Laura Lee obituary

Law graduate and sex worker who enjoyed her occupation and became a tireless campaigner for the rights of prostitutes

April 26 2018, 12:00pm,
The Times

Laura Lee in 2016. She began work in a Dublin massage parlour at the age of 19
Laura Lee in 2016. She began work in a Dublin massage parlour at the age of 19
CHARLES MCQUILLAN/GETTY IMAGES
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Laura Lee sat her seven-year-old daughter on her knee one day and told her that she was a sex worker. “I said: ‘Mummy has this job. I keep lonely men company if they’ve not got a woman with them. It’s not illegal and it’s not immoral, but it’s probably best if we don’t mention it at parents’ night,’ ” recalled Lee, a leading advocate for the oldest profession and the first active sex worker to give evidence to a government inquiry into prostitution.

A woman with a personality as vivid as her long, jet-black curly hair, she had loved her job from her first shifts in a Dublin massage parlour, where she could make £200 a night.

“I was going to university in Dublin and finding it increasingly difficult to meet the costs,” she said. “Most of my friends were working three or four nights a week in restaurants. Being inherently lazy, I took the unorthodox choice to become the Saturday girl in the local massage parlour.”

She had been inspired by watching the 1987 film Personal Services about the suburban madam Cynthia Payne (obituary, November 17, 2015). Like her hero, Lee was an expert dominatrix, but also delighted in talking to her clients about their marital problems and spent time with physically disabled people who had never had sex before. Her job title given to the Inland Revenue was “corporate therapist”.

“Sometimes the wife is ill or in a care home or they got married young. They still adore their wives but the physical side is missing. Sex is probably about 25 per cent of what we do. I had one client who passed away from liver cancer last year and I held him tight and asked him, ‘Are you scared?’ When he said ‘yes’, we both held each other and cried. For these men it’s about remembering how to hold a woman, how we smell, and how soft we are.”

Having been outed several times, Lee decided to be “out and proud” and campaigned against legislation that could drive prostitution farther underground. She fought against a bill introduced in 2015 by the Democratic Unionist Party peer Lord Morrow that made paying for sex in Northern Ireland a criminal offence. She claimed that the risk of assault was far greater after the law was enacted. “People are not willing to use online booking forms or divulge their details. Everyone suddenly became ‘John’. There hasn’t been a reduction in demand but it is far more difficult to keep myself safe,” said Lee, who applied for a judicial review and received a “tsunami of abuse” on social media. “They are using hotel phones, for example, to contact sex workers in Belfast rather than leaving their mobiles. This means if one of them turns violent there is no longer any real traceability.”

She was one of the few active prostitutes to speak publicly about her own scrapes. “One guy got to my place clearly disturbed. He started with hideous verbal abuse, based on sectarianism and his hatred of sex workers, a hatred of Catholics . . . My primary purpose was to get him out of the room, which I did eventually.”

With her personable Dublin brogue, Lee made it her mission to destigmatise sex work. In interviews she would talk about her domestic life as a single mother and that 70 per cent of sex workers were mothers providing for their children.

She rejected the police estimate that 50 per cent of women working in London’s 2,000 brothels had been trafficked. Lee claimed that the law’s definition of sex trafficking was nebulous and joked that if a friend gave her a lift they were technically trafficking her.

She laughed off the religious “fanatics” who condemned her work as immoral and reserved as much scorn for actresses such as Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep and their pronouncements on prostitution. “We have asked them on several occasions to stop speaking over our heads. It’s patronising. It’s: ‘Shh, shh, we know what’s best for you, we’re going to get you out of this industry because you’re harming yourself and you don’t even know it.’ I think I’d know if I was being harmed.”

Indeed, Lee enjoyed the work so much that she said: “I dread the day I hang up my thigh-length boots. I’ll miss my clients, the excitement and the salacious side of it.”

Antoinette Cosgrave was born in Dublin in 1973 into a working-class Catholic family and attended a school run by nuns. She was a natural rebel and would exasperate the staff with her naughtiness. However, she was a bright child and got into University College Dublin to read law. At the same time she worked in a Dublin massage parlour until a local newspaper published a story about her. She told her parents. While deeply shocked, they took it well, she said.

After graduating Lee made steps towards becoming a barrister, but her plans changed after she became pregnant during a short-lived relationship and needed a job to support her daughter. She moved to Oban on Scotland’s west coast, where she worked in a bank and entertained clients in the evenings.

Business was brisk because there were no other escorts in the area. Word spread and traditional Presbyterian sensibilities were inflamed. Passers-by would scream at her and tell her daughter: “Your mummy is going to die of Aids.” The bank received complaints from its customers and tried to sack her. Lee fought against her dismissal on the grounds that she was being discriminated against, but the case never came to court. “I became a sex worker to throw off the stigma of working in banking,” she said.

Lee moved to Kilmarnock in Ayrshire and built up a roster of clients around the country, advertising “tours” on her website. She originally used the name Anna, but about ten years ago took up the pseudonym Laura Lee.

She gave lectures to police forces on sex work and one of her proudest achievements was to persuade the Police Service of Northern Ireland to introduce “sex work liaison officers” in 2014. A year earlier she had started an Open University degree in psychology.

Lee gave evidence to the 2016 home affairs inquiry into prostitution and was often called as an expert witness at trials involving sex workers. She was often recognised in public. “People come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I’ve heard you’ve got a website’ and then you just look at them and say, ‘yeah, and what?’ There’s nothing to deny; if it’s not a secret, it can’t hurt you.”

Behind the bravado, Lee was deeply hurt by the online abuse. Friends also said she was psychologically damaged by a sexual assault three years ago.

She tried to find a romantic relationship of her own. She would tell female friends, over a cup of tea or something stronger, of how nervous she was feeling about a date. After going out with various men in recent years, she was still looking for love.

Lee is survived by her daughter Cat, 17, who is a student. They lived in a house full of hamsters with a cat called Pebbles and a kitten called Luna. She would bring treats such as fresh sausages for her clients’ pets.

She was proud of her daughter, who, she said, “will defend me to the absolute last. What consenting adults do behind closed doors is no one’s business.”

Laura Lee, sex worker and advocate, was born on April 25, 1973. She died of undisclosed causes on February 7, 2018, aged 44