The City paid $2,000 in hotel charges for a boastful prostitute who sunk her own chances to convict her accused pimp.
All you Pretty Woman aficionados out there — myself included — recall verbatim the scene where Julia Roberts is singing Prince tunes in the bathtub while she and Richard Gere “negotiate” what he’s going to pay her for a week of serving as his arm candy.
Upon hearing she’ll be getting $3,000, she gleefully yells out “Holy shit!” before slipping down into a tub full of bubbles.
What she doesn’t do is immediately fire up her laptop, log onto Facebook and brag about how much money she was scheming out of him with her “graduate degree in ‘Advanced Pimpin.'”
Once you get past the fact that there wasn’t a Facebook — let alone a laptop — in 1990 when the film debuted, you might catch on that I’m referring to a prostitute that The City paid $2,000 to put her up in a hotel before testifying against a man accused of assaulting and pimping her.
While awaiting her appearance before a jury in the case against 23-year-old Anthony Dorton, Dorton’s attorney Qiana Washington said she posted online about “supervising and punishing prostitutes.”
The SF Examiner reports that there was enough evidence against Dorton — charged with assault, pimping and pandering — including “taped phone calls, cellphone records, text messages and evidence obtained from a search warrant,” Assistant District Attorney Alex Bastian said in court.
However, Washington said the case lost credibility when jurors learned the woman was found to have been making online claims that she was “pimping and punishing” other prostitutes herself.
Oh, and proclaiming that she had some kind of college degree in a discipline known as “Advanced Pimpin’.”
No, this is not a bad rap video.
Top it off with the fact that The City was paying around $2,000 in taxpayer money to put her up in a hotel while she awaited her trial.
A criminal jury ended up deadlocking on the pimping and pandering charges while acquitting 23-year-old Dorton of assault.
Bastain also told the Ex that prosecutors believe that “further investigation may be necessary.”
You guys want to try to put an allegedly dangerous man brought up on pimping and pandering counts behind bars for a long time? Fine by me.
Just please don’t use any more of The City’s money to take prostitutes on shopping sprees or to the horse races.
Thanks to NASA and the Exploratorium, you can have a front-row seat Sunday night for a Mars landing.
