A federal judge Thursday permanently banned the owner of a Washington-area escort service from selling her client list, a move prosecutors said was designed to intimidate witnesses.
Deborah Palfrey, 50, had threatened to sell 46 pounds of business and phone records to the highest bidder to pay for her defense after she earned racketeering and money-laundering charges.
Instead, after prosecutors tried to stop the selling of the documents, Palfrey’s attorney said she gave the records to a respectable media organization. She has not identified the news organization.
She said she hopes the news organization will aid her defense by uncovering the names of customers who can testify that Palfrey’s escorts did not engage in prostitution.
Palfrey said last week that her business, Pamela Martin and Associates, was a “legal, high-end erotic-fantasy service” whose clientele “came from the more refined walks of life” in the D.C. area.
Last October, the federal government froze her assets after a 2 1/2-year Internal Revenue Service investigation. Palfrey is suing to have those assets returned.
Palfrey, who lives in California, employed more than 130women and earned $2 million from 1993 to 2006, according to the indictment. Court documents show she recruited her escorts through ads in the University of Maryland student newspaper, looking for women at least 22 years old who had some college education.
