It isn’t exactly shocking when a pimp turns out to be a rapist. It is a little shocking when the police deliberately protect him — and he gets elected to state office.
Welcome to Nevada, the only state in America that has legalized pimping. A&E’s new docuseries, “Secrets of the Bunny Ranch,” reveals the late Dennis Hof’s HBO-featured brothel empire for the cesspool of violence and exploitation that it (unsurprisingly) was, featuring powerful interviews from survivors and Hof’s former publicist.
But the series is not just an exposé of the crimes of the man who was once Nevada’s biggest legal pimp. It also brings to light the corrupt system underpinning and enabling the abuses, and the callous way that HBO profited off them with its nine-year run of “Cathouse.”
Prostitution is legal in rural counties in Nevada, but only if it occurs within brothels. In other words, prostituted women must be under the control of a brothel for legal status. If a woman receives a license for one brothel, she cannot simply leave and strike out on her own or even go to another brothel. She must apply and pay for a new license, a process that also requires compulsory STI testing.
Prostituted women are thus not only forced to have pimps, but they are also discouraged from leaving them by law.
In “Secrets of the Bunny Ranch,” survivors detailed the fee system that kept them in debt to these brothels. The brothels took 50% of whatever the women made off the top, while also charging the women for room and board. Many women do not stay in the black.
These accounts dovetail with what dozens of survivors of Nevada’s legal brothels have told me. After the brothels take their cut, the women must still pay licensing fees, cover STI examination costs — which are mandatory for the women, but not for the men who visit the brothels — and whatever fines the brothels decide to dish out. Debt, of course, is one of the oldest means of enslavement, and was a prominent feature of 19th-century American brothels.
In one case, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Law Center found that women at the Chicken Ranch brothel were routinely subjected to searches of their emails, phones, and personal possessions, according to the NCOSE lawsuit. If they were caught with personal items or cash in their own rooms, they would forfeit all of the money in their Chicken Ranch accounts.
What’s more, survivors reported that women in the brothels were not allowed to leave at will, but were locked inside for weeks at a time.
Where is the law enforcement in this ostensibly regulated prostitution system, especially given these abuses? “Secrets of the Bunny Ranch” answers that too, describing how officials in Nye and Lyon counties, where Hof’s brothels were located, protected him. It is well established that slavery thrives where it enjoys official protection. This can be through explicit legalization, as in chattel slavery in the American South. It can also happen through corruption, where — as in most of the world today — slavery is illegal on paper.
A survivor — interviewed at length in the show — described how she was raped by Dennis Hof almost as soon as she arrived in the brothel. She went to the Nye County Police to report the rape. When she informed them of the perpetrator, they shrugged and didn’t even file a report. When she later attempted to leave the brothel, she was allegedly beaten on Dennis Hof’s orders until she began having seizures, and then was hospitalized with head injuries.
To be clear: engaging in prostitution because the pimp has said you cannot leave, and has repeatedly subjected you to violence from his own rapes and other abuses, and from ordering other people to beat you up, is textbook sex trafficking.
Sex trafficking occurs whenever there is a commercial sex act and the victim is either under 18 or subjected to force, fraud, or coercion. Coercion includes abuse or threatened abuse of legal process, threats of physical restraint, or financial, psychological, or reputational harm — something the jurors in the Diddy case had trouble grasping.
The show details how a sheriff’s deputy would show up at the Moonlite Brothel in his squad car and uniform as a sex buyer. This seems to get disturbingly close to the line of “threatened abuse of the legal process,” when the police are not only failing to do their most basic job of protecting the community from the rapists, but are actively enabling the rapists.
When Hof was running for the Nevada Assembly, the survivor who had unsuccessfully tried to report him to the police spoke up in a public county meeting. She was silenced by the local officials and told to file a new report with the police department. The police never charged Hof, who was found dead in his bed the next month. Nevadans posthumously elected him to the state legislature.
It has become fashionable to defend legal prostitution. But the corruption and violence “Secrets of the Bunny Ranch” exposed in Nevada’s legal brothels are not bugs, but features of any legal system that permits human beings to be bought, sold, or rented. A reckoning is well past due.
Christen Price is senior legal counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the leading national non-profit organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation, such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography. On X: @NCOSE
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
