Hollywood movie 'Pretty Woman' inspired ex sex worker

Sex worker inspired by 90’s movie Pretty Woman admits that the reality of her work was far darker.

Annie Lobart experienced more than a decade of sex trafficking and exploitation from 1987 to 1998.

She now runs a sex worker outreach group called Hookers for Jesus.

In replacement of money, sometimes Lobart would request her clients to take her shopping, like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

“I’d say, ‘Oh, I want to go to Tiffany and get a diamond ring…oh, I want a Louis Vuitton, I want a Chanel purse…” she tells Podcaster Peter Santenello.

She tells him that the movie Pretty Woman was “our fantasy”, always hoping to meet someone to take her away from the trap of prostitution and provide a glamourous life.

Lobart shares that when first choosing to work in the sex industry, she was seduced by the glamour of the work, but as time went on, she was sold to traffickers and the reality became much darker.

The pimp she worked for beat her when she tried to escape and used her as an example to the other girls he controlled.

“When you leave you get beat down, hunted down, they send their handlers to find you," she explained. "And you get kidnapped, which happened to me.

“I got all my hair cut off in front of six pimps. And they brought their girls to this…’checking’ of me, they call it. My ex-trafficker made me take all my clothes off, my pimp, and he said, 'Bend your head down.'

"Then he had a gun to my head like this. And so I bend my head down and I heard the razor turn on. And he shaved all my hair off. Because he knew that my hair was my money, it was part of my look.

“And then he took the poker from the fireplace and he just went ‘boom’ on my leg. The muscle got completely killed.”

And yet Lobart says the secret world of sex life was glamorous, “such an underground world… it was so taboo and so attractive. It just drew me in like the Twilight Zone.”

You can read more about Annie Lobart’s story in her memoir ‘Fallen: Out of the sex industry and into the arms of the savior’.