Texas man acquitted in Craigslist escort murder (Salon)

Jury selection begins tomorrow in the trial of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager, and then claimed Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law allowed him to shoot Martin because he felt threatened by him. Sometimes it seems like states — especially those controlled by Republicans — are in some kind of sick contest to see who can pass the dumbest laws. In Florida there’s the “Stand Your Ground” law and the laws that may potentially put a teenage girl in prison for 15 years for a consensual relationship with another student at her high school. In Michigan there’s the insane let-the-governor-bypass-all-local-elected-officials Emergency Manager law I’ve covered previously, which may now result in an unelected appointee of the governor’s selling off the contents of the Detroit Institute of Arts without Detroit residents having a single word in the matter. North Carolina’s attempts to bypass Supreme Court decisions in order to disenfranchise young voters, among other radical right-wing actions on the part of elected Republicans there, are now resulting in weekly protests and arrests in Raleigh. Republicans in more than one state are trying to find a way to put their anti-sodomy laws back on the books, ten years after Lawrence v. Texas ruled them all illegal. Don’t even get me started on the “trap laws” Republicans in several states are trying to pass to make it impossible for any abortion clinic to run in their states.

Now, from the state where they forced textbooks to say Jefferson Davis was a “great leader” and state Republicans don’t even want critical thinking skills to be taught, we have a man shooting and killing a woman, then going free because the young woman in question he hired as an escort off of Craigslist, Lenora Frego, wouldn’t have sex with him. Ezekiel Gilbert shot her in the neck and back when she tried to leave, and a jury has let him walk free. If, as they say, everything is bigger in Texas, I can only hope that Texans’ outrage over this story is big enough to turn this into the national news story it deserves to be.

In trying to sell The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon to agents, I have to keep an eye out for news stories related to prostitution in order to point out when a scandal erupts that may make my novel more relevant to current events. I often joke that as long as Congress is in session, I’m never more than a couple of months away from one of those stories. At the same time, though, I think that our larger society too often turns a blind eye to the very serious difficulties prostitutes face in trying to work in what our laws have turned into a black market. Too often we laugh at the jokes about “pimps and hoes” that abound in our culture, but if you look just the slightest distance into the reality of prostitution in America, then you see a very deep-rooted culture of abuse where the abusers — pimps and johns alike — know they can likely get away with whatever they want because prostitutes have next to no protection against abuse.

Although talk of legalizing prostitution often centres around how prostitution will always happen regardless of how illegal it’s made, one of the biggest reasons I’ve always argued for making prostitution legal is because it would at least give prostitutes the option to work in an environment where they would have much less to worry about in terms of abuse and the other dangers that prostitutes face. There will still be dangers, yes, and there will still be pimps and prostitutes who would choose to work outside the boundaries of a legalized prostitution system, but at least those who choose to become prostitutes would have an ability to avoid some of the dangers that exist in our current system of prostitution in America, such as it is. I appreciate the opinions of those who say that prostitution has to remain illegal because the very institution inherently degrades women — this is one of those areas where I identify more with the Libertarian Party than the Green Party — but given the current risks women have to deal with if they decide to prostitute themselves in America, I find it hard to believe that legalizing and regulating prostitution wouldn’t result in a safer environment for these women than that they currently face.

The case of Lenora Frago just goes to show what happens to the young victims of the anti-sex culture that still pervades America. Even with all the tabs I’ve been keeping on the news for stories about prostitution, this never crossed my radar until after the jury rendered its verdict. Doubtless there are many in America right now who wonder why “another dead hooker” should be a news story at all, let alone those who would argue that Frago deserved to die for the choices she made. It’s heartening that at least some news outlets have picked up on Frago’s story, but more needs to be done to bring this story to people’s attention, if not for the sake of Frago and her family, then for how it shows just how broken our judicial system is. (Given it’s a story about sex, I’m guessing some of the national news shows will at least mention it this Monday.)

There is some kind of argument to be made here about whether or not an “escort,” as Frago was defined in her Craigslist listing, is expected to perform sex, but I’m not interested in making it. Having lived through the Clinton impeachment hearings, I’ve heard enough debates on what is and isn’t sex to last me through the rest of my life. I do know that as I wrote The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, I made a point of never using the word “escort” to describe either the characters or the service they provide, even though I know some use the word “escort” as a synonym for “high-class prostitute.” In part this was because the “madam” of the service, Ms. Best, is a no-nonsense woman who calls things as they are (she first introduces the service to my main character as a “whorehouse”), but I also didn’t feel comfortable using the word “escort” because I knew its definition was contested. For all my sexual proclivities, I’ve never even been inside a strip club, let alone used any kind of service like that, so it’s not something I have personal experience with. (Given that I’ve been celibate for nearly seven years now, I’ve had to rely on my friends to help me get some sex-oriented details of the novel right.)

It is bad enough that so many prostitutes are murdered across this country by their customers with hardly anyone batting an eye, but to have a jury rule that Gilbert was justified in killing Frago — even if we accept the idea that Frago was obliged to let Gilbert have sex with her after advertising herself as an escort — sets a dangerous precedent not just in Texas, but across the nation as well.  There is already so much in our culture that perpetuates the idea that men raping and sexually assaulting women is just “boys being boys” — just look at the testimony of senior military officials (and comments by boneheaded Republican legislators) about the epidemic of sexual assault in the United States military this past week — but to allow a man to kill a woman for not “putting out” reinforces every underlying belief of the culture in this country that perpetuates the idea that men should basically be allowed to have their way with women.

I should hope that, regardless of how people feel about prostitution, there is broad consensus that Lenora Frago did not deserve to die, and that Ezekiel Gilbert should be behind bars right now. If the Texas legal system has failed in its duty to keep a killer behind bars, then the least we can do is work to pass new laws, and strengthen existing ones, so the next man who kills a woman for not letting him have sex with her won’t get away with it.