dave elms.
Dave Elms runs a popular website called The Erotic Review. It’s where clients post reviews of escorts by assigning a numerical value (between one and ten) and a detailed description of the encounter. It’s also where many escorts find their business.
In a little-known success story, TheEroticReview.com has come to dominate the country’s prostitution scene, which is increasingly migrating from the street corner to the Internet.
Elms was arrested recently on charges unrelated to his website, and this merited a mention in the front section of the New York Times on Tuesday, by Matt Richtel.
When I started years ago, the woman who ran the agency asked me if if I’d heard of TER. I hadn’t. I kept to myself, did my own thing, and found my clients through other means. But while pseudo-documentaries still focus on the street walker, sex work moved online years ago, and sites like TER dominate. According to Quantcast, TER gets between 800,000 and one million unique visitors per month, and about 13 million hits per month.
As time went on and I connected with other women, I started to hear the stories, about how agencies paid Elms to inflate the reviews of their lady-merchandise. I’d heard that some agencies were shut out by Elms while others were favored, among them NY Confidential, which was busted in 2004 to subsequently unleash the exceptionally sleazy and excessively vocal Jason Itzler upon our media outlets, a man who likes to call himself “the king of all pimps,” because he’s a moron. It’s counterproductive to take bribes to alter reviews, given that the supposed intention of a site like TER is to give johns at least the illusion of objectivity, but then TER is no Zagat’s. Maybe integrity isn’t such a priority.
Then I started to hear about the extortion. Women who had earned legitimately favorable reviews, and had grown dependent upon TER for their livelihood, were being contacted by Elms directly. He wanted money from them too. And he wanted money not to alter those reviews but to simply keep them up. When those escorts didn’t comply with his demands, Elms removed their reviews until they did comply.
I’d heard that clients who posted legitimate reviews about these non-compliant escorts were having the reviews rejected or removed. When clients complained, they were banned from the site.
I’d also heard that some women were told that they needed to meet with Elms directly if they wanted to keep their reviews up.
And those who did meet with Elms were forced to perform sex acts, either by coercion or by threats of violence.
The house in Hawthorne, Calif., where Mr. Elms lives is modest, with a well-kept yard. The only unusual signs are a surveillance camera over the porch and the late-model Mercedes sports car parked out front with the vanity license plate “Will She.”
And then I’d heard that women were being raped, blackmailed, and assaulted not just by Elms, but by other employees of his site as well. It was becoming clear to me that TER wasn’t a review site at all, but a means for Elms to freely extort money and sex acts. And if women resisted, there was always the threat of violence.
[T]he police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation.
This is unacceptable.
I’d venture Elms and Itzler suffer from the same feelings of sexual inadequacy, what with Itzler’s pimp-king sobriquet and Elms’ coke-addled cock, a cock so ineffectual that it requires persistent coercion and the threat of death to become even remotely compelling.
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It’s time these women have some form of real recourse.
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Follow-up: Through a trackback, I found this post at a blog called Feminist Law Professors. Referring to the last paragraph from the NYTimes piece, regarding the woman who was forced to perform a sex act at gunpoint, she writes,
And the reason there was “not enough evidence to press charges,” it goes unsaid, is that the testimony of “the prostitute” about her sexual assault is considered inadequate and unreliable, despite the incontrovertible presence of a gun.
Filed under: pressing thoughts | 11 Comments
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As you probably know, prostitution is legal in Canada albeit with a great many restrictions. One of the consequences of this legality is that women can file criminal charges against such persons and/or civil suits for damages.
bobo i thought it was legal to SELL sex but not legal to BUY it
or something like that…
Alas, we do not live in Canada.
What can be done? As long as men and women continue to patronize and promote TER, either by paying for subscriptions, submitting reviews, or using it as a marketing tool, it will continue to wield the power that it does.
As of this morning, the message boards over there had been pruned of the few mentions made of the NYT article. But the comments were telling. There was no outrage. There was no “Gee, maybe we shouldn’t be lining the pockets of a freebasing rapist.”. Instead, there were statements dismissing the NYT’s journalistic mettle.
There is an undeniably ugly side to this business, consisting of men who are misogynists to the core and don’t see prostitutes as human beings. I’m all in favor of decriminalization, but the seamier aspects of the business of prostitution are too often glossed over by activists. This troubles me greatly.
I’d love to see it legalized to limit this kind of seclusion and victimization of women. This bothers me greatly that this can happen to women.
Badinfluencegirl, I think you are confusing Canadian law with Swedish law where it is, illegal to be a john. Prostitutes operate openly, but discretely, in Canada which is sufficient to satisfy the “communicating for the purposes of prostitution” section of our law.
Don’t know about Canadian law, but Bobolink is correct – in Sweden it’s illegal to buy but not to sell sexual services.
However, before anyone draws conclusions or anything else, any sex work, including exotic dancing, is immensely stigmatized in Sweden.
Dave Elms is getting everything he deserves. He developed a site for reveiwing the providers that started out cute and entertaining at first and turned into a huge opportunity to treat women like trash. I had several reviews up on TER and almost all of them where great. I had several clients tell me that they had submitted reviews to TER only to find out that they had been changed or totally erased. On many occassions I would post on the TER board to solicite new clients and would have negative post placed under it each and every time. One client tried to stick up for me and was banned and then TER accused us of self posting. I had no clue who this cleint was but negative rumors where spread that all the clients where comments from me. In addition all my reviews where removed from the site. I for one am sick of this site and the negative publicity it gives to providers for standing up for themselves. In addition, its even more sick and disgusting to know that this man has extorted sex from women to stay on the board. The other part is that women in the business need to stop letting guys like this gain so much power that we don’t control our own bodies and destinies. I feel men should not rely on this site for reviews and expectations for service, because many of the girls that have good reviews only have them because they have given away free sex to clients or the owners of TER. Please stop giving TER the power to control you business
Bobolink, the prostitution laws in Canada were once described as “bizarre” by a judge. It is not illegal to be a prostitute, but it is difficult to engage in a commercial sex business without breaking one of the prostitution laws. The prohibitions include: 1) soliciting for the purpose of prostitution in a public place, 2) keeping a common bawdy-house (aka brothel), 3) living off the ‘avails’ of prostitution, and 4) procuring.
These laws were originally drafted to give law enforcement the means to control street prostitution, pimping, and the operation of prostitution rings by organized crime. However, law enforcement can and do use these laws to charge escorts and escort agencies.
In Canada, independent escorts can (and do) avoid the solicitation charge by only discussing and conducting sexual commerce in private (a residence, hotel room, by telephone or by email). Escort agencies run a greater risk of being charged and convicted with living off the ‘avails’ if it is proved that their escorts are engaging in prostitution and they are collecting fees from prostitution activities. Agencies are also vulnerable to the procuring charge which is heavily sanctioned if underage escorts are employed. An independent escort can live off her earnings without fear of the ‘avails’ charge.