In the News

(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.”

Click here for link to original article

(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.”

Click here to access original article

(Jessica Garcia | Nevada Appeal) – Lyon County is working to ensure its four legal brothels remain properly licensed after the death of former owner Dennis Hof, according to county manager Jeff Page.

“The brothels will remain open and the ordinance will remain in effect,” Page said. “The brothels are allowed and the double X zoning is specifically provided in county code. There won’t be any more brothels but in those locations.”

The facilities in Mound House — the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Love Ranch, Sagebrush Ranch and Kit Kat Guest Ranch — were transferred to Madame Suzette Cole the day before Thanksgiving, according to Hof’s campaign manager and political consultant Chuck Muth. The county has been partnering with Cole to make sure the brothels abide by the county’s code.

Muth said business and personal circumstances have been a challenge for Cole and her team to determine their next steps after Hof.

“It’s still tough; no one saw this coming,” Muth said. “We know Dennis did have a will, but we haven’t seen that yet. We know that he had complete faith in Suzette, but all of a sudden, she had to do everything … and it’s been really, really tough. … I know she’s overwhelmed.”

Specific plans haven’t yet been announced by Cole or her marketing manager, James Jaklich. Attempts to speak with Cole were declined.

Page said the county will address concerns Cole and her team have regarding compliance. A recent audit from former Lyon County Sheriff Al McNeil outlined deficiencies vetting applications for sex workers and denoted the possibility of sex trafficking, with an average cost of $150,000 to make improvements within the sheriff’s department. The LCSO has one part-time clerk processing applications who doesn’t have the requisite skills to manage licensing applications, Page said, and the department doesn’t have the equipment available to verify Passports and out-of-state identification are authentic.

“The agency’s records system is not compatible with Storey County and Elko, which also register prostitutes,” Page said.

But Page added there was nothing to jeopardize the brothels’ licenses in Lyon County.

“Dennis was definitely the mouthpiece, and Suzette seems to have a good business sense about her and wants to get things straightened out,” he said. “Her corporate attorneys have reached out to us, but we’ll have that discussion with them about how they want to do that.”

Whatever issues are at hand, though, Lyon’s voters adamantly said they want to keep the brothels to provide revenue for the county with Advisory Question One. The final results in November showed 16,643 voters against the measure with 4,031 for it, or approximately 80 percent versus 20 percent voting against the initiative to rescind Title 3, chapter 5 of Lyon’s brothel ordinance to end the brothels and legalized prostitution.

The vote encouraged the sex workers themselves, who strongly depended on the voters’ rejection of the question to keep the brothels open and their livelihoods intact.

Sex worker Alice Little of the Bunny Ranch, who has spent the past couple of months assisting in efforts to eradicate misconceptions about the sensual services industry and the brothels with Lyon’s advisory question, said Hof provided a vital voice. Now, she’s looking forward to the possibility a new era being born under Cole’s oversight.

“Now, Madame Suzette owns and manages all those various properties, which means that the sex industry in Nevada is now female-owned, female-led and female-empowering,” Little said. “The majority of our employees are female. The majority of our employees are female. … If anything, I view it as a tremendous positive moving forward and I think we’re going to see a resurgence of the brothels in Nevada unlike anything we’ve seen in the past.”

Little said the employees experienced much relief at Question One’s failure.

“That petition, that ballot initiative was holding our futures at stake and holding them hostage,” she said. “…It’s a scary thing to think that in a second somebody has the power to vote away your livelihood, and in any other industry, that would absolutely never stand within this country. But because sex is so stigmatized, we’ve put brothels in their own separate category.”

Little and some of her coworkers are now part of the recently revived Nevada Brothel Association, which announced its comeback on Dec. 28. Its new website, https://nevadabrothelassociation.com, provides an overview and a roundup of perspectives from across the state on issues pertaining to the brothels as well as anti-prostitution views to better inform the public on what’s about to come.

Page said Lyon, too, will keep an eye on what will come from the Legislature.

“I think the interesting thing is, for all the hoopla, 80 percent of the voting population voiced the fact that they wanted the brothels left alone,” Page said. “Lyon County and the sheriff’s office and our public officials are ensuring our places are kept clean and the rules are being followed. I have no doubt in my mind this issue is not dead. It’s going to continue for some time. … People will be watching this next session.”

Click here to access original article

(Jessica Garcia | Nevada Appeal) – Assemblies of God licensed minister Brenda Sandquist had hoped for a different outcome from Lyon County’s vote last fall, which failed to rescind its brothel ordinance.

But Sandquist says she and her colleagues “are not discouraged” after residents rejected the measure.

“We’re going to continue moving forward and we’re going to be a part of the Legislature … and continue to watch,” she said.

Sandquist is a spokeswoman for the End Trafficking and Prostitution Political Action Committee. She helps to run a faith-based nonprofit ministry in Carson City for women called Xquisite and hopes to reach the licensed sex workers in Nevada’s brothels and expose them to other career choices.

“This is a worldwide issue, and I know there’s a lot of legal brothels … but it allows for human trafficking and it’s kind of under the radar … and it does affect us,” Sandquist told the Appeal recently.

The Nevada Legislature will take center stage in February, and state representatives will have opportunities to hear from the state’s anti-prostitution groups, brothel owners and licensed sex workers about the future of the sensual services industry.

In Northern Nevada, Madame Bella Cummins will be watching on behalf of her newly created Onesta Foundation and her own Hacienda Ranch in Wells. Cummins is an experienced entrepreneur from the Midwest who opened her first business in Carson City and purchased the Hacienda Ranch. She’s hopeful the Legislature this year finds better methods of regulating the brothels.

“In my opinion, it’s looking in front of the legislation, looking at the rules … and it’s not just more government, but we just need a clearer understanding of this patchwork of rules and regulation that could be more clearly defined,” Cummins said. “This is the blueprint that will allow it to be in Wells or in Elko or in Lyon County.”

Madame Suzette Cole, legal heir to former owner Dennis Hof’s properties, has been tending to matters since November and hasn’t yet provided a public statement about her plans since assuming ownership.

Coming in this year’s session, Sen. Joe Hardy (R-Clark County) is drafting a bill that would prohibit prostitution in the state.

Assemblywoman Lesley Cohen (D-Henderson) recently confirmed she’s conducting her own research and working on language for a bill draft request regarding the brothels. Cohen, previously a family law attorney and now representing District 29, which covers part of Clark County and Henderson, said she was still determining her specific request in mid-December. She said she was concerned about how women workers were being treated financially in the brothels and was exploring the issue with legal assistants.

“The big one I’m hearing about is women are on two-week contracts … and most people wouldn’t be there if they could afford to buy out their contracts,” she said. “They pay for their own blood tests. I’m also concerned that they’re not allowed to leave the facility for the two weeks they’re there. … I don’t know if this is happening at the brothels.

“I’m going at this with the understanding that they’re safe and this isn’t about trafficking. It’s not about trying to make brothels illegal. It’s not a moral judgment.”

Other developments related to the brothels have risen in the past month. On Dec. 21, a new political action committee, the Nevada Brothel Association, was formed by Cole who took over Hof’s business operations of Lyon County’s brothels — including the Bunny Ranch, Kit Kat Ranch, Love Ranch and Sagebrush Ranch — after Hof’s death on Oct. 16 and other associates, including Hof’s former election campaign manager Chuck Muth and licensed sex worker Alice Little of the Bunny Ranch. The NBA originally was born in 1985 as a means of fighting legislative efforts to quash Nevada’s legal brothels. The group then hired George Flint in 1986 as its lobbyist, and he retired in 2015, when the association disbanded. It now represents 21 legal brothels across seven counties.

Now, the NBA, according to its website, https://nevadabrothelassociation.com, intends to seek out owners to join in its effort before the Legislature begins Feb. 4.

“The Nevada brothels have this incredibly rich history and we benefit our local communities so tremendously,” Little said. “The association plans to continue to educate the local communities as to what the brothels are, what they do and what the benefits are to the local communities.”

NBA spokesman Chuck Muth of Las Vegas said the PAC will be helpful in contacting industry members as a whole.

“We haven’t spoken with the other brothel operations yet, and we haven’t spoken in depth with Suzette (Cole), but we’re all in favor of controlling the licensing and taxing it,” Muth said. “I personally have a big problem, as the First Amendment guy, with the fact that marijuana’s legal and you have big billboards promoting gentleman’s clubs and strip clubs and yet there’s a ban on advertising the legal brothels.”

Cummins said providing a proper process for legal sex work ultimately would benefit the state, the workers and the public as a whole but acknowledged the long road ahead in the 2019 session.

Little said she personally was encouraged by the Lyon vote and the responses she’s received from the public about the brothels, including the questions she and her colleagues had at the town halls about her profession as a whole about the fingerprints and background checks the workers are required to submit to per county code. She said the goal was to help fight off negative perceptions and help the public understand the reality of the industry in Lyon County and in Nevada.

“I view it as a tremendous positive moving forward and I think we’re going to see a resurgence of the brothels in Nevada unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” Little said.

Click here to access original article