WASHINGTON — The phone records of the accused D.C. Madam have been posted online and are available for public viewing.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, tells WTOP he changed his plan of distributing the information — which includes calls from 1994-2006 — only to journalists after he learned of one organization’s plan to post the numbers in their entirety.
Sibley says after he began distributing CDs with the information, he was alerted that their security coding wasn’t sophisticated enough to prevent hacking, and it would be easy to make someone’s number appear on the list even if it hadn’t been originally.
When he initially offered the records to journalists and bloggers last week, it was with the condition that the information would not be posted in its entirety.
“I sent out 54 discs with the records on them,” Sibley says. “[Monday] morning, we got calls and emails saying there wasn’t any security on the coding and the numbers were going to be all over the place anyway. I got one email that said the agreement isn’t enforceable, and that group intended to release the records for free.”
Sibley wouldn’t identify the group further than saying it was a D.C.-based organization. When he initially offered the records, Sibley pledged he wouldn’t disclose which news organizations received copies.
“It’s an evolution from how we planned to put the numbers out,” he says. “Our original thought of coding each disc so we’d know who violated the agreement wasn’t sophisticated enough. It’s so easy to accuse somebody, and once you do that, the retraction is useless.”
Posting the numbers online does leave him open for criticism, but Sibley says in balancing the evils, this was the correct decision.
“That’s why we’re putting out the numbers, so there’s one official list, and any list that’s different can be compared to ours,” he says.
Palfrey is accused of running a prostitution service catering to men in the area. Her business, Pamela Martin & Associates, is said to have entertained 15,000 customers in the Washington, D.C. area between 1993 and 2006.