When the sex workers vanish, no one cares: Steve Duin column

Jan 01, 2024

Ashly Lorenzana

In January, on what should have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Ashly Lorenzana was invited to Kingston, N.Y., to talk about her multiple abortions.

Lorenzana – who lives in a mobile-home park just north of the Columbia Slough in Northeast Portland – was one of 11 women invited on stage for what was billed as “A Night of True Storytelling for Reproductive Justice.”

She was both encouraged and surprised by the honor: “It could have been the fact that I’m a sex worker. You don’t hear from them very often.”

And best she can tell, we don’t care all that much when they disappear.

Lorenzana, 36, posted her first “Erotic Services” ad on Craigslist when she was 17. She followed her mother into the business, and her mother’s boyfriend drove her to the client’s home. The $100-an-hour adventure went fairly well. As she told me back in 2011, “He seemed to like me. He seemed pretty impressed with the entire experience.”

I met Lorenzana when, at 23, she sent me her memoir, “Sex, Drugs and Being an Escort.” From the beginning, she was fiercely independent, disarmingly funny – I twice invited her into my writing classroom at the University of Portland to share her story – and unapologetic about her addiction to methamphetamines.

I always figured meth was the most dangerous element in her life. The arrest of a New York architect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings on Long Island has me rethinking that.

On July 13, Rex Heuermann was charged with three of the Gilgo Beach murders and declared the prime suspect in the death of a fourth woman whose body was discovered in the marshland, similarly wrapped in burlap, 13 years ago.

As The New York Times notes, “All four victims were petite women, police officials said. All were between 22 and 27 years old, and all had been employed as escorts.”

Lorenzana tracked this disheartening case for years. “You look at the victims, and they look like ordinary girls,” she says. “Non-Barbie doll, normal-ass people. Women doing the same thing I do. Trying to make ends meet and survive.” She even reached out to Robert Kolker, who wrote a book – “Lost Girls” – about the killings. (“He was very kind in his response,” Lorenzana adds.)

“Every time I see a story about a serial killer who preys on sex workers, I think it’s our fault that they’re the easy targets,” she says. “They can go unnoticed. People have decided they don’t matter. Nobody cares.”

Lorenzana has never walked the street. “Too dangerous. It’s dangerous enough on the Internet.” Over the years, most of her clients reach out to her through websites. She’s a big fan of references and regulars, and she’s far more comfortable inviting men to her place than searching the suburbs for theirs. “It’s easier for me. And most of them need a place to go. They’re in a relationship.”

“As a woman, there is risk in everything,” Lorenzana says. “But to be fair, the overwhelming majority of the clients I meet are average dudes. It’s not that different from a casual hook-up. Your odds of finding a cute and satisfying partner there aren’t that good, either.”

Lorenzana has honed her survival instincts over the years. “Probably why I’m still here, right?” she laughs, rapping gently on our outdoor table. Her grandparents raised her, rescuing her from a childhood she recalls as both abusive and negligent, and after all these years, she is not easily rattled.

She was sitting in her red Hyundai at the drive-thru window of the McDonalds at Northeast Columbia and Martin Luther King Boulevard in October 2021 when a guy opened the passenger door, tumbled into the car and yelled, “Drive! Drive! Cops are after me!”

He was frantic. Lorenzana remained calm. “I had no interest in being involved in a high-speed police chase,” she says. As she pulled slowly forward, she told the guy, “I have a better idea. I’m just going to get out, and you take the car.”

He did. “He didn’t make it very far, though,” Lorenzana says. Three Portland Police patrol cars soon pulled into the lot. “I tend to be law-enforcement avoidant,” she says, but she flagged them down, told them her cellphone was still in the Hyundai, and led them back to her mobile home so they could track the phone on her computer. Later that night, she identified the carjacker, Gregory Eyler, for the cops downtown.

She can’t afford to be careless in her escort work. Lorenzana knows that. She charges $200 an hour, and some guys think that means anything goes. “Any deep, dark depraved thing you can imagine, I’ve been asked,” she says. A client once texted her after sex and asked if, on his next visit, he could put a plastic bag over her head. “Uh, no,” she says with a sigh, “Definitely not.”

Lorenzana has never felt cornered, fearing for her life. “I’ve been fortunate,” she says. “I pick up clues. I never make it there.” She doesn’t know why others have. “Is a woman’s judgment that poor? Or can a guy at the snap of a finger turn into someone else?”

She tries not to think about hearing those fingers snap: “I think once that sense comes over you, you’re in trouble. It’s too late. A woman is not going to make it out of that.”

Lorenzana has become more of an activist in her 30s. She regularly canvasses for Planned Parenthood and volunteers to work the hotline at All-Options, providing support for pregnant women who don’t know where to turn.

She is also convinced that sex workers, whether they live near Gilgo Beach or Delta Park, will never be safe until the work is decriminalized, and escorts aren’t treated like pariahs.

“They need to be able to go to the police if something bad happens, and they can’t,” Lorenzana says. “They’re criminals, as far as the law is concerned.” And when a guy’s fantasies include plastic bags? “There’s no way to report that right now without incriminating yourself.”

-- Steve Duin

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