The Life of a Teenage Prostitute

JESSICA KLEMPNER, 17

In another installment of the Toledo Blade's ongoing article series: Lost Youth: Teenage Sex Trade, Bold teenage prostitute wanted out of 'game'; Toledoan is home insisting she's not afraid we learn the story of Jessica Klempner, a teenager who was arrested for prostitution in Florida last year at the age of 17 and who was willing to tell her story and have her photo taken, despite laws that would have protected her identity if she so wished. Her pimp was Wayne Banks Jr., the subject of both an earlier Blade article and one of Monday's posts: "Demystifying "The Game".

From the article:

In March, 2005, in Pensacola, after selling sex for five months, she told Banks she wanted to leave.

When police picked her up later that day, she told them Banks beat her several times during the three or four weeks she spent with him.

That night, Florida authorities took Jessica to the hospital for chest injuries - and they arrested Banks.

Back in Toledo now, she insisted her injuries that night weren't serious.

"I wasn't intimidated," she said. "I'm not scared of anything."

Although Banks has received an unprecedented 40-year jail term for sex trafficking minors across state lines, Klempner insists that he is not a bad guy and says of his conviction:

"It should have never happened."

To this day, she says Banks is "so sexy."

JESSICA & HER MOTHER, KIM KLEMPNER

Klempner's mother, Kim Klempner, 40, is as equally unfazed as her daughter about prostitution, although Jessica is now seeking a different line of work:

Jessica said she's given up prostitution and is seeking other work. She's applied for a cleaning job at a hotel, she said.

Jessica won't say why she doesn't want to go back to selling sex. She just doesn't want to - it's that simple.

Standing nearby, Ms. Klempner laughed at the question.

"Me? I'd like to be a high-price call girl," she said. "Sex with complete strangers can be fun sometimes. I'm sorry, maybe I'm too honest, but yeah. You know, the money aspect? I mean, why not?"

To Jessica's mother, transactional sex has its advantages.

"You marry a guy and you gotta give him sex and you're not even getting basically nothing out of it," she said.

"These ones I can send home when I'm done with them."