new Toledo Blade article on teen prostitution

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new Toledo Blade article on teen prostitution

Postby sam » Tue May 16, 2006 9:57 am

Please go to the website to see the pictures of Jessica Klempner because visuals really drive home that she is just another woman, not a glamour model just one more woman like the rest of us. -Sam

LOST YOUTH: TEENAGE SEX TRADE
Bold teenage prostitute wanted out of 'game'; Toledoan is home insisting she's not afraid

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar ... /605150336

By ROBIN ERB and ROBERTA de BOER
BLADE STAFF WRITERS
May 15, 2006

This is part of an ongoing Blade investigation into teens exploited for sex.

Gnawing her fingernails and wearing faded jeans, laceless sneakers, and a bored demeanor, the young woman sitting on the front stoop in one of Toledo's aging neighborhoods looks like any ordinary teenager.

Jessica Klempner is anything but.

Last year, when she was 17, Jessica was arrested working as a prostitute in Florida - and landed in the middle of a multistate federal investigation into the underage sex trade.

The FBI said she was one of dozens of vulnerable women, mostly in their teens and early 20s, who were forced into prostitution by often-violent pimps who traded them nationwide.

Jessica was beaten, the feds said. After the Florida arrests, they said, she was threatened to keep quiet; another hooker arrested with her was beaten "for being a snitch."

The man Jessica named as her pimp - Toledoan Wayne Banks, Jr. - is now serving an unprecedented 40-year sentence for the sex trafficking of children, among other charges. His sentence reverberated in Harrisburg, Pa., where more than a dozen Toledo men and women await trial on sex-trade charges.

In March, 2005, Banks, then 27, was arrested in Florida after Jessica announced she was done with "the game" and wanted to go home. He was named months later as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the Harrisburg indictments.

"All of a sudden, a little white girl got beat up in Florida and all this happens," Toledoan Derek Maes, one of the Pennsylvania defendants, told The Blade in a jailhouse phone interview. "When the girl wanted to go home, he should have let her go home."

Of Banks' 40 year-sentence, Jessica said earlier this month:

"It should have never happened."

To this day, she says Banks is "so sexy."

While the FBI said many of the underage girls caught up in the sex trade don't even understand they are victims, Jessica is defiant: She was not, is not, and won't be a victim, she says.

In March, 2005, in Pensacola, after selling sex for five months, she told Banks she wanted to leave.

When police picked her up later that day, she told them Banks beat her several times during the three or four weeks she spent with him.

That night, Florida authorities took Jessica to the hospital for chest injuries - and they arrested Banks.

'I'm not scared'
Back in Toledo now, she insisted her injuries that night weren't serious.

"I wasn't intimidated," she said. "I'm not scared of anything."

Her mother is equally unfazed.

Kim Klempner, 40, points out she already stared down the U.S. government when she went to pick up Jessica from federal custody.

"They accused me of getting her into prostitution, that I sold her to a pimp," she said with her hands on her hips and blowing air through her lips in a staccato pfffffttt sound of disgust.

"I said to the FBI: 'If I was a prostitute, I'd have money. My house wouldn't be in foreclosure.' "

Both mother and daughter asked to be named in this story, even though The Blade normally doesn't identify victims of sex crimes. Jessica, by some definitions, could be considered one.

Ms. Klempner said the feds told her that Banks' associates might "come after Jessica and hurt her."

Although Ms. Klempner said the feds suggested she and Jessica leave Toledo, both refuse.

"The FBI and all them kept telling me they heard about threats, and I said I don't care," Jessica said. "If they don't make them directly to me, it don't matter."

"So why live afraid of things?" her mother added.

Jessica was 16 and hanging out at a bus stop when a guy she knew only as "Smooth" rolled by in a sleek Chevy Suburban with 24-inch wheels.

"People say, 'Be careful, don't get into other people's car,'●" she shrugged. "I don't worry about it. If it's a nice car, I'm getting in. I don't care."

That was more than a year ago. Soon after, the two of them were on their way to Detroit, where Jessica said she was handed off to the first of a string of pimps later named by authorities in Harrisburg.

When working as a prostitute, Jessica often went by the name of "Spice." Sometimes, however, it was "Snow," because there were times when she was the only white girl in a "stable" with several black women, her mother said.

From November, 2004, to March, 2005, Jessica said, she was traded from pimp to pimp as the cash rolled in - sometimes several hundred dollars for just a few minutes in a truck cab.

Last stop for Banks
"You ain't even have to be in the truck for five minutes … You just got to talk to the right ones. I mean, one just wanted me to watch a movie with him for $200," she said.

It all ended March 20, 2005, in the back seat of an Escambia County, Florida, sheriff's car in Pensacola - the last stop for Banks and his stable.

"They were like a traveling sales company: city to city to city. They'd been to Tampa, Miami, Atlanta," said Escambia County Sheriff's Detective Troy Brown.

The way Banks tells it, Jessica wasn't following the rules that night. According to Jessica, she just wanted to leave. She said he shoved her. He said he cussed at her.

Either way, she stormed out of the motel where they'd been staying.

The deputy who picked up Jessica described her as "upset" and "scared." He said she ducked down in the patrol car's back seat when Banks drove by minutes later in his custom fluorescent orange, 1993 Cadillac Fleetwood.

"She said, 'This guy [is] going to beat me when he sees me talking to ya'll,'" said Deputy Mike Gilmore.

But Detective Brown said that even as Jessica seemed to be an "innocent victim," she was also "trying to recruit [girls into prostitution] within our jail."

With Banks' arrest, Escambia County authorities stumbled unknowingly onto a larger federal investigation into teenage girls forced into prostitution.

Banks continues to deny he forced anyone, let alone Jessica: "I had seven girls when I was locked up. I didn't need her.''

Looking back, Jessica said, "I didn't enjoy working, but I enjoyed the money."

And all that cash? She said she and the other women she worked with - "wife-in-laws," as they'd call each other - willingly turned it over to pimps, including Banks.

Paying bills
With the money they'd earned, he bought the women clothes and jewelry.

Banks once took Jessica and a handful of other hookers to Universal Studios, where they plopped down nearly $1,000 for tickets for the day.

And, Banks said, he even paid bills for Jessica's mother.

"I was sending her money and everything - maybe $1,000 altogether," Banks said. "… She would go through Jessica, and Jessica would ask me."

He said he never talked directly to Ms. Klempner: "I'd just send her the money."

Ms. Klempner offered a different version. Banks, she said, gave her money just once.

"Jessica had wanted to pay my cell phone bill, because she'd been calling me a lot. It was her money, but he wired me $200."

As for Banks' claim that he sent her far more money, she said, "I wish he would have!"

Ultimately, Jessica came home with nothing.

Banks is serving time in a federal penitentiary in Hazelton, W.Va. His alleged co-conspirators in Pennsylvania are scheduled for trial Oct. 2.

And Jessica said she's given up prostitution and is seeking other work. She's applied for a cleaning job at a hotel, she said.

Jessica won't say why she doesn't want to go back to selling sex. She just doesn't want to - it's that simple.

Standing nearby, Ms. Klempner laughed at the question.

"Me? I'd like to be a high-price call girl," she said. "Sex with complete strangers can be fun sometimes. I'm sorry, maybe I'm too honest, but yeah. You know, the money aspect? I mean, why not?"

To Jessica's mother, transactional sex has its advantages.

"You marry a guy and you gotta give him sex and you're not even getting basically nothing out of it," she said.

"These ones I can send home when I'm done with them."
Last edited by sam on Tue May 16, 2006 11:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Your orgasm can no longer dictate my oppression"

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Postby oneangrygirl » Tue May 16, 2006 10:52 am

this is so depressing.
I guess some slavery feels like freedom.
-Wembley Fraggle
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Postby deedle » Tue May 16, 2006 3:29 pm

I agree. It represents just about everything we're fighting, I think.
Remember; resist; do not comply.
- Andrea Dworkin
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