The one that didn't get away

Susannah Breslin has a new article for Salon covering the apparent suicide of the "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey last week.

After scandals with Larry Craig and Elliot Spitzer, coverage of the DC Madam story was conspicuously muted. Especially when considering the scandal brought down an ambassador in the Bush Administration, Randall L. Tobias, and soiled the record of retired Navy commander Harlan K. Ullman. The double standard is most apparent though in how, even as Palfrey was facing trial and subsequently convicted, the most high-profile "john" outed by the investigation, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), remains in the Senate and was in fact applauded by his peers on the Senate floor for returning to work after the scandal broke.

Not purely a political article, Death and the D.C. Madam takes into account the voices of other current and former working girls in exploring this double standard - one by which a woman is now dead, even as most of her clients remain safely anonymous.

"You can lull yourself into a false sense of security, and then when something happens, you realize that you're totally expendable, that nobody cares. You feel so powerless. And I think a lot of women just choose not to think about it -- because it's the only way that you can get through it and do the job."
--Former call girl Bree Daniels