This story explains the basis for the various stories here where girls are described as indentured.
The Interview
“It’s just sex, really— there’s not really much to get people so wound up— except that they like to get wound up. And, frankly, I’m in a position where I could care less. Luckily for me.”
“Well, you say it’s just about sex— but really, there’s more to it than that, isn’t there; be honest— there is power in there too; that’s what gets people upset, surely— the mixture of sex and power?”
“Are you trying to tell me that sex and power aren’t mixed up everywhere you look? I mean, don’t get me wrong— young love can happen, and of course, some people have very equitable sexual relationships; nothing wrong with any of that, if you like it that way, and the very best of luck to anyone who can make it last, too— but if you are trying to insinuate that I am unusual in mixing the two up, I’m calling you on that, and you’ll lose if you try to argue.”
“That’s not a position I’m going to try to argue from— of course, we all understand that sex and power are often mixed up— and often in messy ways. It’s precisely because that’s true that society polices the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable mixtures and messes— constantly debating what is tolerable and what is intolerable in a decent culture. What disturbs your many critics is …”
“… is the way that I have clarified things— have cleaned up the mess. Made it clear, just what goes on. That’s what people don’t like— that I make it hard for them to hide from themselves just how messed up their so-called ‘culture’ is. That I make them feel like hypocrites. Frankly, that’s their problem, not mine. And again, I’m lucky enough that they don’t seem to be able to make it my problem, despite years of trying.”
“You’re referring to your ability to keep expensive lawyers on call to bat away lawsuits, tie up cases for years, sponsor legislation which appears to be about clarifying contract law, but which in fact makes your practices harder to argue against. But that’s just it; your immense power— deriving from your immense wealth— is enabling you to control these young women’s sexuality in— in ways which can only be described as extreme …”
“Once again, what are court cases, what is legislation, if not clarification? We have an adversarial legal system— not my invention— possibly not even my preference, although we’re not discussing that today— but it’s a legal system I accept, and that I abide by in all my dealings. Taking test cases to law— as you well know, Ms Tenison— is considered a positive act in our system of law; getting independent judges to hear all the arguments— my opponents are well-funded, too, you must accept— about particular applications of general law, in order to establish a precedent. It’s how it works. In my view, it’s the people who don’t like the fact that I won— won my original case, and have won all twelve cases that have made it to higher courts, too— that you should be challenging today, not me. They seem to be the ones who don’t accept our culture, our system of justice.”
“And if you really want to go to the money equals power argument, then I have to seriously ask what you are doing here. I am not a Wall Street financier. I am not a banker. I am not a revolving door bureaucrat / academic / regulator. I did not go to a fancy university. I was born an average citizen, without special advantage, into the system that those sorts of people built; I was educated to believe that such a system was for the best, and found how to make my way within it— using what talents, skill, willpower and energy I had. As it happens, that has resulted in my being able to command large numbers of dollars. If you don’t like that system, please, I beg you, ask your readers to donate to the same reformist policy institutes that I donate to, and let’s see if we can change things.”
His voice is calm, friendly, relaxed, but the journalist is clearly reeling, just a little; despite her experience and reputation, sparring with this man seems to be unsettling her— her cheeks are coloring, and she is making rather too much of flicking through her notes, buying time to calm herself down, perhaps.
We were watching this recording in the conference room of the law firm that I work for— one of the several expensive law firms the journalist— Ms Tenison— was referring to — as reference before our review of the published article. When I say ‘we’, I should make it clear that I had nothing to say to anyone about anything. I was only in the room because I was the gofer on the high-powered team who look after Peter Strachey’s account. At 24, I was exceptionally lucky to be working at such a level; I have a good educational pedigree, but at this level, all that gets me is the gofer position, standing at the back, not actually at the table, but behind my boss, who has worked the Strachey account for a few years, and who is, as far as any of us can tell, at least half robot.
Every single published piece about Strachey that we can discover is reviewed by the team— most of it by actual robo-lawyers (AI law-bots - because there are tens of thousands of mentions of him a day on social media), but this piece— for a high-profile New York establishment magazine site— is getting very careful review indeed. Mr Strachey has never sued for libel, or for defamation, and does not even try to demand approval of pieces by serious journalists, but this is at least in part because such publishers, such journalists are fully aware that teams like ours are always looking, reading every word, reviewing interview tapes and transcripts, phone calls, negotiation chat logs— everything— and that each day and each week there are case approaches set out for anything even on the fringes of actionability, the more serious of which are shared with said publishers and journalists. I am aware of a parallel team doing exactly the same work at another high profile firm in the US, and have been told there are others in Europe; he likes, and can afford, multiple views on the same thing. This is serious work, Peter Strachey says, and he’s willing to pay serious money for it.
Corrections, retractions, apologies, republished amended pieces are often the result.
Mr Strachey is not much involved with any of this. It’s our work. We’re not protecting his reputation. We have one single purpose, mandated by him, paid for by his immense resources, and that is to do all we can to maintain the viability of a single contractual term.
The Term— and the Test Case
The full-service term — as it has become known. This is what all the fuss is about.
And it’s very simple. An actor in a porn film contracts to participate in consensual sexual activity in the context of the making of a video— even if that video simulates a rape or includes a beating or a piercing or cruel humiliation. These contracts work— in essence they are indistinguishable from the contracts Hollywood actors sign. The actors have read the script, or whatever else is provided in terms of descriptive material as to what is required of them, they’ve signed the contract; if they do what they agreed to do, they get paid, if not, then not— any disputes end up in due process, however that pans out. This all comes under the Constitutional right to freedom of speech.
Note that no power exists to force them to comply with the agreement they have made— to participate in any particular activity. The contract simply provides for what happens in the event that they do not comply— which is, essentially, that they don’t get paid. It’s as simple as that.
What Strachey did was write a contract for a girl he wished to have sex with that made similar provisions, but lasted a year. The girl was paid a large amount of the money— two thirds of the total, amounting to half a million dollars— up-front.
When the year was up, and after she had been paid in full, the girl went to the papers (in case the obvious has occurred to you, there was no NDA, no gagging order— when I say Strachey wrote the contract, that’s what I mean— he didn’t use a lawyer; he wrote it himself; the whole legal profession is in a mixture of denial, despair and rage about this— that the most celebrated legal knot of the decade was tied— and very effectively tied, too— by a non-lawyer; it drives us crazy). Then some fancy lawyer convinced her she had a case— all sorts of cases, in fact— to sue Strachey, and also that she should attempt to have him arraigned on criminal charges (everything from rape on down, through kidnapping, assault, cruelty— you name it), and the whole thing blew up.
In court, the details that the girl described seemed certain to destroy Strachey— the court of public opinion was all for lynching him at that point.
And then, it got worse. On the direction of Strachey, his lawyers did what they had expressly advised him not to— they showed clips from the regular video interviews he had arranged for various people to hold with the girl— on an almost daily basis across the whole year, asking her to describe what she had been doing— what he had been doing with her— since the previous tape, and asking her if everything was consensual, if she intended to consent to whatever came next, or whether she wanted to leave. These videos, the lawyers thought, would nail Strachey’s coffin shut, so full they were of specific and shocking detail as to what he had put her through.
But as it happened, it was the public’s opinion of the girl that was changed. It was so clear that she was willing, that she was not only thinking about the money, but finding distinct sexual satisfaction from some aspects of what he demanded of her. Even more damning, she was finding her own sexual appetites expanding and deepening as she spent each day immersed in her role as a sexual service provider to a man of evidently prodigious, perverse and wide ranging desires.
Not only was the court of public opinion moved by the videos, the Court was, too; since these videos had been made, and made public there was a clear case for a free-speech rights defence.
Strachey’s full-service contract term was incredibly robust, precisely because it was so simple and direct, and since it was clear that nothing which had been done to the girl (even though the list of what had not been done to her was rather short) had been outside the contract, and that she had at all times been free not to participate.
The case was never decided. The trial collapsed. When Strachey’s lawyers called the girl to the stand, the case imploded. She was utterly unable to be convincing in her claim that she had not consented, had not understood, had not realised what she was signing, that the regular videos where she had consented were faked. Most damning of all, when she was asked about the few things she had consented to where her body language had been unconvincing, about her claims that those things had been forced on her, she had broken down completely under careful, almost gentle, but nevertheless exacting questioning, had first contradicted herself, and then broken down completely, burst into tears and cried out;
“No, no, he didn’t; he … he was … he was kind to me, and sent me on a little vacation, told me not to come back if I didn’t want to… “
And that had been it.
The era of the ‘full-service contract’ had begun.
And it had happened exactly as Strachey had planned it. He had wanted a high profile court case, was happy to have his reputation with ‘polite society’ trashed; happy to be ‘cancelled’. Because he thought it ought to be possible to do what he wished with a young woman who had signed a contract in full knowledge of what he wanted. And, it has to be said, equally to make it possible for a rich woman to hire a young man on the exact same basis.
The change went slowly, at first, but with a distinct snowball effect. It was less than a year before the first podcast dedicated to advice about how to get yourself into the market for a full-service contract went live, with a hostess and guests claiming that they had direct experience, and advice from rich players with money to spend. It was banned, of course, but then popped up on some crypto streaming platform; quickly, there were two competitors, and the year after, a reality TV show, with the first prize a million dollar contract.
None of which stopped the outrage, the attacks, the death-threats, the lawsuits.
None of which stopped Peter Strachey from hiring lovely young women on the explicit basis that he would sexually abuse them.
The Meeting
And now he was looking at me, and I was shaking.
I had no reason to be nervous, beyond the obvious; I was a legal junior, a nameless member of the small team summoned for a rare meeting to his opulent hotel suite— he was in New York for a few weeks, apparently, and had asked for an update.
My boss took three of us with him— the three youngest, prettiest female members of his team— when he set out for the Lotte New York Palace hotel, where Strachey had the penthouse suite— of course. We all knew why we’d been picked, but none of us wanted to acknowledge it. I couldn’t decide if I was pleased, or insulted, or embarrassed, or if I should have refused.
But it was too late, now. We’d been shown into the boardroom of the suite by a woman much younger than me— perhaps not even twenty— wearing a very abbreviated and revealing frilly french maid outfit, and excruciating heels, her hair tied back beneath a ridiculous little frothy lace cap. Her collar was lace, too, but it was also very definitely a collar.
She was an indentured sex-slave, her nipples visible through the sheer white blouse. They were heavily pierced, it was impossible not to notice, any more than it was possible to ignore the little chain which hung from a small ring at the tip of her tongue, at the end of which was an elegant little medal, punched to display a monogram made of the letters P and S. A symbol of ownership, even if it was only temporary ownership - an indenture.
She had been all subservient smiles and pretty wiggles as she had greeted us, her voice soft and quiet, lisping because of the chain, and I had begun to squirm.
I hadn’t really been emotionally engaged in the business of Strachey buying girls and treating them like sex slaves; I really hadn’t. No-one with strong views on the subject was accepted onto the team. Young as I was, the furore had erupted when I was a pre-teen. I had, of course, had various animated conversations about the subject as an adolescent and student— everyone had; but deep down, I just saw it as part of the world, simply assumed that it was other people who did such crazy stuff; that I did not need to concern myself with them— only with my budding career. And it was an interesting and novel area of practise.
But now here was the man who had bought this girl, who could do just about anything he wanted to her, have her smile and beg for more; here he was, shaking my hand and smiling at me; looking into my eyes, not at my breasts, his hand-shake firm, smile genuine, just enough, not too much to be professional, and I was flustered to the point of dithering a little, scolding myself as I moved to my place, standing behind my boss’ chair; gofers didn’t sit.
Until asked to by the client, that is; he was very naturally polite; not at all the hard-pressing boor I’d have imagined such a man must be, whatever his public persona.
Soft drinks were served by another maid, in an identical outfit, brunette and large breasted, where the other had been blonde and slender.
I hardly knew when the meeting was over; I had been unable to think, to listen; luckily nothing at all had been required of me, and I had been able to concentrate on sitting still, neat, knees tightly together, head up, but eyes down; I simply could not meet his eyes, now that I knew how it felt to be in the presence of the world’s most prominent owner and abuser of slave girls.
For, no matter how the official term was ‘full-service contracted girl’, the gutter press had quickly started using the shorter, saltier terms; sex-toy, sex-slave, slave-girl, and they had become normalised, as more and more of the ultra-rich had begun to try out this shocking new idea— in secret or in public.
The meeting was over, we were shown out; I somehow survived another simple handshake, the physical closeness of the man who, quite likely, had done appalling things, carried out shocking sex acts, with the pretty maid who was holding the door. It affected all three of us girls, I think; at least, we were all unusually silent in the taxi back to the office— apart from our boss, who attempted small-talk and a weak joke or two at Strachey’s expense— presumably trying to show that he was on our side, that he thought the man strange, too.
We paid no attention; each of us was bound up in our own thoughts.
We worked for the man who had enslaved and humiliated those pretty young women. We were pretty young women ourselves. We were privileged, well-educated, well paid women; fifty years previously, none of us would have been lawyers. Our grandmothers and mothers had fought for equality. Now we were being paid by a slaver.
We never spoke about it, although one of the girls was soon reassigned, then left the firm shortly afterward.
I should have followed her example.
TAGS:
