Las Vegas- Sex has been a part of the Las Vegas allure since the beginning of the gambling era and today it’s more obvious than ever.
But for the women who become trapped within the sex industry, there’s nothing glamorous about it. A veteran of the local escort industry says it’s a miracle she survived her years as a prostitute and she’s now trying to share the same sort of deliverance with others.
Annie Lobert started her own outreach program for sex workers and is out on the streets trying to save them, one working girl at a time.
“I was addicted to pornography. I was addicted to sex,” Annie Lobert says as she marches through the sea of weirdness that is the Adult Entertainment Expo. She seems right at home.
Lobert has never been a porn star like others at the Las Vegas gathering. For more than a decade, she was in another line of work.
“My old name was Fallon. So, if you ask the girls in the escort service, do you know a Fallon? They’ll say yeah, she’s kind of a legend,” Lobert said.
She was a professional escort, a fancy name for hooker. She survived pimps, rapes, and rip offs while serving customers in Las Vegas hotel rooms. Along the way, she was arrested 25 times.
The first vice officer to nab her was future Sheriff Bill Young. “Yeah, I arrested her many times. She was a regular. She was a beautiful woman and in her day, she could stop traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard,” said Bill Young, former Clark County Sheriff.
“He would always say I was too smart and there was something better for me, and I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Lobert said. But it took years for Lobert to heed Young’s advice. Her pimp wouldn’t allow it. Plus, she liked the money.
“I was a workaholic and I worked every single day of the week. If it was Christmas, I was working,” Lobert said. She said she brought in anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 a night.
Eventually it caught up with her in the form of drug abuse and serious health problems. She quit and found religion which is why she now prowls events like this one, non-plussed by raunchy displays, knowledgeable about the underlying desires. She’s just as comfortable taking a photo with the stars of male porn movies as she is networking with the like minded folks at Porn Stars for Jesus or the strippers turned Christians who call themselves J.C.’s girls.
Along the way, she chats by phone with a porn actress and with potential convert who she sets an appointment with to meet.
The recent explosion in sex businesses in Las Vegas has given Lobert plenty to do. There are more hookers here than ever, she says, and on a recent night, we cruised some prostitution hot spots in a wedding chapel limo so Annie and Carrie, another former escort, can get out and talk to streetwalkers.
It’s a tough sell talking with hookers. Using the limo is a temporary tactic. Lobert’s idea is to set up a school for prostitutes, similar to the john school where men busted for soliciting prostitutes must go to get a reduced sentence.
Bill Young told her he thinks the idea has merit since the working girls are, more often than not, crime victims themselves.
“Ninety-five-percent of the time there’s some man behind the scenes, driving the profits and the girls. The guy’s sitting at home doing nothing and the girls are out working every night,” Young said.
“It’s a process, because the girls are so wounded from what they’re doing. They have such low self worth and self esteem that it’s harder for them to come out of the gutter. If you tell them you’re beautiful, they’ll tell you you’re lying,” Lobert said.
“You can’t force your belief on anyone, and we don’t want to do that,” she adds.
Eyewitness News didn’t witness Annie make any converts, but we did see her start the process with several working girls. Once she gets her non-profit status, she hopes to take her missionary work to the next level, perhaps incorporating it into the legal system, much like the school for johns.