It’s a very sad commentary on Texas. It’s no secret to anyone who lives here what a gun-nutty, sexist state it is but…wow. This is a new low, even for our court history of allowing crimes against women to go underpunished.

For those men who want to start whinging about possibly being ripped off $150, stop. If you were planning on giving her the money anyway, then it’s already gone. Your precious penis and your presumed constitutional right to get off is not worth a human life. It really, truly is not. You’re not that special. Consider your lost money a lesson learned, and try to find someone else you think you might be more be in tune with your desires. (Escorts get ripped off all the time and they learn to tighten up their business practices. They dust themselves off and try again. This is the correct, mature, response.)

After all, Ezekiel Gilbert clearly had the money to spend tens of thousands on his defense. So why was he so upset over losing $150 he was going to spend anyway? He whines about how hard his life has been over the past four years and how he has nightmares. He could have avoided all that drama by not shooting and killing Lenora. How easy and simple to avoid all these problems! Put the damn gun down, get back to Google and find a new escort. There’s not a single escort in the country who costs more than a criminal defense attorney in a murder case.

He got away with murder because he truly got a jury of his peers. I wish every one of their names could be discovered and put on national blacklists. They set him free and therefore they believe it’s right and proper to kill sex workers who don’t do exactly as demanded. This is a horrific precedent, especially for sex workers who see clients in the evening.

Looked at it from another angle, the jury sort of sees prostitution as a legal business transaction. If that’s the case, then anytime a client beats, rapes, or rips off a prostitute at night, she should lethally shoot him (quite a few sex workers carry guns). If this case is going to be a precedent, then let it be a true precedent.

Realistically, the status quo doesn’t change. Escorts who blatantly state what they will and won’t do for money are setting themselves up for arrest. Or they can be coy, avoid arrest, and set themselves up for disappointed clients who decide to kill them. Either way, their lives are ruined. Their clients’ lives are not.

PS: I hope Gilbert changes whatever career he currently has and takes a service-industry job in Texas, preferably on the night shift. He just doesn’t strike me as someone who can get an order right, such as whether or not I want fries with that and please hold the mayo. At the very least, I hope he never gets to hire another escort again. These articles are even better than a blacklist.

Afterthoughts:

Does this mean that the deaths of strip club bouncers will go unpunished? Every year, some strip club bouncer is shot to death in Dallas, either trying to remove a [drunk, angry] patron or later in the parking lot as revenge, often for protecting the strippers. These men could be seen as thieves just as Lenora was. It’s a very strong possibility. It’s bad enough some of these low-paid, high-risk employees get killed because of stupidity (not theirs) but now there could be no hope of justice for their families either.

I have fantasized about Gilbert being cross-examined during his trial like rape victims are. Has he given away money before? What exactly, is his history of charitable donations? (do full audit in court). Does he have an established pattern of charitable donations to individuals or organizations? Has he ever been robbed before, in any circumstance? Has he ever been shortchanged at a store, or rendered poor service in a restaurant? Does he have a history of fighting back against these injustices or just letting it slide? Has he purchased items off Craigslist or eBay that were not as described? Did he leave negative feedback or shoot the seller? Does he have a habit of inviting strangers to his home at night with promises of giving them money?

My friend Jill and I have discussed the Ohio women every day since the news broke. We’ve wanted to help but didn’t want our money to go anywhere but directly to the victims. Jill feels she has found a way to donate that will help the women the most. I’ll let her explain why this matters so much to Gina, Amanda, Michelle.

I’m Jill Brenneman. Amanda graciously asked me to do a guest post on her blog about donations for the Cleveland kidnapping victims. I want to express why it is very important that anyone who can donate does so, because while they are now free from Ariel Castro, their recovery will be a lifetime process.

Donations are being processed by the Cleveland Foundation. While there appears to be more than one donation website, the Cleveland Foundation is the only site that states it will be giving 100 percent of the proceeds to the victims.

My post will refer a great deal to my own life experiences after being held captive for three years until I escaped. It is imperative to me that my purpose is understood: I am using my experiences to illustrate what life is like once one has escaped because there is little information or discussion about it. While much of this discussion is about me and my experiences, the post is about why the three kidnapping victims need our help. While I appreciate whatever concern may be felt about me by those who read this post, I would ask that you please focus on the purpose of the post: Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry need our help. They are the focus of this post. My experiences are only to illustrate the reasons why a former captive needs immediate assistance. This post is about the three women in Cleveland. Not about me.

I was a kidnapping victim in circumstance similar to Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry. I was fortunate to escape after three years. Nonetheless, escaping a captor isn’t even a halfway point to recovery. For three years I was tortured, raped, endured sensory deprivation, placed in restraints that kept me in stress positions for long durations of time, malnourished, and had absolutely no control over any part of my life. Life for me as a captive was always cause and effect — usually with violent consequences. Even involving things I had no control over; for example, bruising from a vicious beating was cause for punishment. I was expected to address basic bodily needs once a day when he came to take me to the bathroom. Anything beyond that was automatically grounds for punishment because it was seen as defiance. This has profoundly impacted my life even though I escaped nearly thirty years ago.

Since my captivity ended, I’ve had eight surgeries in seven years that ultimately were caused by what I suffered in captivity. For many years I considered myself very fortunate. Most of my injuries appeared to just be scars until the years of abuse caught up with me in the form of delayed onset injuries. Delayed onset injuries are those that manifest well after the trauma, undetected until a life event such working at a job that places stress on an already weakened part of the body. A basic data entry job became acutely painful after just a few weeks due to nerve compression related to carpal tunnel, resulting in two surgeries. Another job which required consistent lifting caused numbness and then pain and loss of feeling in my arms and hands from what was eventually diagnosed as cubital tunnel syndrome, which required major surgery on both elbows to relieve nerve compression. I’ve had four knee surgeries since 2009 to repeatedly repair injuries that have developed because my ligaments and cartilage are weak. All these problems are the result of long periods of time in restraints while in stress positions and malnutrition suffered in captivity.

The surgeries alone have amounted to over $2 million dollars in medical bills and have driven me into bankruptcy because the medical costs exceeded my $1 million dollar insurance coverage limit more than once. Because they were delayed onset injuries that developed when minimally stressed by basic jobs I have repeatedly been fired due to being unable to perform the job or from missing too much time due to the injuries, surgery, and recovery.

Many injuries can’t be repaired. My raspy voice is the direct result of trauma and has no resolution. While I have managed to live a semi-normal life physically, I have also literally lost years of income during the times I was unable to work as a result of the injuries themselves.

From an emotional perspective one thinks of the usual, assumed responses. It is assumed an escaped captive will have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). It will likely take years of counseling to learn to deal with the most common symptoms of PTSD including nightmares, flashbacks, hyper vigilance, and/or an emotional flat effect. There will also be a process of learning to trust again and developing healthy relationships, especially with men. Part of recovering from captivity is regaining one’s sense of self worth and coping with being treated as damaged goods by people whose opinions of the former captive change once they become aware of the victim’s history.

A long term captive’s emotional and psychological responses are also altered in ways that are less obvious. When freedom has been taken away and replaced with living in abstract fear of death, with violence that is often incomprehensible and in response to uncontrollable events, that devastates one’s psychology and how they view and react to the world after escape.

Freedom is something that I literally have had to relearn, and am still learning. Something as basic and normal as asking a friend to stop at a restaurant because I’m hungry or need to use the restroom are examples of what I have had to relearn. I still take instruction far too literally, fearing an aggressive or violent response even with a friend that I consciously know has no desire to harm me, but subconsciously still react as if captive and face punishment. For example, eating food that I know will make me sick because I was told that is where the friend wishes to eat. Instinctively I take the choice of restaurant irrationally and literally, fearing harm for saying no to the idea, thereby becoming ill from the food — causing an unnecessary and larger problem.

This is PTSD. This takes many years of intense therapy to overcome and it is a lifelong process.

While Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry, they likely have many years of very costly medical expenses and the need for equally costly psychological help in recovering from the trauma and relearning how to live their lives in freedom. Like me, their lives were interrupted at a young age. Now they have to move on with the physical and emotional issues related to what filled those ten years and how to recover and rebuild their lives. While $640,000 has been raised as of May 23, 2013 and that sounds like a lot, it is a drop in the bucket for even one of the women — much less all three, and Amanda Berry’s child. Consider that I have had more than $2 million dollars in medical expenses from three years of captivity. Ten years is much longer and the damage even more profound.

People often erroneously assume victims of crimes such as those faced by Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry will qualify for many safety-net programs offered by the by Federal or state government such as Social Security Disability, Medicaid and Medicare. This is often untrue. These programs often require paying taxes to qualify. The three women in Cleveland have been in captivity, therefore have not been able to pay taxes and may not qualify for Federal or State assistance. Even if they do qualify, the processing time for Social Security Disability, Medicaid and Medicare, can stretch for years. Years in which these women may have no income and no access to health care.

Often the topic of health insurance is discussed. The women in this case are likely to have a large number of injuries that will now be classified as pre-existing conditions, making them ineligible for insurance or causing long wait times without treatment. Insurance companies usually require a long duration of time (usually a year) without any treatment to satisfy their requirements to treat a pre-existing condition. These women need immediate and ongoing treatment. They are already likely scarred from ten years of violence and lack of proper medical attention. They don’t have the luxury of waiting for bureaucratic processes to assess their conditions, determine which portions of their injuries and living expenses qualify for coverage, or cause denial of coverage due to regulations that are inapplicable to a situation such as this. Unfortunately they likely will have to wait for assistance. Thus donations are imperative.

Recovery from long term captivity is a very difficult and expensive process. It requires all the help they can get. Please help them if you are able. After enduring what they had to live through and now have to undergo the lengthy process of recovery, they truly are going to need every dollar that anyone can give and more. I truly hope you can help them.

I just like the idea of a celebrity paying the bills the old-fashioned way. If she really is a paid companion, then it would be so wonderful for her to speak up about it. Come out and proud! On the other hand, she has substance abuse problems and an arrest record. Okay, maybe she’s not the best choice for celebrity sex work spokesperson.

If her mom is pimping her out, call Donna Hughes or Melissa Farley. Quick!

– I regret forgetting my walking shoes one recent weekend and having to wear heels more than I’d planned, which caused a foot sprain a couple days later when I returned home.

– I regret giving my real phone number to a Las Vegas strip club for the one or two nights I worked there in 2008. I still have that phone and have gotten text messages from them a few times a week. Since 2008. I wish they would purge their “inactive hires” list. Advice to anyone: treat strip club managers like customers and never give out your real phone number. Granted, I’m obviously a little slow on the uptake. Never had a problem with Dallas clubs texting me for the rest of my natural life, but that was years before. Damn technology.

– I regret not having professional photos taken of me during my stripper years. I had a great body. I also regret not being an international touring stripper. Would have been a blast.

– I regret letting relationships get in the way of my work; the reason I didn’t become an international touring stripper, the reason for my retirement in 2004, and the reason behind other decisions. Something I’ve learned in my 30s is to just say no to being squished by a relationship.

– I often regret being so damn “different” as an escort but that one’s not a full-on regret as there have been a lot of good things about being me. However, when I give advice to others, I always give it on the assumption that they do not want to make the mistakes I have.

– I regret my terrible, trashy taste in fiction. I read a lot of the classics when I was younger and I regret not reading more because my current love of brainless, non-redeeming fiction is embarrassing. (My taste in non-fiction is upright and not embarrassing.)

– I regret buying cute handsoaps with little plastic animals embedded in the soap because as the soap washes away, the hard pointy edges of the animals emerge and every washing is painful but it takes a lot of washing to be able to pull the animals out of the soap.

– I regret not speaking my mind when I really should.

– I regret my lack of time-management skills and how it’s gotten worse, not better, over the years.

– I don’t regret not getting a boob job.

I would like to donate to any personal family fund for victims without health insurance. For now, it seems like this is going to be the best place to donate: The One Fund. Sporty types can buy a t-shirt.

As a Texan, I’ve been saddened by the explosion in West. A friend and I were sitting on my couch, watching a movie and we felt it. We’be both been through earthquakes and thought it was an earthquake, one that lasted only 1-2 seconds. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized the time of the blast and what we felt.

The people of West have lost a lot. There are already donation cans set up near cash registers around Texas. For direct donations, this article suggests donating through the Salvation Army, Wells Fargo, Red Cross, or direct donations to the local banks specified in the article.

Anyone is welcome to post links to family donation websites. I know that it’s usually months after a tragedy that the the real cost comes to light for everyone involved.