Riley Keough plays an escort and law student in The Girlfriend Experience. Photo courtesy of The Verge.
Summary: On the website Harlot, a lawyer and sex worker advocate shared her experience being an escort to support herself while in law school.
When Tina Dolgin was in her second week of law school, she received an email from an anonymous classmate, soliciting her for a blowjob in the library. While the message was alarming in itself, she was even more scared that he had written her private account, which she used solely for her escort business.
Like the character Christine in Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience, Dolgin was a sex worker during law school, and she shared her story on the website Harlot. She wrote that although she had some financial support from scholarships and family, the cost of living in the Bay Area of California was too expensive and she needed more money. While she knew that the legal field atmosphere was conservative-leaning, she was outspoken with her profession. Whenever someone asked why she was in school, she told people she wanted “to be a better advocate for my sex worker community.” Thankfully for her, those in her school were respectful and the weird blowjob email was the exception, not the norm.
However, when Dolgin encountered attorneys in the real world, that was a different story. She said they often made passes at her, offering “mentorship” but those offers came over a night of drinks and requests not to tell their wives. But Dolgin saw through their bull, and she didn’t let those men deter her from her goal—to launch a legal service to help sex workers.
According to Dolgin’s post, she launched Red Light Legal during her third year of law school. The company is located in Oakland and it provides free legal services and community education to sex workers. Their website states, “Red Light Legal is the first constituency-led legal organization providing services to this marginalized population… Like Justice Now, we believe policing and prisons are not making our communities safer and that the current system severely damages the communities most affected by criminalization and stigmatization.”
Red Light Legal is a non-profit organization, and it is currently accepting donations.
Source: Harlot