Today’s Must ReadSen. David Vitter (R-LA), your prayers have been answered! The D.C. Madam’s attorney tells the AP that he will not be calling her most famous former client as a witness.
Of course, Vitter’s attorney made it as clear as he could that Vitter would not be a helpful witness for the former madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Palfrey’s defense is that she was running a legitimate “fantasy sex” operation from her laundry room in California. Vitter’s attorney said his client would plead the Fifth if called; not a helpful spectacle for the madam’s case.
If Vitter and his escort didn’t restrain themselves to fantasy, they weren’t alone. The prosecution has called more than a dozen of Palfrey’s former escorts to testify, and it hasn’t been pretty. From The Washington Post:
The jurors have watched a procession of scared, mortified ex-prostitutes (13 so far) reluctantly take the witness stand, forced to reveal their secret former lives in intermittently graphic detail — a past each clearly hoped was buried forever. Most testified that they grew weary of the business in less than a year and quit.
At $250 for 60 minutes or so, these weren’t high-priced call girls, it turns out. They didn’t measure up in appearance to the elites in the business. As the women tell it, Palfrey’s niche was a middle-of-the-road, largely suburban clientele — a long way up from the streetwalker trade, but well south of Emperors Club VIP, the four-figure-per-hour call girl outfit that last month proved the undoing of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer….
[T]he trial has been just a long, sad parade of former prostitutes, some in wigs provided by the government, a feeble disguise, a few dabbing tears on the witness stand.
The Post offers some snippets of testimony to convey the tone of things:
Prosecutor: “Of those 80 appointments, approximately how many times did you have sex?”
Ex-call girl: “Seventy-nine. . . . All except the gentleman who was a quadriplegic.”
and:
Defense attorney: “Ma’am, you ultimately decided that this wasn’t for you, right? . . . I believe you were tired of lying to your boyfriend, correct?”
Ex-call girl: “Yes.”
Defense attorney: “And you’re not particularly happy to be here, are you, ma’am?”
Ex-call girl: “Who would be?”
Amen to that, eh, Sen. Vitter?
