You Too Can Ruin Careers and Destroy Lives! Read On to Find Out How

Posted on July 10, 2007

Attention amateur sleuths! Have I got a treat for you.

If you haven't heard of the infamous Case of the D.C. Madam, let me clue you in. Deborah Jeane Palfrey is alleged to have run a high-end prostitution business under the name of "Pamela Martin and Associates" here in our nation's capitol for 13 years, from 1993 to 2006.  Last October, the Feds busted Palfrey on racketeering charges arising from her business. Palfrey insists that she wasn't breaking the law, though; ABC News reports that

The women [employed by Palfrey] signed contracts agreeing not to engage in illegal activity, including having sex for money, Palfrey says, and were given guidelines on the difference between legal and illegal sexual behavior.  At least one woman, Dr. Paula Neble, is known to have told federal prosecutors that she had sex for money while working for Palfrey. Palfrey is suing her for breach of contract.

Her defense, in other words, is that the women she was representing were only supposed to be providing companionship, not sex; and if they took money in exchange for sex, they did so against Palfrey's instructions and their employment agreement.

That's not the interesting bit, though. The interesting bit is that Palfrey kept her phone records for all those years she was running Pamela Martin and Associates; and when the law came down on her, she threatened to make those records public — presumably embarrassing her clients, among whom are supposedly many Movers and Shakers.

Well, yesterday, she made good: the phone records are available for download on the Web site of her legal defense fund. Here's the link. (Note: you may have to hit refresh a few times to get the page to load; her Web server is currently getting hammered. No pun intended.)

So is there anything juicy in there? Well, at least one client has pre-emptively outed himself: Senator David Vitter (R-LA) announced yesterday that he had been a Palfrey client.

So clearly Palfrey wasn't kidding when she said there were Movers & Shakers in there. Which raises the obvious question: who else?

If you want to try and find out, grab the records and get going. It won't be easy; the records are being distributed as ZIP-ped up image files, not as text, so they're not easily searchable, and all you get is the timestamp of the call, and the phone number & city from which it came.

But you're an amateur sleuth, right? Surely little hurdles like that won't stop you.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

UPDATE (July 11, 2007): That was fast! 

Use this site to search the publicly released phone records of "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey, proprietor of the Pamela Martin and Associates "high end adult fantasy firm" in Washington, DC.