Law-enforcement officials have been slamming Craigslist's prostitute ads for years. CEO Jim Buckmaster's response has been benign: We don't profit from the ads, we're very nice and friendly with the cops, etc. No more. Push Buckmaster too hard, and he will cut you, as South Carolina just learned.
Here's the backwards result of the legal crusade against Craigslist: The site never used to make money from its "erotic services" ads. But the service tells Valleywag that it's now planning to profit from porn.
Under pressure from state officials after a Boston medical student reportedly killed a masseuse he met on Craigslist, the classifieds site is cancelling its racy "Erotic Services" section with a new one reviewed by employees.
Troubled by reports that accused murderer Philip Markoff found his alleged prey through Craigslist, a do-gooder has called for a boycott of the classifieds site. 61 out of a hoped-for 500,000 have signed up.
Click on the "Everyone" tab on Twitter enough and you'll start seeing... well, the same sort of thing you'd see on Craigslist and other online venues: hookers. Twitter is all grown up! A sampling:
For vice squads, Craigslist personals, home to many a paid hookup, make prostitution busts as easy as buying a couch. So why is an Illinois lawman suing the website?
Before she married an Ask.com cofounder, Cristina Warthen (née Schultz) advertised escort services online as "Brazil" and boasted of making enough to pay for her Stanford law degree. She has pleaded guilty to tax evasion.
Kristin Davis, whose Wicked Models escort agency counted former governor Eliot Spitzer as a client, thinks Britney Spears could earn $1,000 an hour in the world's oldest profession.
"If you've ever tried to download a dildo, it probably didn't take you long to realize the futility of the task." — AVN blogger Tom Johansmeyer, on the resilience of sex toys and strip clubs to piracy.
Everyone's favorite blowjobs-for-hire site has pledged to appease 40 state attorneys general by "curbing prostitution ads." You can read Melissa Gira Grant's in-progress response, but the kicker is CEO Jim Buckmaster's promise to start charging $10 a pop or so for Erotic Services ads. It's not pimping, it's protection…
Click to viewNow that they've fired Melissa Gira Grant, I've got my first Sex Trade assignment! Owen told me to post about Slate's new clip on the escort business in Second Life. Easy: "This is Samantha Henning with Slate V. Now, some vices are socially acceptable. But prostitution, that's not one I was gonna try out…
Playboy capitalist Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic will take your $200,000 to book a brief trip to space. But when offered $1 million cash upfront to let an unnamed pornographer film some zero-gravity, superatmospheric nookie with the futurist-fetish SpaceShipTwo cabin as a backdrop, the space-tourism startup…
Geeks always think they will trick the system by being smart. They fail. It's no different when intensely brainy women take up escorting over the Internet, like Stanford Law graduate Cristina Warthen, in court this month facing federal tax evasion charges. As sophisticated as the sex trade is, there's still no magic…
Yes, Stanford Law grad and former escort Christina Warthen is back in the news, and this time it's criminal — though don't worry, supporters of San Francisco's Proposition K (which would decriminalize prostitution in the City), it's just a tax rap. My question is why a law student wouldn't know to pay her income…
Cristina Warthen, née Schultz, aka Brazil, has been charged with the crime of federal tax evasion stemming from $25,424 in unpaid taxes in income earned as an escort in 2003. A previous civil case stemming from a seizure of $61,000 in cash from her Oakland apartment in 2004 after authorities found her bragging about…
The impending Depression Lite will be a boon to high-end sex workers, researcher Sudhir Venkatesh assures Slate readers. Venkatesh has made a name for himself in the post-Freakonomics, après-Spitzer era of hooker metrics, and the high end of the industry is his niche. Venkatesh actually does get that the sex trade is…
San Francisco's Kink.com operates just like any other startup — young folks everywhere, DJ booth in the break room, plucky office vibe — except there's way more ass-fucking. That's the story from inside The Armory, the imposing 200,000-sq. ft. "castle" at Mission and 14th Streets. The Armory's dungeonlike interior is…
Larry Ellison didn't provide escorts for attendees at this week's Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Well, certainly not for all of them. But with 45,000 geeks — the kind of geeks who can afford Oracle's software — in town, it's bonus week for local working girls. "Jet-setting adventuress" Kimberlee…
A Sacramento-based "high-tech pimp" who advertised sex with underage women for pay on Craigslist is now in custody. Federal investigators were able to bust 22-year old Stephen McKesson after one of the young women's friends saw her photo in Craigslist's Erotic Services section for panderers. Nobody will see the …
The fiercest supporters of a ballot measure to keep the cops off San Francisco prostitutes' backs are Internet-based escorts. In a Los Angeles Times interview, online sex worker Patricia West is described like any other Web-savvy entrepreneur, with an obvious law-challenging twist.
