Originally posted by zebra at 3/19/23 03:42 AM
Thank you bros for your detailed explanation. As someone who has never lived, or punted, in the US, I guess my questions are just for academic interests. But the reason I, for one, have never consider ...
1) I didn't follow the news when it happened (I was way too young), but here's the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estella_Marie_Thompson
There's really only three things at play here: 1- The mere fact that prostitution is illegal. 2- He was probably driving drunk and tapped the brake too many times, flashing the brake lights and drew the attention of the cops. 3- He's too high profile and this would be too big of a story to keep under wraps; how many cops wouldn't want to go around brag to their friends about "guess who I just arrested?"
It only became news because Hugh Grant is Hugh Grant. Just because prostitution is legal in the UK doesn't mean its socially accepted back in the UK, and the controversy was whether or not he just ended his career. From the contemporary UK articles I read he seemed lucky that it didn't end his career, in part because it was already late stage promotion for the movie he just finished and everything is about to launch so its completely impractical for them to terminate contract with him at that point.
Note that the bail was only $250 and the fine $1,150. These are very small punishments in the grand scheme of things because its a misdemeanor. The WG was also imprisoned for 6 months, the maximum sentence for prostitution, which to be perfectly honest she probably only got the max sentence because she's black and the system is racist. A white male like Hugh didn't even get jailed despite the exact same no contest plea for the exact same crime from the exact same incident.
2) Yes, which is why us from the US had a thread discussing it that might be useful to get stickied. I posted an "RA Ettiquette Discussion" recently to encourage Reading Access controls for reports.
The primary vulnerability to WG's would be the Newbie reports section where all content is exposed. There's a mainlander-dominated Chinese forum US151.com which uses a double blind system; newbies cannot post in other sections until they have sufficient karma just like 141, but existing users also cannot read their posts without spending coins. This way it prevents lurker/leechers/LEO's who are not participating in the forum from reading even the newbie reports.
3) Probably about as safe as posting your Dongguang videos on PornHub while physically living in China; That is, pretty freaking stupid, but not going to affect PornHub in any way. Escortbook.com is a Cyprus-based website that probably never would've gotten into trouble, in fact they've been fine for 5 years since FOSTA-SESTA. The termination of US accounts 3 weeks ago may have been due to business plans to physically operate in the US, the owner's personal relation/travel/residency status with the US, or they hired a conservative lawyer who advised them to avoid the risk of the chance international anti-sex trafficking efforts being formed by the US - which seems exceedingly unlikely considering prostitution is legal in most of the world and the US method of applying the law upon prostitution is likely an overreach on the international scene, though there is some merits domestically mainly with illegal migrants at the border AFAIK.
4) The same reason Escortbook terminated US accounts, except that Craigslist is based in the US. There's no actual federal prosecution; the site management proactively terminated sections on their own because they don't want to take any chances, in response to FOSTA-SESTA which grants federal powers to prosecute websites that may be "facilitating sex trafficking". Could there have been sex traffickers using Craigslist? Sure, possibly much less than 1 in 100,000 chance, but they probably shut the entire section down under the legal advice of their lawyer because as soon as a federal prosecutor asks questions they'd be on the hook to investigate their millions of posts, which you can imagine can quickly become extremely expensive and most investigations being completely wasteful and useless. It would be too much of an administrative headache for them for a low-cost post-based revenue site, which would probably make them operate at a loss for each post.
I can't speak for other areas but if you ask any monger in the Bay Area or any WG it's fairly clear they are not being sex trafficked. For one, many are independent providers, obviously American girls,girls who are clearly not being pimped, or small groups with a retired or older provider becoming a mamasan/PO/manager managing the business side of things. Two, of the massage parlor girls I know they have ID/Driver's license and commute from other cities for work, motivated by the ability to make more money than the average white collar worker, and are sufficiently free that one manager ranted to me about how the girl I asked for was late or skipped out on work just like any normal worker who is not under some threat.
[ Last edited by sexyloser at 19-3-2023 07:57 ] |
