an open letter to former pamela martin & associates escorts

Ladies, if I may be so forward, or so foolish, to address you as such:


You turned your back on Jeane. Maybe she wasn't the nicest human being to work for, but she was a human being, and you either knew or should have known what you were getting yourselves into. The fact that somewhere in the range of fifteen of you turned snitch to save your skins was despicable in light of how well you were paid. Admittedly, I only know so much about how you were treated, yet none of you were willing to come forward to educate me and others on any of the details but one, the woman who courageously attempted to establish contact with Ken Silverstein when he was an editor at Harper's. That woman was a hero and she has my deepest regards and respect.

As for the rest of you, the others that went into hiding, believe it or not, I get it. That being said, it doesn't excuse your kicking the late Ms. Palfrey to the curb. Many of you had moved on after more than a few years, and that's a good out, it's fair. Nonetheless, a number of you, the ones who testified against her, are scoundrels. You own a piece of her death, you are rats, scum, filth, indirect killers. I despise you. 

You see, what a number of you did helped bring PMA to its knees and Jeane to hang at the end of a rope. You are Judases. Not a lot of you were in any specific need to become escorts--there was little desperation involved in it, more a desire for a soft, materialistic life that you felt entitled to. That doesn't make you much different from the rest of the entitled whores that overpopulate this country, but it makes you lower than a streetwalker who's run out of options and finds themselves in the profession. Yes, I don't want to see the government and some of the elements you serviced victimizing you further, there's no point to that, and there's been enough suffering in all of this. But the fact remains that some of you, some of the over one hundred and thirty escorts that worked for PMA over the years, are going to have to live with what you did.

I was fair to you in my book, maybe too fair. But don't expect that I was letting you all off-the-hook completely, because I didn't. For the dozen-plus of you who turned informant, you have no sense of honor. It pleases me that this will cause you a certain degree of pain for the rest of your natural lives. A woman died, as you know, as we all know, and there's no going back from what happened. My hope is that some of you learned something from this and changed, but I'm not an optimist about people and their ways. My assumption is that this will haunt some of you psychologically in some way, yet it won't result in any real shift or transformation in who and what you are, selfish pigs, and that you're going to continue on your merry, indifferent ways just as before. How lovely for you.

Some idiot claiming to be one of you, Andrea Detty, made a limp attempt at undermining the book by suggesting that I hadn't contacted you, therefore, how solid could my attempt to chronicle what happened. That wasn't my job. My job was to tell what I experienced and learned, my part of the puzzle and to try to make as much sense of that as I could. That included obtaining more information. A lot of this was so that I was able to move on from my role in the last year of Jeane's very short life. That kind of an attempt is the act of a scoundrel, a liar, and a psychopath, exactly what I'd expect out of a genuine informant. There's nothing lower than that. Who is this magical person or persons that was able to speak extensively with the former escorts? If they exist outside of a government job, they're sitting on it, and at this point, now that a lot of the smoke has cleared, their behavior is incredibly unethical. I put out requests long ago on this blog for information from you women with no results whatsoever. The onus is on you. It wasn't even a nice try, "Andrea."

You women are the past, and what's past is prologue. I you want to clarify things, great, then do it, otherwise, shut the fuck up, forever, you have no legs to stand on, no credibility.

I could go on endlessly about you, but let me sum it all up: life is short, and the truth will one day come to light. One day we'll know precisely who the worst were, who were the heroes, who at least tried under terrible circumstances to do what was right at the time, and really, who the fucking animals were. Jeane is dead, and I am one of the caretakers of her legacy, one of the few who can bring her voice back from the grave, one of the only people in the world who can at least begin the process of allowing her to point her dead hand at the guilty. There never be a place to run. There is no place to hide from a sun that never sets. Dwell on that for the holidays.

Matt Janovic