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(Jackie Valley | Nevada Independent) – A woman who says she was sex trafficked through a Nevada brothel plans to file a federal lawsuit Monday that seeks to overturn the state’s legalized prostitution in rural counties.

The lawsuit, which will be filed in federal district court in Reno, argues that legal brothels contradict two federal laws that criminalize human trafficking across state lines for the purpose of commercial sex acts. The state of Nevada, the Legislature and Gov. Steve Sisolak are named as defendants.

Plaintiff Rebekah Charleston, who was born in Texas, alleges in the lawsuit that a man she initially considered her boyfriend trafficked her for “purposes of commercial sexual exploitation,” which included a stint working at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Northern Nevada. Her trafficker eventually brought her to Las Vegas, where profit margins were higher in the city’s illegal sex industry, according to the civil complaint.

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(Amy Alonzo | Mason Valley News) – Former Lyon County Sheriff Al McNeil was the largest campaign contributor to the End Trafficking and Prostitution political action committee before the 2018 election, campaign finance records show.

McNeil made contributions totaling $1,499. Each of McNeil’s two contributions were under $1,000, which avoided mandatory reporting before the election under state campaign finance law. He contributed $500 on April 13 and $999 on Aug. 30.

The Nevada Secretary of State’s office requires PACs and political candidates to periodically report financial donations they receive. For the 2018 election season, reports were due May 22, June 8, Oct. 16 and Nov. 2, 2018, and Jan. 15, 2019.

While individual contributions under $1,000 do not need to be reported, when a series of contributions combined exceed $1,000 they must be disclosed in the final report, said Wayne Thorley, deputy secretary of state for elections. That final report came out in January. No other donors contributed more than $1,000 to the anti-brothel PAC.

That means during the election season, people looking at End Trafficking and Prostitution’s donations were unable to see that McNeil had contributed.

“They aren’t cumulative until they do this annual report,” Thorley said. But, “people are smart, and they know what the threshold is.”

McNeil, who retired from the sheriff’s office at the end of the year after losing the 2018 election to Frank Hunewill, said he doesn’t remember why he wrote a check for $999, one dollar under the amount that would have been reported during that period’s financial statement.

“I look at that number and said, ‘Why did I write $999?’ In all fairness, I look at that number, and I don’t know,” he said.

McNeil said he was never questioned during his campaign about his donations to ETAP, but, “I would have said ‘yes’ if somebody had asked me. … I look at those campaign contributions as exercising my First Amendment rights.”

In April, an anti-brothel and anti-prostitution group, No Little Girl, filed a referendum with Lyon County asking voters to choose between shuttering the brothels or freezing the county’s ability to regulate them.

In response, Lyon County commissioners placed an advisory question on the November ballot asking voters if they supported closing the county’s brothels. In exchange, No Little Girl withdrew its referendum. No Little Girl was a grassroots effort that later united with ETAP.

When asked during the campaign whether he was affiliated with the No Little Girl group or if he had a stance on the referendum or advisory questions, McNeil declined to answer.

Lyon County overwhelmingly voted in support of the brothels.

Sheriff-backed compliance check of brothels ahead of election

In October, the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, in conjunction with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Department of Homeland Security investigators, conducted a work card compliance check on the brothels.

The compliance check followed a four-month internal investigation into the prostitutes’ registration procedures, and McNeil gave a presentation on the investigation to Lyon County Commissioners just weeks before the November election.

The audit said nearly one-third of the brothel workers showed indicators of human trafficking, and in his report to the commissioners, McNeil said there should be “an in-depth, thorough, detective-led investigation to determine if they were being trafficked.”

Complaint filed against McNeil

A complaint was filed with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office regarding McNeil’s campaign contributions by Chuck Muth, a conservative blogger who also served as campaign manager for Lyon County brothel owner Dennis Hof.

Hof ran for state Assembly before he died in October. Muth filed his complaint the first week of February, alleging the PAC didn’t disclose the donations in a timely manner and that the lack of timeliness could have impacted the election.

Muth claims ETAP, which is spearheaded by Reno attorney Jason Guinasso, should have reported those contributions in the third and fourth reports that were filed with the secretary of state’s office.

The Nevada Secretary of State’s office is reviewing Muth’s claims, according to Thorley.

Guinasso, who also served as legal counsel for No Little Girl, declined to comment to the Mason Valley News.

“Because of … Mr. Guinasso’s experience as a lawyer and a candidate for public office in Nevada, I would suggest this omission was both knowing and willful – especially in light of the fact that Mr. Guinasso himself previously reported similar ‘cumulative’ donations for his Assembly race in 2016 that exceeded the disclosure threshold,” Muth wrote in his complaint.

Guinasso ran for state assembly in 2016.

“I would further suggest that the unusual amount of the second donation of $999 — exactly one dollar under the disclosure ‘trigger’ amount – that both the donor and the PAC colluded in an intentional effort to hide the donor’s identity from the public before the election on November 6, 2018 due to the donor’s elected position as sheriff of Lyon County and his duties in regulating and enforcing the county’s brothel ordinances,” Muth said in the complaint.

McNeil disagrees.

“Most people knew where I stood,” he said. “When you put that uniform and badge on, you put those biases aside and have to enforce the law. I really take offense to Chuck Muth, who is acting like a thug.”

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(Steven Nelson | Washington Examiner) – The longtime leader of the Marijuana Policy Project says that after helping legalize pot in 10 states, he’s decided to spearhead a national push to legalize prostitution.

Prostitution is against the law in all 50 states, with the exception of some Nevada counties.

Rob Kampia, a savvy political campaigner who grew the MPP from a low-profile nonprofit organization into a well-funded vehicle for designing state political campaigns, “came out” in an interview with the Washington Examiner as a someone who has paid for sex himself.

“It’s important, like the gay rights movement. … If everyone knows someone who is gay, maybe being gay shouldn’t be a hassle or a crime,” Kampia said. “With this, anyone who has been engaged in paid sex, on the provider or the client side, should speak up and out themselves. I just outed myself to a reporter for the first time here.”

Kampia said he paid for sex rarely, and that “the reason I admitted this to you right now is that it’s extremely hard to find professional men to admit to a reporter that they paid for sex, because usually their family or their girlfriend aren’t going to like to hear it.”

According to Kampia, an unmarried political libertarian who left MPP in 2017, many of the well-heeled donors who backed marijuana legalization also support Decriminalize Sex Work, a new national advocacy group that launched Monday.

Kampia claims there has been more than $1 million in donations, with $700,000 coming from “hardcore libertarians” Scott and Cyan Banister. The group has hired a Republican lobbying firm in New Hampshire and a Democratic firm in Rhode Island, hoping small, nonconservative states will start a national movement.

Scott Banister, a tech pioneer who worked as a Paypal board member, did not respond to a request for comment. Kampia said that Banister authorized him to use his name but generally does not speak with the media.

Decriminalize Sex Work currently has four staffers, including Kampia. The group’s communications director, comedian Kaytlin Bailey, said in an interview that she’s been a sex worker during two periods of her life, and she applauded Kampia for outing himself as a client of prostitutes.

“It’s so important to show people that these are not monsters. These are not crazy, creepy people who you would never want to be associated with,” she said. “Perfectly normal men purchase sex. … I can speak with authority.”

Initial reaction to Kampia’s group has been mixed. Some fellow decriminalization advocates note his controversial past leading MPP, where he once joked about giving a coworker a “breast massage,” according to a 2010 Washington City Paper expose.

“This is really a vanity project, not a functional rights organization,” activist Stacey Swimme, who worked with Kampia on marijuana policy and connected him with sex work advocates, told the Daily Beast.

Bailey said that the group’s four employees are all co-directors, however, and that the focus should not be on Kampia.

“Our goal is not to teach our allies not to be dumb,” Kampia said. “It is working with well-meaning legislators and activists on specific bills in specific states and winning. With marijuana, we have the playbook.”

When successfully pushing for state legalization of marijuana, MPP branded the effort in simple terms as a bid to “regulate marijuana like alcohol.” For prostitution, he intends to push the message of “making sex legal.”

“‘Making sex legal’ is a punchline and it’s actually more powerful than regulating marijuana like alcohol. It’s more powerful because about half of American adults have smoked pot, but almost 100 percent have had sex,” he said.

Marijuana legalization’s early successes came at the ballot box through initiatives, circumventing more cautious lawmakers. Kampia said the earliest he could imagine a sex work initiative is in 2022 or 2024, perhaps in a relatively sparsely populated state such as Alaska, Maine, or Oregon. Although state campaigns are the focus, the new group launched after the 2018 passage of FOSTA-SESTA, a federal law that forced sex ads offline.

But Kampia, who favors both legal brothels and the legalization of independent-contractor sex work, faces strident opposition to his claim that legalization would improve sex worker well-being.

“I’m so sad I can hardly stand it right now,” said Lori Paul, spokeswoman for Breaking Free, a group that opposes prostitution, citing exploitation and violence against sex workers. “They don’t see the faces that come in here broken.”

“No woman really wants to do this,” Paul said. “This is something where she is marginalized and someone else is trying to screw her for their own pleasure, physically or financially.”

This story was originally published by the Washington Examiner on February 4, 2019

(Jessica Garcia | Nevada Appeal) – Moonlite Bunny Ranch worker Alice Little says her profession as a licensed sex worker provides her with a certain freedom that should be respected, not threatened.

She also feels more empowered in her current role with recent opportunities to speak out at town halls on behalf of Lyon County’s brothels and the formation of the Nevada Brothel Association.

When Lyon County’s vote on its advisory question to remove the brothels showed residents largely were opposed to it, Little said she and her cohorts were relieved.

“We ended up winning with a tremendous landslide — over 80 percent in favor, showing a very clear and very vocal support for the Nevada brothels,” Little said. “It was, in fact, the most decisive victory in the entire county, which I thought was very impressive.”

Little welcomes being an outspoken advocate for the sex industry and the legal brothels in Lyon County. She long has defended the purpose of the workers at former owner Dennis Hof’s Bunny Ranch, Love Ranch, Kit Kat Guest Ranch and Sagebrush Ranch and makes it clear their services are about intimacy and believes strongly in what they do.

Little writes advice articles for SheKnows Media and has made multiple media appearances, including serving as a guest on the Tim Ferriss Show and interviewed with CNN, ABC’s “Nightline,” Refinery29, Quartz, Shane and Friends and recorded other podcasts. She’s a founder of the “Hookers for Healthcare” movement. She also hosts her own vidcast, “Coffee with Alice,” in which she responds to questions about sex work. In her free time, she also has a passion for history and enjoys visiting Virginia City and exploring other Nevada landscapes.

But in recent months, she’s focused a lot of her efforts on combating “Hollywood stereotypes” with the opportunities the advisory question presented leading up to the recent election in Lyon. She said the ballot initiative and the town halls opened doors to help the public better understand what her livelihood means to her and those of her fellow sex workers.

“Essentially, that petition, that ballot initiative was holding our futures at stake and holding them hostage,” she said. “There was no ability to plan for anything or for moving forward when this was threatening the legality of the very career that many of us had dedicated multiple years to.”

Little said she’s confident now with the recently revived Nevada Brothel Association, a collaboration of the Silver State’s legal brothels, and Madame Suzette Cole’s new ownership of Hof’s properties, positive change is coming for the workers and the industry.

“Dennis did Dennis, and we’re not trying to be Dennis,” Little said. “Something new is going to happen. The women who work at the brothels are going to make something new … and we don’t need Dennis to represent us anymore. I think society is caught up enough.”

Little said the public should educate itself more on what the industry is rather than continuing on age-old assumptions. She said her participation in the new Nevada Brothel Association is meant to support that.

Little said she would like to see many of the stigmas lifted and wants it known what she does is important to help her clients.

“What I do is beautiful,” she said. “I’ve had clients tell me, ‘I was suicidal and I didn’t think I could be loved from a wheelchair’ or ‘I do deserve love.’ … And it’s not about sex. It’s about intimacy and compassion.”

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