Speaker 1: 0:04

She could not get away from that asshole from nothing in the world and we tried everything. She would take a bus from Memphis, run away. I sent her money, grab the bus, come up here and boom. I think she shouldn't have came to New York, you know.

Speaker 2: 0:17

Hi everyone, my name is Ben Skye.

Speaker 3: 0:20

And I'm Em Bon.

Speaker 2: 0:22

And welcome back to another episode of Madam, the podcast. In this second part of this era and aspect of Julie's life, we're going to be hearing more about some of the people that she's met. In the previous episode, we talked about people that work with her in security, people that she encountered in various parts of the sex industry, but today we're going to be focusing a little bit more on some of the women that actually worked with her. What was that like for you, both as a sex worker and as somebody who's gotten to know Julie?

Speaker 3: 0:53

Honestly, it was hard hearing about some of the stories she had to share. The first one in particular is hard to hear because she's talking about a woman who was in a very similar situation to her and her pimp, that she came to New York with Some of the horrific and violent ways that this pimp treated women.

Speaker 2: 1:17

Really, it broke my heart to listen to it and to hear Julie tell that story, and so if you're sensitive to that kind of content, please be warned that we're going to have a very frank and honest description of both the way this person was treated and of the experience that this person went through, which resulted ultimately in the loss of her life is there anyone in particular that you want to talk about?

Speaker 1: 1:55

or heaven, you're talking about heaven. Heaven was, you know, the pimp that I had a long time ago. Right, he came back to new york many, many years later with this girl that was like 18 years old and it was Heaven. I named her Heaven because she was like this really pretty blonde girl, adorable and she was. He brought her to New York and I was like and I didn't like him anymore. But you know, he was my son's father, jerry's father, and his name was Pretty Jerry. He's from Minnesota, so he brought the girl here and she was like everybody went crazy for Heaven, you know, that's why I named her Heaven.

Speaker 1: 2:28

She was excellent service. I mean, she was like unbelievable Guys were going crazy to see her and she was really nice, but she wanted to get away from him and she tried everything. I tried to help her get away from him, like you know, but she wanted to work and it just didn't work because he kept coming. She even went to work at this place called Pink Little Pussycats. They were also advertising when Utopia died and she went to Pink Little Pussycats. It was alcohol. This guy called an alcohol and when she got there, it was him. He would take her and kidnap her. He even took her to Tennessee and married her and she left again and got away. I sent her money. She came back to New York. He ended up murdering her.

Speaker 3: 3:15

He didn't go to jail for murdering her, but everyone knows he murdered her. So the pimp that you previously came here with who you got away from, but is also the father of one. One of your sons comes in a lot later with Heaven Right and she's in a similar situation, similar spot, and you try to help her get out.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Yeah, I really tried to help her. This guy was like he was obsessed with this girl. He would not let her go. It was horrible. She worked for me about a year and the next time she came back she worked and she left the place and she disappeared. So we're like what happened to her? You know where did she go? And then the maid that worked for us her name was Petrina she said the police called because, having to stay at her house, you know, we snuck her over there and the police called and said that she was found on railroad tracks beaten to death. You know they never could prove that it was him, but everybody knows it was him.

Speaker 3: 4:08

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:10

And when I seen her, I'm like where's Heaven, oh, she's pregnant. She went with some guy you know. He told me this lying story about her, but then we found out she was murdered and on the side he would brag about it. You know what I mean. Like to people Like, yeah, I got that bitch, or whatever. It was just terrible. That's awful. It is horrible. Really sad too, because she could not get away from this guy. Those are the bad things you know with like things like this.

Speaker 3: 4:41

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Yeah, but there was a whole story. He even went. We had an apartment on 49th, across from the worldwide plaza. There was a parking garage there and we were across the street. At 339 49th street, this guy climbed into our window. A client was with this girl. He climbed in and pulled her off. The guy yes, pulled her off. The guy drug her across the street. And a client called me and said, listen, some pimp just came in and grabbed the girl off of me and I ran. I ran to the garage and he was coming out of the garage. He broke through that. You know, like the thing that comes down. He literally drove through that, broke through it and nothing happened. He got away with her. Mean, she came back after that again. But I'm just saying it was crazy to see somebody and I was like, wow, this girl doesn't want to be with you, leave her alone, you know. And he was like stay out of my business. You know that's my bitch, my whole, and you know it's just a bad situation.

Speaker 3: 5:40

that's awful, it was was horrible Because, looking back, it's something that could have happened to you.

Speaker 1: 5:50

Yeah, it could have happened. I said when I got away from him there was, I think, so many calls of 911. And they tried to take me to some domestic shelter place, but I didn't stay. I sat there and just left Because it was an office. I'm sitting there hours and hours and I was like the hell with this and I got the hell out of there, but thank God that I did get away from him. You know he went away for prison after that for eight years for, you know, underage girls and all kinds of stuff, but I wasn't involved in like with him at that point, that's after she got out.

Speaker 3: 6:34

and then here he brings a girl.

Speaker 1: 6:34

I see, I see, yeah. So he went to prison in between the time that you left him and he came back with heaven, right, yeah, because the time I left I had my own business, right. A lot changed, you know. And when he came to new york he used my son as a reason. He didn't do it ever do anything for my son. He never helped him, he never did anything good for him, never. He kidnapped him when he was a baby for me and I said if you don't bring my son back, I'm calling the FBI. And he actually brought my son to his cousins in Harlem and I had to go pick him up and get him away from there. She called me and said come and get your baby. He's here with me now and thank God I got him and then I sent him to my family. But I went through a lot with this pimp thing too.

Speaker 3: 7:12

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Yeah, it's horrible, yeah, yeah, because if you're making money for them, of course they don't want to let you go. We used to have to go out and work and he'd say which street are you on? We had to make $400. We could not come home. So, oh, I'm on 2nd Avenue. Well, when you get on 4th, let me know. You know, it's like that kind of a situation, but I got rid of his ass.

Speaker 3: 7:43

Is he still alive today? Do you know?

Speaker 1: 7:45

No, he died a few years ago.

Speaker 3: 7:48

Horribly. I hope, no, he didn't. No, possibly peacefully.

Speaker 1: 7:54

Heart situation, went to the hospital, didn't come out, yeah, but he was something else. He was raised, he, he said and I met his mother this a long time ago in tennessee. She had a boarding house and you know they were prostitutes. So he grew up in a prostitution. His mom, mary morgan, was murdered by a pimp and his hooker. They robbed her and they beat her in the head and killed her. Wow, yeah, and back then there was all this like payback. You know, so they would. You know, I think, yeah, things didn't really get resolved back then by the cops and stuff a lot no yeah, so they just got away with a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1: 8:34

Wow, matter of fact, the guy that did a photograph. It was really weird because it was strange, because he had her photographs with wings and clouds. You know, it's so weird and it was so sad, you know, because she could not get away from that asshole from nothing in the world, and we tried everything. She would take a bus from Memphis, run away. I sent her money, grabbed the bus, come up here and boom. I think she shouldn't have came to New York, you know. And then we had Lola, our first Lola. There you go, tell us about Lola Lola. Yeah, lola was from the Bronx. She was like in her 20s. She was unbelievable too. Her service was like, wow, you know, really great service. She was really nice Lola. She lasted up until around that time that we all got boom In 2005,. That's the last I saw her.

Speaker 3: 9:39

There's one girl who left with a client, married a client, that is. Is that Cheyenne, or?

Speaker 1: 9:47

Raven, Raven, yeah, Raven, yeah, Raven married a surgeon Nice. Yeah, that was really nice. I was happy for that. Those kind of stories I like and I didn't get upset with the girls If a guy really liked a girl, you know. One guy you know wrote me and said that he had cancer and prostate cancer. He says, why pass away? He really liked this girl, Marilyn, and she's in there too, and he wanted to see Marilyn. He said, would you mind? You know I really like her. And I gave him permission, you know. I was like, yeah, of course, you know, if it's really something I'm not going to stand in between, you know what I mean. And she went with him and he retired her from the business and she, you know Marilyn was a wild maniac though yeah, she was, but she was great service from Chicago.

Speaker 2: 10:40

Yeah, now she's in a nursing home in Chicago, Somebody who used to work for you. Her name was Brittany. This is somebody that you met and came to work at a couple of your establishments and you're all still friends, right right yes, I wonder if you can tell us how you met Brittany, what your relationship was like when you first met and how your relationship evolved.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Well, I met Brittany years ago. She came to work for Bleecker. She had a pimp. She had a pimp and I guess he went away to prison or whatever.

Speaker 1: 11:14

But I met Brittany and I immediately did not like her. There was something about her that she was, oh, I don't like GFE, you know what I mean. And I was like, well, that's why you're not making a lot of money. We just had that kind of a relationship, you know, and she was like I was like I can't stand this girl. She never shuts up. She wants to like help everyone, you know, assist this and assist that. You know what I'm saying Give her advice or whatever. And and I couldn't stand her.

Speaker 1: 11:42

And then she started hanging around with another girl there Her name was Naomi and this girl like really took advantage of her because Brittany, she's a type of party girl. She'll party, get drunk, you know, goes for days like that. And it's like I was like you can't do that, you know, you're like you're fucking yourself up. But anyway, we became really good friends and she, she was a type of girl that she, you know, she really helped me with whatever I needed, like anything I needed. She was there for me to help me have really a lot of respect, you know. So we became really good friends, yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:17

One of the you know, brittany's been with you a couple of times that you've shown up for these and she, like it was right before you went into the hospital or right after you came out of the hospital when you showed up and I was helping you get out of the car, and the way that she cared for you she does care for me, she does help me, yeah. You know, getting you on the curb safe and getting you down was really sweet.

Speaker 1: 12:44

I could really tell she went to the hospital with me. She bothered the hell out of the doctors, which is like I'm just happy, I really love her. Now she's really grown on me and she's really tried to help me with things. She's like really grown on me and she's really tried to like help me with things and she's she's always there for me for certain things. You know she's she's back in touch with the kids now and now she's so happy that she's, you know, connected with them. So her life is changing too, you know, and things are going good for her and she's a really good friend too. She's like almost like a daughter kind of.

Speaker 2: 13:25

So I did want to make sure our listeners knew about another project that you're working on, em, which is part of your ongoing sort of quest mission to chronicle the work of sex workers and make sure that their stories are told, which is Em. You have recently completed your very first short film.

Speaker 3: 13:46

Yeah, I just completed my first film this summer.

Speaker 2: 13:51

It's a documentary right.

Speaker 3: 13:52

Yes, it's a documentary short. Originally, I sat out to document five people that I knew, their relationship to sex work and recovery. These are two important things to me, since I identify as a sex worker and I'm also in recovery. I found these two subjects to be very much intertwined. And yet sex workers you know, a lot of times we know that their stories are exploited. Their stories are inaccurate, they're not written by workers themselves.

Speaker 3: 14:27

So I basically I just wanted to record my friends talking about their lives, their relationship to sobriety and sex work, and ended up Learning how to work the camera and sound system and filming these people. Over the course of a couple of months I learned a lot. I want to make films, which is not something that I necessarily thought I could do, but after this experience, I really, I guess, fell in love with the art of storytelling in this way. And the documentary is called Fucking Sober. It's about my friend, brooke Johnson, who's a BDSM adult performer. They're based in Vegas and basically I I went to Vegas in May of 2023 and stayed with Brooke. We'd never met in person, we just met online.

Speaker 2: 15:36

I didn't know that.

Speaker 3: 15:38

Um and we'd known each other for, I think, about a year online and then I told them about the project, were interested, were willing to shoot um. I was also filming with, like I said, other people around that time escorts, porn stars all of whom were in recovery.

Speaker 2: 15:59

All of them were dealing with sobriety.

Speaker 3: 16:01

Yes, yeah and it just ended up for a lot of different reasons, which I'd be happy to get into in a later episode. But basically, brooke was the one that stuck around and we took all the footage that we shot together and I found an editor who's edited this film for free. It was many months, many hours that we spent together and he also mentored me through this entire process, and now we are trying to get it in the festival circuit.

Speaker 2: 16:41

What is it specifically about the relationship between sex work and recovery that interests you as a storyteller and as a filmmaker, and as somebody who's invested in this work of chronicling these stories?

Speaker 3: 16:54

Like I said, I think accurate media representation is so important for sex workers variety, recovery and sex work. These things are intertwined, at least in my experience going into recovery circles and hearing the amount of people that did sex work either before, after or during their recovery process. It's a lot of people and things either specifically retaining to the act of doing this work or just being a worker that are hard and challenging for the subject of your film.

Speaker 2: 17:45

that helped them deal with some of the as you say difficult aspects of sex work. You know the aspects of sex work that they talk about, that that can feel disempowering at times, if that's a fair characterization. You know I don't want to put words in their mouth, but but, but that's certainly one of the things that I heard in watching the film.

Speaker 3: 18:10

Yeah, I think both things can be a reclamation of power doing sex work and doing recovery and it was a really beautiful process. I'm just really grateful to Brooke who trusted me through all of this, and it's just been a really incredible experience.

Speaker 2: 18:32

Again. I've I've seen the completed film and I know it's just starting to sort of work its way into the festival circuit right now. But, uh, I I want to say to our listeners it is a very powerful piece of filmmaking and, um, something that you should be very proud of, and our listeners can check out a preview of the film at mvonme that's E-M-V-A-U-G-H-N dot M-E. The trailer itself is really inspiring. So if you like the trailer, stick around for the whole movie. But it's a wonderful piece and something you should be very proud of, and I'm really excited for our listeners to get to know more of your work in this sort of mission, this ongoing mission that you have of chronicling these stories, because it's important work, and this podcast is one piece of a larger story that is your life. So, yeah, check it out.

Speaker 2: 19:30

Fucking Sober by Em Vaughn Before we go. I want to make sure that our listeners know about some other places that they can hear Em talk about sex work and the stories that she's telling and her work chronicling the lives of sex workers. Em, you'll be appearing on some other podcasts about sex work in the near future, Is that right?

Speaker 3: 19:49

That's true. I just went on Stripped by Sia, a very lovely, beautiful, incredible podcast that's been around for about five years. I was lucky enough to get a little guest slot on her show and have an interview with her about ethical storytelling and documenting the lives of sex workers. We just had a really rich conversation about it and that will be available in early November.

Speaker 2: 20:22

Madam is produced and co-hosted by M Vaughn and Ben Skye. To subscribe to M's newsletter, where she writes about her experiences as a sex worker, visit mvaughnme. That's E-M-V-A-U-G-H-N dot me. Our show is edited by Nate Naxian Ward, our music was composed by Timothy Reyes and, of course, the star of our show is the madam herself, julie Moya. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and support the show by joining our Patreon at patreoncom. Slash, madam pod. Our patrons will receive their own print of an original artwork by Julie herself and get access to special bonus interviews. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.