Tangled Web

O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive! –  Sir Walter Scott

As many of you already know, the prohibitionist mouthpiece who calls herself “Stella Marr” has been outed.  Last Tuesday evening I was emailed links to a posting she made which carelessly linked her legal name with “Stella Marr” and several other online personas; I quickly made a screen capture of the page, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be long before it was deleted (and it was, only a few hours later, though I also have a link to a cached copy).  Later that evening I was contacted by Norma Jean Almodovar, who had even more information than I had been given; due to the nature of some of it, we suspect the anonymous leaker (whose identity we do not know) is a real-life acquaintance who was fed up with Stella’s lies and wanted sex worker rights activists to know the truth.

And what a truth it is; it turns out that Amy (her real first name) is the daughter of a wealthy family who attended Barnard from autumn 1981 until spring 1985, then skipped a year and returned for the 1986-1987 school year; since she did not graduate until spring of 1994 I surmise that she was actually done by 1987 but for some unfinished requirement (a senior thesis perhaps?) that she finally completed in ’94.  I further assume that whatever dates she gives (and whatever the truth of the conditions therein), her “ten years in prostitution” ran from  early 1985 to late 1993.  I was not able to confirm her statement that she attended Julliard, and I assume her claims about Columbia extend from the fact that Barnard is an autonomous part of it despite their well-known rivalry.

Amy’s Google profile describes her as “a writer living in Houston, TX with her beloved husband and labrador [sic] retriever.  She is writing a memoir about her experiences as a prostitute in New York City.”  Interestingly, the “pimps and hos” nonsense she touts as “Stella” is in sharp contrast to her other claim that she transitioned out of hooking via being “kept” by a wealthy professor for two years; apparently, her “violent and controlling” pimp whom she supposedly saw murder women in front of her just meekly let her go without even demanding a cut.  But considering the poor job she did of covering her tracks (I even have records of real estate transactions she conducted), and the fact that she can’t make up her mind whether her benefactor taught at Oxford or Cambridge, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that she left such a gaping logic hole in her invented life story.

How much of that story is real?  How much embellished?  How much distorted, wildly exaggerated and “reframed”?  How much made up out of whole cloth?  We simply don’t know and have no way of telling at this time, and I have to wonder if Amy herself even knows any more; given that prostitution is a recurring theme in her writing it seems likely that (as one of my sources stated) she started hooking after her family cut her off.  It may be that she then got in over her head, though she wasn’t nearly as traumatized as she pretends; after all, some of the things we found in other names seem to present whoring in a far less negative light.  She even owns a WordPress blog called “A Prostitute Reviews Movies”, which she seems to use for writing her screeds before posting them publicly to her own blog; this seems like a rather odd title for someone who also brands herself a “survivor” and blathers about “trigger warnings” and other concepts favored by the tissue-paper feelings crowd.  The tipster claimed that her “beloved” husband, a US government bureaucrat, considers her insane and that she started the “Stella Marr” character to get back at him; even if this isn’t true she obviously thrives on attention and craves success as a writer (of  fiction, clearly) at any cost.  However, I have no wish to cause problems for Amy’s husband, who may be as much her victim as the sex workers and activists she constantly defames and libels; though I have no control over what information others have released and may continue to release, I have redacted her last name from the information and pictures presented here so as not to be the agent of harm to a possibly-innocent man.

Norma Jean Almodovar sent “Stella” an open letter, which you can read here; she also posted the following on several Facebook groups:

Many of us sex worker rights activists have been well aware of the vicious lies told about us by an abolitionist calling herself “Stella Marr.”  She has bullied us and lied about us in numerous articles, forums and on her blogs.  There was nothing we could do about it because we did not know her real identity.  She felt free to spread her falsehoods anywhere and everywhere, knowing that there was nothing we could do as long as her cloak of anonymity protected her.

Now we know who she really is.  Someone who knows her well and obviously dislikes her enough to “out” her, has provided us with her true name and other very personal information.  When I sent a message to Stella’s Facebook page, letting her know that we know who she really is, she confirmed that it was her by responding with a very nasty message threatening action against me if I posted her real name.

It seems her whole story is a fraud, that she is not who she claims to be (in addition to her fake name), and that she was never the victim of pimps who trafficked her into prostitution.  Her real story is much more interesting, but I will not share what I learned if she agrees to publicly apologize to all of us who were defamed by her.  A number of you already know who she really is, because the person who outed her originally has shared that info with many other people.

I’d like to propose to our community that we give her the opportunity to make that public apology, and then hopefully she will retire the fictitious character “Stella Marr” whom she created in response to her own personal problems which had nothing to do with a past she never lived.  (Think William Hillar, fraudster extraordinaire whose alleged true life story became the basis for “Taken”.)

Should she not take the opportunity to publicly retract her false statements and apologize to all of us who have been psychologically battered by her lies and bullying, perhaps we can consider filing a joint lawsuit against her  for doing to us what she claims “pimps” and prostitution do to women.

You can read the email I sent to her as well as my refutation of her recent blog article which claims all of us sex worker rights activists are pimps (and therefore have no right to speak at colleges and universities or to fight for the rights of prostitutes) here.

Feel free to post this message anywhere and everywhere that victims of Stella Marr’s lies might read.

Personally, I hope Amy accepts the offer, admits the lies and retires “Stella” (I for one care nothing for her apology, which would be as insincere as everything else she writes); it would accomplish a great deal more good than fully “outing” her ever could, and would demonstrate the lengths to which prohibitionists will go to spread their propaganda.

One Year Ago Today

The conclusion to an interview in which my husband answers questions submitted by readers.