen name
(“I cannot change her,” Spellman told me, “I can
only change me.”). Over the past decade, she has
become one of Washington, DC’s most visible
activists for sex-worker rights. In her work as
40 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
an advocacy coordinator, and now as head of
the department, at Honoring Individual Power
& Strength (HIPS), a DC-based harm-reduction
organization, she has addressed more politicians
and lawmakers than most Americans could
likely name, and has been featured in so many
news articles that she has often had to take to
Twitter, where she is prolific, to tell journalists
she needs a break.
Spellman’s work as an activist is rooted in her
conviction that sex work helped her forge her
own path—economically and otherwise—but
that it remains a profession fraught with unnec-
essary peril. In 1988, three years after graduating
high school, Spellman joined the military, think-
ing “it would look good on a résumé” and because
she wanted the benefits. One night, while out
at a bar trying to get some side work—“I knew
this particular spot had a thing for military per-
sonnel,” she said—she was drugged and raped.
At the base, she told her commanding officer
what had happened and was dismayed by the
response. “All they wanted to know was, did I
know anyone else at the base who was gay?”
she said. Discharged and far from her family,
she felt “completely lost.” Since then, as a sex
worker, she has struggled with drug addiction
and homelessness, and has been the victim of
anti-Black racism and transphobia, losing out on
jobs she felt she deserved and enduring discrim-
ination in the jobs she did get; before becoming
an activist, Spellman’s only consistent work was
in fast food restaurants where, she says, she was
relegated to the kitchen with other trans work-
ers. She has transitioned mostly by virtue of her
own hard work and connection to a supportive
trans community in DC, where she has lived on
and off since early adulthood.
In spite of the risks and alienation that came
with it, sex work, at least, was reliable. And for
Spellman there has been no more consistent—
no more frustrating or more dangerous—source
of violence than that from law enforcement.
Since she began working, whether on the street
or in a hotel or online, the police have been a
third party in Spellman’s work. She has been
arrested and caught up in a chaotic whirlwind
of stings. She has been sexually assaulted or
coerced into sexual acts by arresting officers.
Once, while in custody, she was raped. “Every
time I look up, here they come, putting criminal
charges on me, interfering with my life, stop-
ping me from making progress,” she told me.
“Every time I took two steps forward, I end up
taking seven back.”
Her treatment by the police, when it didn’t
take the form of actual violence, was a neglect
that recalled her experience in the military.
“That was the first time having that door
slammed in my face,” she says. “And there’s been
a succession of it ever since.”
While Spellman saw sex work as providing a
possibility of building a better future for herself
and her children, she considered the police the
counterforce—arresting, fining, and harassing
her into homelessness. Her life as an activist was
shaped around this violence, until eventually she
determined that she would only feel safe and
free to work if the police could no longer arrest
her or her clients. It was then that she started
campaigning for the full decriminalization—
eliminating criminal penalties for both the
buyers and the sellers of sex­—of sex work in
Washington, DC. For Spellman, who had strug-
gled her whole life to find a way to work safely,
the answer was simple. “When you take away
the criminality of it, the crime surrounding it
ceases to exist,” she said. “You take away all of
the ugly that comes with it.”
Marian Hatcher had a family, advanced degrees,
and a nearly twenty-year career in finance, work-
ing in the accounting department for a dialysis
provider, when she fell into sex work, although
she hates that term. “It’s not sex and it’s not
work,” she told me. “I prefer prostituted person.
That’s what’s being done to them; they are being
prostituted.”
Her nearly two years as a prostituted person
were the bleakest of her life. Hatcher became
addicted to crack cocaine and dependent on
men who profited by coercing her into per-
forming sexual acts with strangers, a tactic that
falls under the legal definition of sex trafficking,
keeping her strung out for long stretches. “I was
going as long as three weeks without sleeping,”
she told me. “I was a captive of the mind.” She
became estranged from her three children and
lost custody of her youngest daughter. For years,
as she put it, Hatcher simply “disappeared.”
Most of the violence Hatcher experienced
during those years was at the hands of johns,
some of whom were so brutal that she thought
they must have hired prostituted people just to
beat them. She was less scared of the police,
though she had also, at times, felt threatened by
them. “The only time I ever had a nine-millime-
ter gun put to my head was by a policeman,” she
said, recalling a run-in with the police during
her time as a prostituted woman.
Her experiences made her deeply skeptical of
the methods most American police used against
both prostituted people and johns. Although
the solicitation charges against her were almost
always dropped, the arrests were dehumanizing,
chaotic, and worst of all, in her mind, sexist and
unproductive. “It was always the women who
were arrested,” she told me. “Men were told
to go home to their wives.” Hatcher came to
see the police’s haplessness as its own form of
abuse. “Prostitution is gender-based violence,
primarily against women and girls,” she told me.
“The exploiter is the exploiter. Sometimes the
exploiter has a badge.”
In 2001, almost two years after leaving her
family, Hatcher was living with a boyfriend
whom she later identified as her trafficker and
sometimes refers to as her pimp, in a basement
on the west side of Chicago. The basement was
bleak and nearly windowless, with a front room
for partying and a back room equipped with a
few dingy mattresses. In addition to other rules,
Hatcher says, she wasn’t allowed to leave.
But one day, confident that her addiction,
and what Hatcher calls her “trauma bond,” kept
her on a short leash, Hatcher’s trafficker sent
her to go buy drugs on her own. Unbeknownst
to Hatcher, the car she drove had a broken tail-
light. The police pulled her over in front of her
apartment building, where Hatcher tried, and
failed, to hide the drugs from view.
Hatcher was arrested for possession and
taken to the Cook County jail, where, because
of previous arrests—for possession, criminal
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  41
 trespass, and solicitation—she was given the
option of participating in a 120-day program for
nonviolent women offenders. She consented. “I
could have gone to the penitentiary for three to
seven years,” she told me.
That program changed Hatcher’s life. By the
end of it, the fog of addiction began to clear,
and she made contact with her family. To her
surprise, even her public defender helped
her piece her life back together, and she was
spared prison time altogether. She connected
with other graduates of the program and started
volunteering at the sheriff’s office, where she
eventually took on a full-time job, joining Lisa
Cunningham, a formerly prostituted woman
Sex workers have a long history of organizing and joining
critical US movements, from labor rights to LGBTQIA rights.
They have had a harder time, however, garnering
popular support for their own movement.
on staff who became “like a sister” to Hatcher.
A few years later, they were joined by Brenda
Myers-Powell, another formerly prostituted
woman who Hatcher credits with teaching her
“how to help women.” Convinced both that they
could not have achieved freedom and sobriety
without police intervention and that the police
around the country needed to adopt more
humane tactics, Hatcher, Cunningham, and
Myers-Powell joined a growing chorus of voices
in Cook County pushing for partial decriminal-
ization of prostitution, or the Nordic Model
(alternately referred to as the End Demand
Model, Equality Model, which is Hatcher’s
preferred term, or Abolitionist Model), under
which the selling of sex, but not the buying of
sex, is decriminalized.
Hatcher believes that people who are prosti-
tuted are only further victimized when they are
arrested and jailed for it. But she also believes
that the police need access to sellers of sex in
order to offer them a way out. The people who
buy sex, meanwhile, deserve to be punished. In
42 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
this scenario, the police play a dual role of sav-
ior and enforcer. In Cook County, she says, they
“set the bar for how police should treat women
around the country.” Describing her arrest today,
Hatcher is resolute with gratitude, calling it a
“rescue” and the police who pulled her over
“angels with handcuffs.”
Until recently, the conversation around polic-
ing sex work in the US has been dominated by
two models: legalization, in which sex work is
a regulated industry as in parts of Nevada; and
prostitution, a crime that can only be mitigated
by criminal punishment. Although seemingly on
opposite ends of the spectrum, both methods give
law enforcement a central role. In one, police are
responsible for monitoring legal brothels for mis-
deeds; in another, cops arrest buyers and sellers
of sex, whether online or on the streets, in an
effort to wipe out the trade altogether.
In the US, legalized sex work is very rare;
most jurisdictions criminalize prostitution,
partly guided by the perception of sex work as a
social scourge. In American cities, the presence
of sex workers is seen as evidence of lawless-
ness and degradation, with their disappearance
serving as proof of a city’s resurgence. In some
cities, even the suggestion of sex work has been
criminalized; as recently as 2012, police in New
York, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco could
use the possession of multiple condoms as evi-
dence to support prostitution charges.
Sex work’s notoriety, however, has yielded
little consensus on smart policy to address it.
And it is the workers themselves, whatever
term is used to describe them, who bear the
weight of harsh laws and social stigma. Glob-
ally, up to three-quarters of sex workers report
experiencing violence on the job, with migrant,
transgender, and people of color at greater
risk. In 2015, nearly 40 percent of sex workers
arrested for prostitution in the US were Black;
of the forty-one sex workers murdered in the
US, more than half were cisgender women or
transgender men and women of color. Because
sex work is illegal, laws written for victims of
domestic abuse or rape often exclude sex work-
ers; New York, for instance, only began con-
sidering the inclusion of sex workers in their
rape-shield laws, which make sexual history
inadmissible, in 2018.
Not only does much existing law leave sex
workers feeling unprotected, many report
feeling endangered by law enforcement. In
a 2003 study, one-third of New York–based
sex workers reported violent encounters with
police, with Black trans women being especially
likely to have experienced harassment or vio-
lence. This has led to a fear of any interaction
whatsoever with police, which in turn means
that sex workers are unlikely to report crimes
perpetrated against them by johns. Such mis-
trust is underpinned by a disregard for crimes
committed against sex workers in general—the
Los Angeles Police Department unofficially used
the acronym “NHI” (“no human involved”) to
describe murders of prostitutes, most of them
women of color, which went largely uninvesti-
gated. “This is a very broken, harmful carceral
status quo,” Yasmin Vafa, Executive Director
of Rights4Girls, a DC-based advocacy group
focused on gender-based violence and exploita-
tion against women and girls, told me. “The
wrong people are being punished, unjustly
criminalized, and unjustly abused at the hands
of police, at the hands of the state, at the hands
of men.”
In the face of this, sex workers and their
advocates felt it was clear that the policy of
criminalization of sex work failed sex work-
ers. Long before reforming or defunding
police became a mainstream issue in the US,
sex workers have tried to reimagine different
methods of policing their industry. And, partly
owing to the increasing general focus on police
violence, they have gained significant ground.
In 2019, a handful of Democratic presidential
candidates expressed a willingness to reimag-
ine policing sex work; even Kamala Harris,
who in her role as California’s attorney gen-
eral had rejected decriminalization, said in an
interview with the website The Root, “We can’t
criminalize consensual behavior, as long as no
one is harmed.” At last, a larger conversation,
on a much broader public platform, was being
had with regard to fundamentally changing law
enforcement’s approach toward sex work.
But along the way, the movement’s two most
progressive factions—one comprised of people
like Spellman pushing for full decriminaliza-
tion, the other of people like Hatcher who
advocate for only decriminalizing the selling of
sex—came to be at odds with one another. Even
while their platforms were frequently conflated
in the media, any common ground became a
battlefield, and the debate about policing sex
work became a bellwether for the debate about
the role of police in America.
Prostitution laws in the US have been histor-
ically harsh, the most archaic, such as arrest-
ing those with multiple condoms, bordering
on cruelly experimental. In December 2018,
a report on female sex workers published by
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health found that all of the 250 sex workers
who participated in the study had interacted
with the police at some point in their lives,
and that 78 percent had been either harassed
or assaulted.
In 2017, DC councilmember David Grosso,
with aide Darby Hickey and others, introduced
the Reducing Criminalization to Improve Com-
munity Health & Safety Amendment Act, a bill
that would decriminalize both the buying and
the selling of sex in the District. Their ideas
were loosely inspired by New Zealand, which
has a similar approach to sex work, though were
shaped according to DC-specific concerns as
well as the District’s own progressive activism.
In addition to removing criminal penalties for
buying and selling sex, the amendment sought
to revise laws around “pimping” and “brothel
keeping” so that, for example, sellers wouldn’t
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  43
be criminalized for living together. Access to
housing and work, particularly acute problems
for the District’s sex workers, underpinned the
bill. “A lot of the crimes that we have in the
city occur just because somebody has been in
poverty and are trying to survive,” Grosso told
me when we met in his Pennsylvania Avenue
office. “On the one hand, we say these folks are
engaging in survival sex work and they should
be cared for. But on the other hand, we’re not
giving them the kind of autonomy and power
they should have.”
Grosso became involved in police-reform
issues in the District soon after joining the
DC Council in 2013, when he and several
other council members helped end a policy of
“prostitution-free zones” —a designation DC
police could apply temporarily to a neighbor-
hood in order to force groups of two or more
people who were “reasonably believed” to be
selling sex to leave, and to arrest anyone who
didn’t comply. Intended to be part of a greater
crackdown on sex work in the city, the policy was
both largely ineffective and overly aggressive.
Rather than offering access to housing assis-
tance or addiction programs, the policy instead
pushed DC sex workers into less visible—and
therefore dangerous—corners of the city. In
2014, nine years after the policy was enacted
under the Omnibus Public Safety Act, the
council repealed it. In testimony before the DC
Judiciary Committee, attorneys with the Dis-
trict’s Office of the Attorney General admitted
the legislation was vulnerable to constitutional
challenge. “We were just taking it off the books
so that police couldn’t use it as an excuse to
harass people,” Grosso said.
Grosso’s 2017 bill to fully decriminalize sex
work in DC never received enough support for
a hearing. After its failure, Grosso began focus-
ing on engagement with community groups like
HIPS and leaders like Spellman, forming a coa-
lition that put sex workers at its core. Spellman
and others began showing up at neighborhood
meetings to give testimony about their experi-
ences. They canvassed neighborhoods where sex
workers were present but kept a distance, hop-
ing to establish a relationship with residents that
44 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
wouldn’t rely on police as an intermediary. Most
important, the group began connecting the
decriminalization of sex work with other activ-
ist groups that were focused on police reform,
among them the Black Youth Project 100 and No
Justice No Pride, a queer- and trans-rights group,
both of which expressed strong support for full
decriminalization.
Sex workers have a long history of organiz-
ing, both globally and in the US—in 1917, hun-
dreds of sex workers marched in San Francisco
to protest brothel closures—and joining critical
US movements, from labor rights to LGBTQIA
rights. They have had a harder time, however,
garnering popular support for their own move-
ment. In DC, with what advocates came to call
“decrim,” sex workers seemed to be on the verge
of subverting that dynamic. Rather than side-
lining their own demands in order to support
other movements, they successfully connected
increasingly popular platforms such as police
reform and trans and LGBTQIA rights to their
own platform. “The sex worker advocates coa-
lition has become so savvy,” Grosso said. “They
know the number one issue for sex workers is
housing. So, they went to budget meetings for
increased accessibility to affordable housing.”
Criminalization of sex work has had an
impact on every aspect of Spellman’s life. After
two experiences in a prostitution sting, the
second of which was particularly traumatic,
Spellman, in her words, had tried to “stay small,”
avoiding areas at times when she thought the
police might be on the lookout for sex workers.
At the same time, in order to survive, she had to
work. She became smarter and more confident.
She started dressing her tall, broad figure in
bright colors and wearing a range of long, silky
wigs, engaging people in conversations about
sex work in an attempt to normalize the work
and rally support for her community.
Eventually she was arrested again. “In DC
they were always doing a damn sting opera-
tion,” she said. “Snaring girls to take them to
jail.” This time, she was in custody for eighteen
hours, long enough to derail parts of her life.
At the time, she was staying in a motel half an
hour outside of DC (since quitting drugs, she
avoided staying with friends in the District
where she might be tempted, but never had
enough steady income to afford her own apart-
ment in DC while paying her and her family’s
bills); when she failed to show up to pay for the
room, the manager tossed out what was in it and
changed the locks. All she had left was what she
kept in her car, but because of a couple of out-
standing tickets, the car was towed. She’d spent
$400 to buy it but needed $1,200 to get it out.
“It’s the downward spiral of poverty,” she told
me. “I lost thousands of dollars of hair, clothes,
shoes, purses, all of my valuables. Paperwork
that I could never get back.” Spellman eventu-
ally ended up in a homeless shelter for women,
most of whom were cisgender, avoiding going
back to the all-male shelter where she had been
sexually assaulted, an incident she did not report
to the police, assuming they wouldn’t help her.
“I’m lying there and I’m too scared to move,” she
remembers. “I didn’t want to cause a problem. I
shouldn’t have to live like that.”
In 2006, a few years after Hatcher started
working at the Cook County Sheriff’s office, the
county elected Tom Dart, a prosecutor, as sher-
iff. In Dart, Hatcher found a willing and open-
minded ally in the quest to reform the county’s
approach to prostitution. “The sheriff is a vision-
ary,” she told me. “He truly believes that people
can change and his policies reflect that.”
Dart has been lionized for progressive ini-
tiatives, including his refusal in 2008 to evict
tenants living in foreclosed homes. He has
a youthful energy and a casual, long-winded
way of talking characterized by an avoidance,
whether it is genuine or an affectation, of
self-aggrandizement. He uses this same tone
when he talks about his department’s adoption
of a version of the Nordic Model, as though it
happened almost by accident. When he first
took the job, he was startled by the pride other
precincts took in their prostitution arrest num-
bers. “Thirteen years ago, when I started this,
I knew that didn’t make any sense,” he said. “It
started with not wanting to be stupid.”
Dart wasn’t aware of the Nordic Model when
he was first elected. His education, partly at the
hands of Hatcher and other formerly prostituted
people who worked in the office, was gradual.
“I’d never even heard about it until about three
or four years in,” he told me when we met in his
office. “They would go out and make the arrest
for prostitution, the woman would come to the
police station, they would fill out the paperwork.
She would be bonded out and right back on the
corner before the officer’s paperwork was done.”
When the Nordic Model was first introduced
in Sweden in 1999, it was a fundamental rethink-
ing of policing. Along with absolving sellers of
criminal penalties, the new policy used one
of its four pillars—“awareness and education
campaigns”—to help transform public opinion
and reduce stigma. In the twenty years since
Sweden pioneered it, seven other countries,
including Norway as well as non-Nordic coun-
tries such as Canada, France, and Israel, have
followed suit, as have a handful of jurisdictions
in the United States.
A 2014 Norwegian government study
claimed, among other successes, that the model
reduced instances of sex trafficking and violence
against sex workers. These claims have been
widely challenged, but they’ve also garnered
support. The European Parliament, in emphatic
backing of the model, cited a reduction of prosti-
tutes working in Sweden compared to neighbor-
ing Denmark, where prostitution was, according
to the study, occurring at ten times the rate.
“The evidence of the effectiveness of the Nordic
Model in reducing prostitution and trafficking
of women and girls and thereby promoting gen-
der equality is growing all the time,” the motion
for a resolution reads. By adopting the policy,
member states would be taking “another step
on the road to full gender equality throughout
the European Union.”
Supporters of the Nordic Model make no
apologies for its long-term goal, which is to erad-
icate prostitution by eliminating demand. One
of the core pieces of data cited by US supporters
is a 2018 study funded by Demand Abolition, an
American anti-trafficking group founded by Har-
vard lecturer and former ambassador Swanee
Hunt, called “Who Buys Sex?” The report, which
surveyed more than eight thousand men online
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  45
46 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
about their sex-buying habits, suggests that if sex
work were fully decriminalized, demand would
significantly increase. This increase is presented
as inherently dangerous.
But the end-demand ambition, however
humanely conceived, has the potential to be
brutal in execution. An Amnesty International
report, published two years after the Norwe-
gian government study, observes a hardening of
stigma against sex workers in Norway, as well as
an increase in violence from buyers and a rush
among the police to criminalize sex workers in
other ways, such as for operating a brothel—
often just a home shared by two or more sex
workers—or helping another sex worker find
a client. “The basis of the Nordic Model is to
make it harder for sex workers to do their work
in the hopes that they will have no other option
but to do something else,” Christa Daring, the
executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach
Project, told me. “It doesn’t look at the actual
realities of people’s lives and what they need to
do to survive.”
Lenient antiprostitution legislation has a
hard time gaining traction in the US. But the
popularity of the Nordic Model coincided
with a growing interest in human trafficking,
a crime which, depending on who you ask, is
either tangentially or inextricably related to
sex work. Although supporters of full decrim,
like Spellman, acknowledge that some sex
workers are in fact trafficking victims, partic-
ularly minors, she sees them as separate issues.
Hatcher, however, disagrees, as do other sup-
porters of the Nordic Model. While the decrim
movement was attaching itself to broader issues
of police misconduct and access to low-income
housing, proponents of the Nordic Model, or
versions of it, were becoming aligned with the
anti-trafficking movement.
In 2000, when the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA) was enacted, US law
defined trafficking as any type of labor carried
out as a result of “force, fraud, or coercion.”
Since then, attention to the issue has grown
exponentially. Groups that focused on traffick-
ing before the TVPA, and which contributed to
its shaping, had greater clarity in their mandate,
while other groups, like the Cook County vice
unit, emphasized the trafficking angle of their
antiprostitution agenda. Countless others,
ranging in size and effectiveness, were formed
around the issue, jockeying for the growing
number of grants and tens of millions of dol-
lars allotted by Congress annually to help fight
trafficking. Among the common tactics of the
anti-trafficking movement is the use of under-
cover police to infiltrate prostitution situations
in pursuit of trafficking victims.
Trafficking also became a popular issue among
lawmakers and politicians, both Republican and
Democrat, who professed a moral imperative to
combat blatant exploitation. The TVPA passed
with bipartisan support and has benefitted from
the same bipartisan support ever since. Donald
Trump made fighting trafficking one of the few
human rights issues of his presidency. In April
2018, Congress passed with near unanimity a
bill called FOSTA/SESTA that holds websites
accountable for users who engage in or promote
sex trafficking. These days, it is not unusual to
see instructions for identifying trafficking vic-
tims posted in hotels and airports across the
country, as though a crime characterized by
its being hidden can, like a fish in a magic-eye
poster, be detected with a properly trained gaze.
But as fighting trafficking became a focus for
lawmakers, law enforcement, and NGOs, it also
grew into a blunt instrument. Trump used it in
his anti-immigration toolbox, insisting incor-
rectly that closing the southern border would
curb trafficking (even while he was denying or
postponing visas designated for trafficking vic-
tims). In the years since FOSTA/SESTA passed,
no conclusive evidence—such as an increase
in trafficking arrests and prosecutions, for
example—has been presented to demonstrate
the law’s effectiveness. That does not mean it
won’t prove itself in the long-term—“We don’t
measure the prevalence by successful prose-
cutions,” Vafa said. “If we did, it would be as
though no one has ever been raped”—but in the
meantime there have been numerous accounts
of sex workers unable to use the internet, being
forced back into street work. Spellman, who had
relied on internet advertising for over ten years,
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  47
went from earning around $4,000 per month
from sex work to making $400. Were it not for
a small raise from HIPS, she felt sure she would
have been back on the street. “[FOSTA] put me
at the point where I’m on the verge of homeless-
ness,” she said.
Critics of human-trafficking campaigns often
say that they perpetuate the myth that victims
are largely white (data, though incomplete,
shows the opposite) and inflate the threat of
sex trafficking while ignoring the equally or
more present issue of forced labor. Efforts to
engage travelers in the magic-eye experiment
have led to egregious incidents of racial profil-
ing, including by Cindy McCain, a senator and
leading anti-trafficking activist, who, upon see-
ing a woman carrying a toddler of a different
ethnicity in an Arizona airport, reported it to
the police. Later, she admitted she was wrong,
writing on Twitter: “I apologize if anything else
I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you
see something, say something.’”
Over the years, in many circles, trafficking has
evolved to become synonymous with sex work.
Supporters of full decriminalization reject the
conflation. (Spellman thinks that, as a sex worker
operating without fear of the police, she would
be in a better position to recognize victims and
connect them to authorities.) Others embrace it,
feeling that only at the intersection of sex work
and trafficking can people fully understand sex
work as the misogynistic, exploitative crime they
know it to be, and not a subject for ridicule or
disdain. “People think of human trafficking vic-
tims with sympathy because they think they are
white,” Hatcher, who is Black, told me. “When
they think about prostitution, they think about
people of color.” Then, they are too inclined to
dismiss the issue. “It is a black and brown prob-
lem,” she said. “A continuation of colonialism
and chattel slavery, and that can’t be forgotten.”
By connecting the two issues, the avenue of
escape widens to include women like her.
Trafficking eliminates the need to talk about
choice, much less the need to make choice a
talking point. This, more than anything, has
made anti-trafficking an effective tool in pro-
moting the Nordic Model. Ask an average
48 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
American their opinion on sex work and the
answer often wobbles on the unstable grounds
of morality and fear. Ask the same American
about human trafficking, and the answer is likely
to be more certain. “They’re in different areas
of government. They’ve allied with conserva-
tive groups,” Suprihmbé, a Chicago-based sex
worker and writer who focuses on sex-worker
rights, told me. “A lot of feminists are part of
the anti-trafficking movement. Anti-trafficking
groups, they’re winning right now.”
One sweltering July night in 2019, the Cook
County vice/human-trafficking unit split into
three cars for a prostitution sting that started
out like a children’s book. “Ducks are trying to
cross Mannheim with chicks,” the lieutenant’s
radio crackled from the cup holder. “Can you
come help?”
“Ducks?” he asked into the radio, seriously
enough that it could have been a code.
It wasn’t. One of the two officers posing as sex
workers had noticed a mother duck and duck-
lings angling to cross eight lanes of heavy traffic
and opted to help. “She’s walking slowly across
the road,” the officer said. “From here it looks
like a video game.”
Thirty minutes earlier, while I waited for
Sergeant Tim Hannigan, whose car I would
be stationed in for the night, the two officers
had been sitting at a round table in the Cook
County office solemnly brushing on eye makeup
and replacing their police uniforms with lacy
tank tops. One chose zebra print leggings while
the other dressed for the heat in cutoffs. The
officer in leggings declined to be interviewed.
Now, ducks safe, she resumed pacing in front of
a convenience store, looking bored.
I’d been warned that it would be a slow night.
“With this heat we’d be lucky if we get any,” Han-
nigan told me. Instead, over eight hours, with
a 7 p.m. break for “lunch” and between affable
chitchat about children and baseball, the unit
apprehended eleven men attempting to buy sex.
One by one, the men were handcuffed and
taken to the station, where in a back office dec-
orated with a Bible and a Batman figurine, they
sat in front of a laptop computer that played
a video on the evils of paying for sex. Heart-
felt interviews with former sex workers were
interspersed with graphic images of syphilitic
penises. The men glanced at the screen furtively,
as though wondering whether paying attention
would exonerate them or prove them guilty.
In Cook County, Dart has instituted a version
of the Nordic Model that places the focus almost
entirely on the buyer of sex. Although a Cook
County vice officer has the authority to arrest
and charge the seller, those arrests have declined
radically since Dart took office. Instead, officers
most often implore the seller to enroll in drug
rehabilitation and job placement programs
offered by the sheriff’s office. Significantly, there
is no record of the interaction, although the sell-
er’s name might appear in a police report.
The buyer is usually given a hefty ticket and
a video lecture on the dangers, physical and
social, of buying sex, and, if he has one, his car
is towed. Most of these operations take place
during the National Johns Suppression Initiative
(formerly the National Day of Johns Arrests), a
biannual program so successful in catching men
trying to buy sex and garnering positive media
coverage that today it takes place, in one form
or another, in over one hundred jurisdictions
throughout the country.
The night I was there, an officer explained
to each buyer in a practiced, gentle tone why
they had been taken to the station and what
was going to happen to them. “Girls out there
are being trafficked by pimps,” he said, sound-
ing more like a high school guidance counselor
than a vice cop. Each of the men signed a pledge
promising never to buy sex again. “We’re not
arresting you,” the officer said. “But you will get
a ticket.” If this came as a relief, it was momen-
tary: The Cook County ordinance fine is a hefty
$1,000—“We fine the hell out of them,” Dart
told me—most of which funds programs for for-
merly prostituted women. An additional $1,600
to retrieve a towed car makes soliciting sex on
Mannheim Road a prohibitively expensive act.
(The night I joined them, the unit was short-
staffed, and the men were spared towing.)
Most of the johns that night were construc-
tion workers or cab drivers, offering around
In American cities, the presence
of sex workers is seen as evidence
of lawlessness and degradation,
with their disappearance serving
as proof of a city’s resurgence.
twenty or twenty-five dollars in exchange for
oral sex. One young man, dressed in khakis
and wire-rimmed glasses, had an MBA and
claimed to be there on a bachelor party–style
dare. Another wore a lanyard identifying him
as an addiction counselor; he’d been waiting
for the bus when he noticed the undercover
female officer. Another fearfully handed over
his immigration papers to the police, who gave
them back, disinterestedly. The unit works with
homeland security on certain cases but rejects
most requests for immigration status. “That’s
not our concern,” Hannigan told me.
Only one man, drunk to oblivion, tried to
argue that he’d done nothing wrong. “It’s better
than a criminal charge,” the officer told him,
his voice elevated for the first time that night.
“You could be going to jail, having your name
printed in the paper.” To discourage repeat buy-
ers, under Dart’s predecessor, Michael Sheahan,
their names could be made public, a practice
Cook County vice officers have since rejected.
“I didn’t like that,” Hannigan told me. “It would
shame the whole family. What if a kid got teased
at school?” If there was a humiliation involved,
it was more private. “No one wants to tell their
wives why they took thousands of dollars from
their account,” the officer said.
Hannigan had been on vice since before
Dart adopted his version of the Nordic Model.
The transition was difficult for a lot of Cook
County police officers, he told me, but those
who remained on the force had become true
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  49
believers. It helped that in recent years their
work had been elevated beyond the realm of
prostitution into something that sounded much
more menacing, and which was much better
funded. “Before, we were just grabbing girls off
the street,” he said. “We didn’t know whether
there was trafficking going on.” Now, he says,
they understand the crime and, because of their
more nuanced tactics, have access to the com-
munity where trafficking might be happening.
Prostitution stings uncover very few traffick-
ing victims compared to the number of people
they target—when I spoke to the sheriff in the
summer of 2019, he said their annual stings
uncover only a few scattered trafficking cases—
yet trafficking remains a core rationale when
undertaking sting operations. Some, like Dart,
consider the rescue of one or two trafficking vic-
tims enough to count as success; for others all
prostituted people are trafficking victims.
“I have so much empathy for the girls,” Han-
nigan said. It was after dusk and he had just
hung up the phone with a prostituted woman
who he said called him every day from rehab.
He’d been trying to get information about her
pimp, who he thought he could build a traffick-
ing case against. But the woman had run away
from rehab once before and seemed poised to
do so again. “They have kids. They have to make
money,” he said, shaking his head. Drugs were
involved in at least half of the cases. When he
saw the girls crying, he said, it made him want to
cry. “Would I let my daughter do this?” he said.
“Oh, my goodness, no.” When it came to sus-
pected traffickers, though, his voice hardened.
“It feels good to lock those jerks up.”
Both Hatcher and Spellman spend a lot of time
alone, working. For hours out of any given day,
Spellman drives through DC responding to neigh-
borhood complaints about sex workers, hoping to
intervene before they call the police. “You gotta
give a little to get a little,” she said. “If giving a
little means you wrap a condom up and toss it in
the garbage so that you don’t have people calling
constantly saying there is condom litter every-
where, well, I think you might want to wrap that
condom up and throw it in the garbage.”
50 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
After the updated bill was reintroduced, a
DC-based coalition comprising HIPS and other
supporters fanned out across the city, attending
neighborhood meetings in order to present their
case alongside developers pitching new mixed-
use apartment buildings and locals complain-
ing about slow trash pick-up. They canvassed
gentrified neighborhoods, focusing on Ward 6,
overseen by Councilmember Charles Allen, who
remained a holdout on the bill. They engaged
with key opponents, such as local anti-trafficking
groups. They rallied for better investigations
into the deaths of sex workers and protested in
front of the courthouse when suspected killers
went free. When Allen eventually lent his sup-
port for a hearing, they celebrated. “It’s really a
testament to the hard work on the ground by the
sex worker advocates coalition,” Grosso told me.
“They really got into his community.”
Spellman split her days between the HIPS
office and various pro-decriminalization
events, spending most nights driving through
the city looking to diffuse tensions. One day,
after talking for an hour in a Whole Foods over
coffee, the exorbitant price of which Spellman
helped justify by adding around seven packets of
sugar, we drove to the nearby courthouse where
she was scheduled to give a short speech about
the trial of a murdered Black trans sex worker.
Another day, we joined Black Youth Project 100
while they canvassed a neighborhood of brightly
painted, expensive townhouses. Another early
evening, I followed Spellman, dressed to the
nines, into a ball memorializing trans people
who had been murdered. A group of men sitting
on a bench shouted insults at her as she walked
by, her long hair swinging in time to her long
stride, and Spellman expertly ignored them. “I
put in the footwork because I don’t want this
to keep happening,” Spellman told me. “What
if one of my kids needs this? What if one of my
grandchildren needs this? I don’t want them to
go through what I’ve gone through.”
Partly owing to health issues, Hatcher often
works from the single-level home she shares
with her father and a rotating cast of her adult
children and their children, in a living room
overflowing with toys and decorated with
Hatcher’s many awards. “It’s fluid,” she says.
“But it’s a big house.” During the national johns
stings, she monitors what she wryly calls her
“new toy”—bots set up by the sheriff’s office to
reply to would-be buyers of sex. Part of her job
includes gathering information from twenty to
thirty of the more than 140 participating pre-
cincts throughout the country, at all hours of
the day. “My already messed-up sleep is even
worse,” she said.
“The reach with online stings is much fur-
ther,” Hatcher told me. Bots, she said, could
take in “twenty, thirty times” more potential
buyers than conventional sting operations. “It’s
exponentially greater reach.” On most days, mes-
sages ping between a few dozen would-be clients
and bots posing as sex workers. After a couple
of exchanges, the artificial intelligence identi-
fies itself. Hatcher is fascinated by the range of
reactions. “We get cussed out,” she told me. “We
get apologies.” Some claim entrapment, while
others act clueless (“Is this a joke?”; “Who gave
you my number?”). Most of the time, once they
understand they are talking to a police bot and
not an actual sex worker, the johns vanish. If
one continues, they risk falling into the category
of “high frequency” offender, and the sheriff’s
office may try to arrest them. During the 2019
Super Bowl, a man was arrested for sending
more than three hundred text messages. “We
gave him a court date,” Hatcher said. “We don’t
normally do that. But I found him again. He was
back a couple of months later.”
In terms of mission and focus, recent years
have been a turning point for the Cook County
Sheriff’s Office. Getting johns, whether in stings
or with bots, turns out to be relatively easy. “I
could get one of my children to put that pro-
gram together,” Dart said. But he found that
catching and fining johns was not on its own
terribly effective, both in the newer terrain of
anti-trafficking and in the fight against prosti-
tution. The remote corners of the internet have
been much harder to police than Mannheim
Road. Bots were one way of adapting, but they
were only part of the strategy. Dart had been a
leader in the crusade against the website Back-
page, a classified-advertising website that was
shut down by the FBI in part for facilitating
prostitution and trafficking; Dart was also a
champion of FOSTA/SESTA, the legislation that
followed Backpage’s demise. Hatcher, mean-
while, became allied with Swanee Hunt, one of
the key ideological and financial forces behind
FOSTA, in 2010. “Swanee fell in love with me
and I fell in love with her,” Hatcher told me. “I
kept opening my mouth and we became buds.”
The first time I met Hatcher it was in Hunt’s
spacious DC apartment. In Hunt, Hatcher
found a well-connected, empathetic ally with
deep pockets. Hunt, meanwhile, had a partner
with the kind of lived experience and advocacy
background crucial to shaping any policy on
sex work or trafficking. “People who are doing
it by choice—and let’s not talk about what
their lives have been like—I think it’s probably
fifteen percent,” she told me. “Are we going to
protect their rights if their selling is the reason
that all these people are being trafficked? The
answer is no. That’s not how you create public
policy.” FOSTA was in large part their victory,
but it was only the beginning. Since the disso-
lution of Backpage, other websites have picked
up the slack, often operating outside the US or
behind a paywall. Targeting the site had been
arduous—“Backpage came after me with every-
thing,” Dart said. Nonetheless, it was a fight
worth having. “I knew once I took them out it was
going to be a different world,” he said. “And it is.”
The move online deepened the gulf between
supporters of the Nordic Model, who gener-
ally saw FOSTA as a victory, and supporters of
decriminalization, who felt it made sex workers
even more vulnerable. Hatcher and Spellman
had not met, but they had strong opinions about
the movements each represented. To Spellman,
Hatcher’s approach imposes a moral preconcep-
tion onto women, forgetting that autonomy is
the foundation of women’s freedom. She likens
it to the debate around abortion. “I am person-
ally not on board with abortion,” she said. “But
I’m pro-choice because it’s up to that individ-
ual to decide for herself what is right.” Hatcher,
meanwhile, sees Spellman and other supporters
of full decriminalization as “resigned to their
own exploitation,” whether they realize it or not.
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  51
“I want to write them a love letter,” she said.
“Forget about what they are trying to promote
with this particular decrim law, or whatever.
They need to meet somebody that says, ‘Let me
help you. We can find another opportunity for
you other than selling sex.’”
In mid-2019, the DC City Council announced
that there was enough support behind the
decriminalization bill to hold a public hearing—
the first on full decriminalization in the country.
Anyone interested in the issue was invited to
speak for three minutes, and by early October
nearly two hundred people, from around the
country, had registered to speak.
At 9:30 on a Thursday morning, a half hour
before the hearing was scheduled to begin, flus-
tered aides began trying to usher an overflow of
people toward an annexed room on another floor,
where the proceedings would be live-streamed
on a television. People kept pushing into the
main room anyway; eventually the aides gave
up. “We’ve moved every chair we can,” David
Grosso said into his microphone. By 10 a.m., the
room was packed, with people sitting shoulder to
shoulder on the floor between rows of seats and
others standing against the windows and walls.
With councilmembers arranged behind
a semicircular desk in the front of the room,
supporters of the decriminalization bill filled
the side to their right, wearing T-shirts with slo-
gans like be nice to sex workers and images
of high heels crushing handcuffs. Opponents
of the bill took up the rest of the room, with
T-shirts and signs reading slavery still exists
and full decrim hurts everyone. “I like the
‘housing not handcuffs’ shirt,” a supporter of the
bill whispered to a friend. “We were thinking
‘help not handcuffs,’ but that plays into the help-
less victim narrative.”
Immediately, tensions were high. “It’s bull-
shit survivors have to come here and tell their
story, that they have to do this again and again,”
one woman said to her neighbor. “But it gets so
heated, they want to come.” On the decrim side,
having spotted a priest in his cassock among the
opposition, one supporter of the bill said—loud
and to no one in particular—“The gall of the
52 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
Catholic Church, when you ran the world’s
largest brothel for hundreds of years. The gall.”
When a representative from an anti-trafficking
movement ventured into the rows of seats
among the bill’s supporters offering buttons,
she was met with glares and quickly moved on.
Spellman arrived in jeans, a housing not
handcuffs shirt, a curly platinum wig, and
black rectangular glasses, more than ready to
give her three-minute speech. Having just come
from a coalition pep talk, she was grinning; not
only was there an outpouring of interest in the
bill, but the hearing would be overseen by Coun-
cilmember Allen, a crucial new supporter of
the measure. “I’m ecstatic,” she told me. “We’re
about to make monumental history.”
Marian Hatcher couldn’t make the hearing
because of illness and a prior commitment.
But she did write a letter strongly denouncing
the bill. “We reject a society that leaves those
exploited with hopelessness,” the letter reads,
explaining that although they support “the
decriminalization of people directly selling
sex in prostitution, Sex Buying/Patronizing,
Pimping/Procurement, and Brothel Owning
MUST remain illegal. That combination of laws
is known as the Equality Model.” Addressed to
the council, and published online, the letter was
cosigned by more than two hundred survivors.
As the hearing opened, Allen laid out some
ground rules: They would be using the term
“prostitute” throughout the hearing because
it was considered legally accurate, though he
explained this in a tone that suggested it wasn’t
his preferred term. The room was expected to
remain quiet during each testimony. After a
confusing retelling of the origin of the word
“hooker” by Councilmember Jack Evans, Grosso
gave a brief explanation of the bill. Testimony
began and lasted until nearly two in the morning.
Trafficking survivors, some testifying anon-
ymously via audio, spoke out against the bill,
while women describing themselves as sex work-
ers adamantly defended Grosso’s ideas. Lawyers
and activists from anti-trafficking organizations
referenced the End Demand study on buyers to
suggest that full decriminalization would lead
to an increase in sex tourism and trafficking in
 Over the years, trafficking has evolved to become synonymous with sex work.
Supporters of full decriminalization reject the conflation. Others embrace it,
convinced that only at the intersection of sex work and trafficking can
people fully understand sex work as the crime they know it to be.
the District, while lawyers and activists from
sex-worker rights organizations argued that
criminalizing buyers and third parties would
only lead to further criminalizing sellers, and
that depriving sellers of their livelihood would
cause them considerable harm.
Those in favor of the bill compared it to leg-
islation on marijuana, and likened the use of
prostitution stings as a way to catch traffickers
to outlawing marriage in order to prevent abuse.
“We would never approach domestic violence by
arresting everyone in relationships and hoping
you catch someone being harmed,” one speaker
said. Those opposed shook their heads at the
notion that, without enforcement in place,
underage sex workers would be recognized as
trafficking victims. Almost everyone seemed to
agree that the sellers should not be arrested and
prosecuted, with the exceptions of the Conser-
vative Family Research Center and the priest,
who opened his testimony by saying, somberly,
“The faith community does not know how we
got here,” before likening prostitution to slavery.
Some testimonies seemed designed to shock.
“Pimps would be handing out brochures on
street corners!” one said. Researchers weighed
in with data-driven arguments. The evidence—
from studies conducted in New Zealand and
Germany to data about vulnerable communi-
ties to comparisons with budgets for home-
less shelters—piled up so steadily that, after a
while, only the actual, lived experiences of the
sex workers or trafficking victims themselves
seemed to have real meaning. Dozens of them,
of all ages and backgrounds, provided stories full
of raw emotion and real fear, as impossible to
generalize as they were to argue with. Eventually,
people started to object to the reliance on the
survivor stories at all. Cyndee Clay, the executive
director of HIPS, decried the whole process for
retraumatizing victims. “I am saddened and frus-
trated that we are pitting the experience of some
people who face violence because of trafficking
against others who have faced violence because
of criminalization,” she said.
Inevitably, the crowd grew weary after hours
in the stuffy air of a packed hearing room,
slouching under florescent lights, and pas-
sion occasionally flipped over to anger. When
Bradley Myles, the executive director of the
anti-trafficking group Polaris Project, criticized
the bill for failing to allot money to survivor
programs, a supporter sitting across the room
from him shouted, “Then give us some of your
money!” “There’s about forty million dollars on
that side of the room,” they whispered, referring
to budgets of anti-trafficking organizations. “It’s
not like they don’t have a platform.”
Acrimony so divided the room that by the
time Hunt, who had testified, approached
Spellman at the door to the hearing room, one
of the decrim supporters, a pink-haired gradu-
ate student in a “Be Nice to Sex Workers” shirt,
told me, “I am amazed by Tamika’s ability to
talk to people who literally, literally, want her
dead.” Others gathered around them, shaking
their heads at a meeting that until that moment
seemed not just unlikely, but unfathomable.
Spellman, who towers over Hunt, turned
her head down to the ambassador, listening
patiently. Hunt speaks softly, but is command-
ing, and although no one could hear what they
were saying, the meeting drew a small crowd.
Hunt’s aides took photos on their cell phones.
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  53
 Afterward, Spellman told me she didn’t know
much about Hunt herself, although she was
aware that Demand Abolition was vehemently
opposed to full decriminalization. After talking
to the ambassador, she told me in an unsurprised
tone, “We actually agree on a lot of things.” It
was the priest, approaching the microphone
with a Bible, who infuriated her. “It feels like
the old way of thinking,” she told me. “It makes
me think about how far we’ve come.”
By the end of 2019, the bill to decriminalize sex
work in Washington, DC, was officially dead:
Too many people had spoken out against it.
And yet the hearing also showed how much the
two sides have in common. “I did not hear a
difference in the very heartbreaking testimony
of both survivors and sex workers,” Vafa, of
Rights4Girls, said. “Everyone was talking about
the importance of decriminalizing the individ-
uals who are engaged in selling sex.”
Supporters of the bill were enraged by the fact
that, while the bill was a local issue, the opposi-
tion included big-budget anti-trafficking organi-
zations that had flown in from across the country,
with the intent to counter the voice of the DC
coalition. “It’s really interesting that all these
national abolitionist organizations spent tens
of thousands of dollars to fly people in to argue
against this bill that was supported really strongly
by locals, and particularly by queer and trans peo-
ple of color,” Christa Daring, executive director
of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, said. “All of
that money could have gone to direct services.”
A few months later, the antagonism that
had kept people in that DC hearing room for
more than twelve hours would be muted by a
new shared reality: With COVID-19 spreading
through the US, public health officials began urg-
ing people to change their behavior to prevent
contracting and spreading the virus. What they
were advising—staying indoors, limiting contact
with strangers, wearing a mask—was difficult for
most Americans to grasp; for sex workers, it was
akin to being fired. It was a test that proponents
of neither model had faced before.
In Cook County, the vice unit suspended its
antiprostitution and anti-trafficking operations
54 V Q R | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
in streets and hotels. Enrollment in programs
like the one that had helped Hatcher was down,
as was revenue from the johns’ tickets. A pro-
gram that sent officers into the jail in the hopes
of connecting with female inmates—“We tell
them, we’re police, but we are here for you,”
Jim Davis, the vice commander, told me in a
telephone interview—was halted, in spite of
the promise Davis saw in it. “We were getting
really positive feedback,” he said. “At one point,
they started clapping when we left.” Davis was
forthright about the challenges the coronavirus
posed for their anti-trafficking and antiprosti-
tution operations, but he declined to answer
any questions about the office’s response to the
racial-justice protests that shared headlines with
the virus.
Hatcher’s health issues kept her at home, and
eventually she went on leave to recover from
knee surgery. The Cook County team, mean-
while, extended their public health message to
include COVID-19, hanging posters and handing
out cards that explained the risks of infection
in the sex-worker community. But without daily
interactions, they had no idea whether their
message was getting through to the women they
wanted to help, or what was happening to those
women. “To find a seller that’s being trafficked,
you’ve got to go out there and you’ve got to be
able to talk with them,” Davis said.
As the months passed, the sheriff’s office
started to ramp up operations again; by the fall
of 2020, streets that had emptied of sex work-
ers were now almost back to normal. When I
talked to Sheriff Dart on the phone last Octo-
ber, they hadn’t tracked down a single trafficking
victim—“If you were to really just objectively
lay out what we do, you’d say there’s a traffick-
ing component and then a larger social work
component,” he said—but shortly after our
call his office sent me a press release about the
October 3 arrest of a Chicago man they found
through a tip from the National Human Traf-
ficking Hotline, which is run by Polaris, advising
them that “multiple young women were being
trafficked.” The man was charged with “pro-
moting prostitution” near a school, which is a
Class III felony. One of the two women he was
charged with promoting accepted the county’s
offer for social services.
When COVID-19 hit, Spellman saw the
women she worked to protect left jobless, look-
ing for a safe place to shelter. Because of her own
health problems, she set up a home office for
HIPS from the basement of a house for at-risk
sex workers that she helped run with a friend
and fellow activist, Emmelia Talarico. “There is
plenty for me to do,” she told me. “Everything
has shifted gears to rapid response.” Women
who lived at the house were given whatever they
needed to avoid getting COVID-19, and walked
through the process of getting health insurance
or treatment when it came to that. Spellman
resisted the notion that sex workers moved
online during COVID. In her experience, sex
workers struggled to transition to online work;
most of the women Spellman advocated for did
not have reliable access to a computer or the
internet. “You can only do so much on a cell
phone,” Spellman said. “Especially if you don’t
have the money to keep the cell phone on.”
Spellman and Talarico knew how many
women had tested positive for COVID—only a
couple, they said—and they knew who was still
working despite the risks. As the virus surged,
they scrambled for ways to secure income so
that sex workers didn’t have to meet with cli-
ents, applying for grants and crowdfunding. “I
don’t think people will give any consideration as
to what could happen to sex workers,” Spellman
told me over the phone. “People who are bound
to these street-based economies will suffer the
most.” A few clients had asked Spellman to
make an exception and, although it was hard
to turn down the income, she was determined
not to get sick.
She missed human contact—“I’m a hugger,”
she said. “I’m the big momma in the house,
and I can’t even express my love like I normally
do”—and she vented online, tweeting at celeb-
rities like Caitlyn Jenner and Beyoncé, who she
felt had abandoned trans people once the pan-
demic hit. Spellman was furious at what she
saw as the hypocrisy of the same deep-pocketed
This article was produced in partnership with the Fuller Project.
anti-trafficking agencies who had blocked the
decrim bill. The Polaris Project in particular elic-
ited deep frustration. “Where is your support
now that people are suffering?” she said. “Y’all
talk about the work you do in the marginalized
communities. Where is your help now that we
really need you?” She worried that the progress
they had made was gone.
When racial-justice protests swept through
the country over the summer, Spellman, still
concerned that her preexisting conditions made
her particularly vulnerable to the virus, stayed
in. But she celebrated the demonstrators, partic-
ularly the trans sex workers of color like herself,
who she knew were among them, marching both
for Black Lives Matter and the full decriminal-
ization of sex work.
Spellman let out a long, wistful sigh when
I asked her what might be different had the
DC Council passed the decriminalization leg-
islation. “We could advocate without fear,” she
said. “Our concerns would be at the forefront,
people would be able to come out to speak on
their behalf.” They could continue to push their
movement forward; when we spoke, it was as
though all momentum had been lost. “What
about the urgency, the fight, the struggle?”
she asked. “We had to stop everything to stop
the bleeding.”
Sellers, she imagined, would have an eas-
ier time applying for unemployment. Clients
could, after some time, establish open and
trusting relationships with sex workers. Both
would be more inclined to participate in con-
tact tracing, or testing. Instead, with the DC
police monitoring the lockdown, sex workers
had another reason to fear being caught outside.
With decriminalization, Spellman imagines
that the hidden movement she has been the
public face of for years would finally emerge
in full. “If everybody that has fed me informa-
tion to convey could speak it would be a very
powerful movement,” she said. “Not everybody
has the strength of character to say, Look, y’all
are going to leave me alone and hear my voice
at the same time.” 
J E N N A K R A J E S K I  55
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