Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Mary Lou, a teenage prostitute, turns to a married man for protection and starts to like him, maybe a little too much. Part 4 in a series.
Sep 19, 2000 | One night in early July, Mary Lou took a bus and a subway into D.C. to interview a pimp. The closest thing she'd had to a protector was "First Guy," her sole client for almost a year. It was First Guy who introduced her to her second and third clients; he had her call him from any new trick's home or hotel room to make sure she was safe. She'd been pestering him for a year to cosign with her on an apartment.
But First Guy faded away this summer. He told her to get a passport so he could take her to Europe, but he took his fiancie instead. Mary Lou has seen him only once since May, and she now makes the safety phone call to her aunt. So when Mary Lou met a man who told her he could get her more clients in exchange for a percentage of her earnings, she arranged to meet him at a small nightclub in a rough part of Washington.
She waited for the man for more than an hour and then struck up a conversation with three guys standing outside the club. They asked her her profession; she told them, "I escort." They invited her to their house, "just to party," and started watching a movie on TV. One guy led her upstairs into a bedroom and inquired about her price, and Mary Lou told him $200. When he protested, "I can get a girl on the street for 20 bucks," she said, "Well, I don't work the street. I wasn't working the street when you met me and this isn't how I do business, and I charge this much for an hour."
He went downstairs and as she began to follow him, a second guy came up. He also bartered with her, then suddenly began cursing and yelling, "That's too much, and you're not all that anyway." Then he pushed her onto the bed, tore off her jeans and raped her.
She ran out into the street, crying, and flagged down a car full of strangers, who drove her straight home. She never went to a hospital, even though the next day, she said, "I couldn't even walk; it hurt to use the bathroom; I felt like my insides had been ripped out." She stayed in bed for three days.
She didn't call the police either, "because I thought it was my fault ... I should have known better than to go with those guys. And I should have fought harder, but he was big, one of those guys who go to the gym every day ... I didn't know what he was capable of, and I'd heard you should just let them do it and get it over with."
