LAS VEGAS — Las Vegas Sun, the city’s leading daily newspaper, published an article yesterday interviewing sex workers and advocates about how FOSTA — the supposedly anti-trafficking bill passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Trump in April 2018 — has endangered them and put them at the mercy of “sex traffickers and pimps.”
Headlined “Some Nevada sex workers say anti-sex trafficking legislation has negative impact,” the article surveys how this legislation has affected Nevada sex workers. The state is famously one of the few U.S. states to have implemented versions of the legalization model for full-service sex work.
As XBIZ reported recently, the Nye County Commission, which has jurisdiction over the legal brothels nearest to Las Vegas, has drafted proposed changes to the county code, which include officially discarding the stigmatizing term “prostitutes” in ordinances in favor of “courtesans” and reclassifying “houses of prostitution” as “brothels.”
Yesterday’s Las Vegas Sun article, written by Kelcie Grega, interviewed Mike Stabile, from industry trade group Free Speech Coalition (FSC), performer/producer Lance Hart, sex educator and director of the Erotic Heritage Museum Victoria Hartmann, attorney Nicholas Wooldridge and courtesan Alice Little.
“Our sex free speech was attacked, for sex workers especially,” Hartmann said. “There’s nowhere to congregate online to talk about sex work safety and dangerous clients.”
According to the Erotic Heritage Museum director, “the law has been a boon for sex traffickers and pimps. It starts a cycle of abuse in the state, and the downward spiral continues. Then they have an arrest record, and there’s more abuse on the streets.”
Stabile told the Las Vegas Sun that FOSTA is also overbroad and “doesn’t differentiate between forced prostitution and consensual sex work.” The newspaper clarified for their readers that “the sex industry isn’t limited to prostitution, and includes phone sex operations, exotic dancing, webcam modeling and pornographic filmmaking.”
Moonlite Bunny Ranch’s Alice Little focused on the social media self censorship and discrimination against sex workers encouraged by the controversial legislation. “Myself and my coworkers are constantly getting our accounts deleted on Twitter as well as Instagram,” she said. “There’s always this challenge in accessing the online space in really any capacity now.”
For the Las Vegas Sun article “Some Nevada sex workers say anti-sex trafficking legislation has negative impact,” click here.
For more of XBIZ’s coverage on FOSTA/SESTA, click here.