The Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community sits off state Route 170, on the edge of East Palestine, Ohio, a town most Americans only learned about because a train derailed there in February 2023 and released toxic chemicals into the creek. I grew up in a trailer park like this one, and know the sights. The grid of aluminum boxes in rows. Skirting the color of old teeth, some of it buckled, some patched with a piece of lattice. The window units huff and puff in August, dripping dark condensation on to the gravel.
I’m sure there were drugs on my street. I’m sure somebody was selling sex. I never saw it. What I saw were families raising kids in 800 square feet and people the country had already written off, living next to each other and mostly getting along.
That’s the kind of place where police arrested San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York on the morning of 23 August.
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Agents with the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force posted an undercover ad on a website known for prostitution. York answered it and agreed to pay a woman just $160 for sex, according to court records. There was no woman waiting for York. Dan Haueter, an East Palestine detective on the taskforce, described the method to the Ohio attorney general’s office in 2024: post an advertisement for sex online, negotiate a price with a prospective customer and arrange to meet in East Palestine. The sting worked because it’s based on real life. York carried the glowing phone he used to set the bargain to the trailer park, where officers took him into custody.
Police booked York on two counts: engaging in prostitution – which was later reduced to disorderly conduct – and possessing criminal tools (in this case, his cellphone). York pleaded no contest to the charges and was sentenced to two days in jail to be served concurrently and fined $1,150.
Ohio charges buying sex from an adult as a first-degree misdemeanor and sends the buyer to an education program. Selling is a third-degree misdemeanor. So the statute is harder on the buyer. But it helps a buyer like York if he can pay a high-powered lawyer to work on his case. York ended up pleading the count down to disorderly conduct.
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York is not the first NFL owner to find themselves in a situation like this. Florida prosecutors charged New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in 2019 with soliciting prostitution at the Orchids of Asia spa in Jupiter, part of what police billed as a major human trafficking investigation. His lawyers challenged the hidden-camera warrants and won, and the state dropped the charges in September 2020. By then, an assistant state attorney had already told the court the investigation turned up no human trafficking. Prosecutors pressed ahead against four Chinese women who worked at Orchids of Asia instead. The women didn’t receive the same breaks. Instead, they received criminal records and about $45,000 in fines.
Nationwide, women account for nearly 64% of adult prostitution arrests. Rebecca Pfeffer, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Houston – Downtown, studied about 23,000 prostitution cases in Harris County, Texas, and found that police arrested and jailed men less often than women. The women who landed in jail stayed there longer.
My mom could support us because nothing on her record stopped her. Put a prostitution conviction on a woman two lots down, and the background check keeps her unemployed and desperate.
The NFL’s personal conduct policy is blunt about how owners should conduct themselves. The policy claims to hold owners to a higher standard than anyone else in the league, with stiffer consequences to match. A league spokesperson says York’s case will be reviewed under that policy. Kraft drew no discipline from the NFL after Florida dropped his charges in 2020. Owners write the rules, and the NFL commissioner they hire and pay enforces them. A standard like that lasts exactly as long as the owners want it to.
But expecting those owners to hold themselves accountable is wishful thinking. The York situation would be less absurd if the US decriminalized the entire transaction for all parties.
The ACLU reviewed the empirical research on how criminalization affects sex workers and found that police are a bigger threat to sex workers than clients are. Additionally, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health surveyed 250 women and found that 22% had suffered violence from a client in the previous three months, while 78% had endured at least one abusive encounter with police. The numbers cover different time spans, so they aren’t a clean comp. But they make the same point. The police sent to protect women are also a danger to them. In that same cohort of women, 70% had been locked up for more than three days, an average of 15 incarcerations apiece.
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Kate Shannon, associate professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, and her colleagues looked at 87 studies and concluded that over the course of a decade, decriminalization could prevent 33% to 46% of projected HIV infections among female sex workers.
In 2018, Congress passed a law to fight trafficking. The law made websites liable for ads that facilitate prostitution, so the sites that sex workers used to advertise and vet clients shut down. Activists Danielle Blunt and Ariel Wolf surveyed sex workers, and 99% said the law did not make them feel safer. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2021 that prosecutors had brought a single case under the law’s criminal provision, and no victim had received restitution.
The three approaches to decriminalizing sex work get confused constantly, but they differ significantly. Legalization keeps prostitution a crime but makes exceptions for workers who register, get licensed or work in a permitted zone. The Nordic model, which Sweden adopted in 1999 and Canada, France and Northern Ireland later copied, makes selling sex legal and buying it a crime. The theory is that you protect the seller and punish the buyer. In practice, it’s mostly women who still lose. Clients who face arrest demand that sex workers meet them somewhere hidden – and possibly dangerous. Full decriminalization removes criminal penalties on both sides and regulates the work through labor and health law, as the state would handle any other job. Trafficking and assault laws still apply, and they are obviously more effective when a woman can walk into a police station without getting arrested.
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Most sex workers are just trying to survive, just as my mom was as a cashier. Median household income in East Palestine runs about $49,000. Last year, the York family sold off a small piece of the 49ers, a 6.2% stake for more than $500m. Meanwhile, York’s penalty for his offense over the weekend cost him $1,150 (and, of course, when you’re rich any additional legal fees are easy enough to cover).
A woman in Columbiana county once told an undercover officer that “no girls wanna go” to East Palestine because of the prostitution stings in the area. The county later convicted her of promoting prostitution anyway. York was arrested under the same chapter of Ohio law, and he was back on the road by Monday afternoon.
