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I’m A Sex Worker Who Was Raped, Here’s Why I Didn’t Fight Back

The Establishment
The Establishment
Published in
15 min readMay 4, 2016

By Anonymous

Warning: graphic sexual assault content

II picked up on something in his text messages and emails — they were demanding, bossy, and paternalistic. This was a client who had been attempting to contact me since October, but I decided to ignore him. The client kept contacting me. He was persistent. I’m a sex worker, and as such, I confront decisions regarding safety and sanity and money on a fairly frequent basis. The client’s vibe was just too weird, even for me, a veteran in the field of absurdity, social outcasts, and patriarchs desperately reaching for the touch of a young girl. Unsure how to placate his aggressive energy, I finally told him that I had left the business.

But he found my advertisements online. “Everywhere,” he wrote to me in a text message three months later. “It’s clear that you’ve returned to the industry.” In the lull of the Christmas season, clients were feeling broke and weighing familial obligations — with the holiday season’s moralism, I was left with an empty schedule and a hungry wallet. I agreed to meet with him.

The man was very old. How old, I couldn’t tell. He had crow’s feet in his eyes and a potbelly that threatened to pop the buttons of the Ralph Lauren polo that lurched over his waistline. Fine white tufts receded…

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The Establishment
The Establishment

Published in The Establishment

The archives of culture + politics site, The Establishment. Media funded and founded by women — Nikki Gloudeman, Kelley Calkins and Katie Tandy with Ijeoma Oluo, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jessica Sutherland. The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice.

The Establishment
The Establishment

Written by The Establishment

The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice. Media funded & run by women; new content daily.