The “censored” box that Craigslist put over the “Adult Services” section of its website may have been a last hurrah before capitulating to demands from attorneys general that the section be eliminated. Today, the censored box disappeared from the site.
The “adult services” section is gone, but two new services sections appeared: “cycle” and “marine.” Their offerings are not as exciting as the now-disappeared lusty section. There are multiple ads for jet ski repair in the new marine section in New York, and a “massage special” in the cycle section. It looks like would-be prostitutes are going to have to work on their bike and boat repair skills.
The law — i.e., Section 230 — was on Craigslist’s side. Why did it capitulate?
In October, we told you that a Philadelphia Phillies superfan, Susan Finkelstein, allegedly attempted to trade sex for World Series tickets. Her preliminary hearing was yesterday, and … well, I’ll let the Philadelphia Inquirer explain it to you:
“I admit it. I’m a prostitute. I love sex. I’m a whore,” the Bensalem police officer testified that Finkelstein had told him as he posed as “Bob” at Manny Brown’s in Bensalem.
She talked about “how much she loved anal sex,” he said, alleging later that she pulled up her denim skirt to expose her genital area and asked, “You wanna touch it?”
Hey now. That might be even too much drama for TNT. Who does she think she is, Eddy Curry?
Finkelstein denies all of it. Her side after the jump.
Frankly, this is the kind of scheme that Detective Jimmy McNulty would have come up with. The Legal Intelligencer reports:
In a case of first impression, the Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled last week that state troopers committed “outrageous government conduct” when investigating alleged prostitution at a massage parlor in the Lehigh Valley by giving money to an undercover informant to have sex four times with two different women at the parlor.
You read that correctly. Pennsylvania state troopers pimped out an undercover informant to have sex with prostitutes:
[T]he police investigation started when a patron of the massage parlor complained to state police that he had been offered “‘manual sexual stimulation’” after being given a massage. The patron did not accept the offer because he could not afford it, the opinion said.
The patron then agreed to become an informant for the police, the opinion said. He wore a wire and was provided money with which he purchased sexual acts with two different women at the massage parlor on four occasions, the opinion said.
Does the work of the undercover informant count as a “shovel ready” stimulus job, or are the two prostitutes counted as jobs the Obama administration has created or saved?
You have to love the informant. Who hits up their local police officer for hooker cash? Real sense of moral integrity by that guy.
Not surprisingly, the court was outraged by the actions of the police officers. Details after the jump.
What would you do to score World Series tickets? If you aren’t willing to do what this Philadelphia Phillies fan had in mind, then you aren’t really trying. Earlier this week, the New York Post reported:
A rabid Philadelphia fan — apparently believing the “P” on the team’s cap stands for “prostitution” — was busted yesterday for offering sex in exchange for World Series tickets, police said.
Susan Finkelstein, 43, was nabbed after allegedly soliciting an undercover Bensalem, Pa., cop who answered her innuendo-laced craigslist ad seeking the coveted ducats.
CBS has a full photo spread of Susan Finkelstein, in case you have two spare tickets for Saturday.
That’s right, she needs two. One for herself, and one for her husband. UPDATE: Actually, it seems that she no longer needs tickets for the next game. (Gavel bang: commenter.)
Allegations after the jump.
Ed. note: We gave this a shout-out last week in non-sequiturs (second item), but it’s egregious enough to merit more discussion.
Biglaw attorneys frequently complain about how hard it is to date given the amount of hours they devote to work. Attorneys at a small immigration firm in Chicago may have encountered a similar dilemma.
Perhaps inspired by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s cinematic portrayal of a sex-enjoying legal secretary, Samir Zia Chowhan of Chowhan Law allegedly advertised on Craigslist, in the “Adult Gigs” section, for a secretary with benefits. From Legal Profession Blog:
Loop law firm looking to hire am [sic] energetic woman for their open secretary/legal assistant position. Duties will include general secretarial work, some paralegal work and additional duties for two lawyers in the firm. No experience required, training will be provided. Generous annual salary and benefits will be provided, including medical, dental, life, disability, 401(k) etc. If interested, please send current resume and a few pictures along with a description of your physical features, including measurements. We look forward to meeting you.
Many of you will recall that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan waged a war against Craigslist’s “Erotic Services” section earlier this year, claiming that there was rampant prostitution there. By her doing, the section was taken down and replaced by this “Adult Gigs” section, which is supposedly more closely monitored for illegal activity. But in our surfing of the section, we saw quite a few ads like Chowhan’s, including ones like this: “I’m seeking a young lady who would like to have some fun with me, possibly on a regular basis, in exchange for some help with bills or whatever.”
At least Chowhan was a little more discreet in his May 2009 ad. But when one woman responded, he made it clear why he had listed the job in the Adult Gigs section.
I haven’t had time to read the article yet, but the headline is ‘Blind lawyer says hooker took him for 8Gs.”
Yes, that sounds like it would be of interest to Above The Law. From the Philadelphia Daily News:
John F. Peoples, 60, was steamed after he learned that the woman who he says he hired for sex allegedly overbilled his Discover card by $8,600.
So he sued her for damages and the credit-card company for alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming that it had not sufficiently protected its blind customers.
Ginger Dayle, the alleged prostitute, denies being a lady of the night, instead insisting that she was actually giving Peoples Pilates lessons. Peoples says though that he is “barely able to walk, let alone do Pilates” and that sex is “one of the few exercises I get to do.” Whether for Pilates or sexual play time, Dayle bills at Biglaw rates: Peoples says he agreed to pay her $275-$375 per hour, but that she started charging him $550-$800 per hour. He signed the receipts, without realizing she had upped her price.
He reported the fraud to Discover but it chose to look the other way.
For those of you considering prostitution to pay off your law school debts (you know who you are), consider the cautionary tale of Cristina Warthen. As we have previously reported, Cristina graduated from Stanford Law School in 2001. But instead of going into Biglaw, Cristina adopted the porn name “Brazil” and turned herself into a high-priced escort.
Granted, if she graduated today, Cristina might have been able to get some public interest deferral money for her “service.” But this was a long time ago.
And for a while Cristina was a smashing success. She even landed a rich husband, AskJeeves founder David Warthen.
But the Warthens were hit hard by the recession, and the couple split. Meanwhile, the government came looking for $313,000 in back taxes from Cristina’s sultry side business.
The ABA Journal reports that there is a resolution in Cristina’s case. What sentence did she get?
Deidre Dare is one of our favorite laid-off lawyers. She was working in Russia for Allen & Overy, and decided to pen a salacious online novel about her expat adventures. The literary critics at A&O were not pleased with the novel, which featured lots of drinking, sex, drugs, donkeys, and dwarves.
After she lost her job at Allen & Overy, she sued the firm.
Dare’s still in Moscow, where she pens a column for the Moscow News called sExpat. Recently, she wrote that money is tight and that she’s considering various options to increase her cash flow. Among some of her proposals are robbing banks, becoming a jewel thief, blackmailing someone, or prostituting herself. From the Moscow News:
Now, when I decided to go into the law, I wanted to take an expensive preparatory course for the law school admissions test. At the time, I was suffering severe “cash flow problems” and I asked my father to pay for the course, which he refused to do, considering it a waste of money.
So, in order to raise the cash, I decided to become a “high class” whore.
I’d heard that this was something pretty Ivy League students sometimes did for money.
Sometimes the non-Ivy types do it too. So what are Dare’s rates?
We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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