(To protect each individual’s privacy, SN&R has blurred out identifying features.) SN&R witnessed more than two-dozen women on Stockton Boulevard south of Fruitridge Road on a recent weeknight. Unlike other escort-friendly sites with broader geographic profiles, myRedBook allowed users to access safety information and post certain ads for free.īecause of a federal crackdown against online sites, activists say more sex workers are operating on Sacramento’s streets. MyRedBook’s operators, sex workers lost an online resource they used to warn each other about dangerous clients. She knew that instant the game had changed. On the freeway passing Fremont, Monroe checked the home page on her phone and discovered three government agency seals and a terse message: “This domain has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as the result of a joint investigation by the FBI and Internal Revenue Service.” She was on the road to San Jose, where the plan was to set up in a motel room around midnight and earn some money. But a year ago, the young mother and former sex worker was operating independently. “Monroe” is a 23-year-old woman hiding out in Sacramento, a potential FBI informant against the pimp who trafficked her up and down the coast. “You’re doing that for us?” she asks.ĭown the street, a female worker slides into the passenger side of a pickup truck.
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On this Saturday, they’re spreading word about a safety class where they’ll instruct workers how to guard against predators.Ĭrouching down to eye level, DiAngelo invites the woman on the stoop. That desperation is what brings DiAngelo and Callahan out night after night. But you take that risk because you have to.” “They don’t even know if they’re going to come back. “Every time somebody gets in a car, you never know if they’re going to come back,” Callahan reflects. When it disappeared, the most at-risk workers-those of limited means and greatest need-were displaced to the streets. Sex workers say the site provided a meager safeguard against predators, pimps and cops. Authorities say the San Francisco-based website, which primarily served California and Nevada, facilitated prostitution and had to fall. In June 2014, a joint investigation by the IRS and FBI brought down myRedBook. Busier still, since federal authorities raided an online escort operation last summer. Past Mack Road, the older “renegades” solicit.Īlong with an area of Watt Avenue north of Auburn Boulevard, it’s one of the county’s busiest open-air prostitution markets. Fifteen blocks south is the pitch-black mouth to a mobile-home park where underage girls are trafficked, DiAngelo says. Across the street from a chapel is a dingy motel where the transgender workers congregate. Sacramento’s unofficial red-light district is a 9-mile stretch of Stockton Boulevard that cuts through the neighborhoods of Oak Park, Little Saigon, south Sacramento and Florin like an incision, scabbed on either side by cheap commerce and human suffering. It’s a public-health crisis disguised as a criminal nuisance.
The findings depict alarming rates of violence, medical neglect and hopelessness. Along with a platoon of like-minded allies, SWOP Sacramento has attempted the first scholarly survey of the homegrown sex-worker population. Decades later, they’ve reinserted themselves into the landscape as activists, with DiAngelo fronting a local iteration of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. The two started out as sex workers in the ’70s, surviving rapes, robberies, kidnappings and other callous mistreatment. You’d be hard-pressed to find better authorities on the subject. “I have never in my life seen that many workers in the street,” DiAngelo says. Over the past year, they say, that tribe has grown in both size and despair. These onetime sex workers know a member of the tribe when they see her. Callahan, small and dainty under a canopy of bangs hedging her forehead, turns to her best friend, Kristen DiAngelo. Planted on the stoop is a young woman with stringy blonde hair, wearing sunglasses to cloak an already-dark night. Pearl Callahan pulls her sedan to the side of Stockton Boulevard, just up from an abandoned house with boarded-up windows, somewhere near Sacramento’s southern city limits.