Favor Hamilton, Olympian, call girl. in a recent promotional shot for browsing johns. “Faster, Higher, Stronger!”
The Smoking Gun, in what has to constitute the most ready-made plot for a cheesy movie in history, has obtained documents showing that three-time Olympian runner Suzy Favor Hamilton spent the last year living a secret life as a Las Vegas call girl. The entire story is jaw-dropping, including Hamilton’s comments about it once she was confronted with imminent exposure. It also raises some vivid ethical issues, as you might expect.
Beginning last December, the 44-year-old Hamilton started working under the fake name “Kelly Lundy” with one of Las Vegas’s premier escort services, booking what the Smoking Gun terms as “scores of ‘dates'” in Vegas, where prostitution (I was surprised to learn) is illegal (though it is legal in other parts of Nevada), as well as Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and other cities, where it is also against the law. She apparently was outed after she told one of her clients who she really was, and he couldn’t keep a secret.
Hmmmm.
A few observations:
- Is leading a double life unethical? As an ethics rule of thumb, if you keep conduct secret and especially if you engage in it under a false identity, there is probably something wrong with that conduct, and you know it. Clandestine activities certainly raise questions of personal integrity and honesty. Whether or not a double life is unethical often depends on whether it harms others or is likely to do so.
- Being a prostitute harms others or threatens to do so. Hamilton has expressed concerns that she will be attacked a “homewrecker” now that her eccentric hobby is known. That’s a “smoking gun” right there. Prostitutes are professional home wreckers. Hamilton knew it, and did it anyway. Yes, Suzy, you’re a homewrecker. Not all by yourself, of course, but you willingly participated in the wrecking of homes for personal profit.
- Hamilton also has the Tiger Woods problem. She had an ongoing contract with Disney, based on her squeaky-clean image as an Olympian. She knew becoming a Las Vegas call girl risked the potential consequence of embarrassing her employer. She had an obligation, if this was her chosen path, to inform Disney and get their permission. You know: “Hey, sure, Suzy; Disney doesn’t care if its public face includes prostitutes. No problemo!” Or, in the alternative, give up the Disney relationship. The third ethical alternative would be to give up her dream of being paid to perform sex acts with men.
- While I wouldn’t maintain that Hamilton or any Olympian has a lifetime obligation to avoid any activity that might embarrass the U.S. Olympic team or the Olympic movement generally, I would put these organizations among the stake-holders in Hamilton’s public conduct. She knew, or should have known, that her career as a call girl posed risks and dangers to the image of the Olympics.
- It also violated her duty as a role model for young athletes, especially young female athletes. Obviously, she didn’t care about this, or didn’t care enough about her role model and exemplar status to take reasonable steps to protect them…like, say, just to pick a wild example out of the air, not to become a high-priced hooker.
- Much is being made about the fact that Hamilton didn’t need to be an escort. She and her husband, a lawyer, are apparently financially secure. I don’t think this factor makes her conduct better or worse. Being a prostitute is unethical whether you need the money or not.
- Favor, as she likes to be called (ironic, because she couldn’t use her real name as a call girl, and that’s a great one) is miffed at the john who outed her to a reporter. “He totally broke all the rules by outing me,” she says. Favor won’t return the favor, because “I don’t want to be like him. Because he is scum. And I will not become scum to make myself feel good. I will not do it. I would suffer rather than go that route of being vindictive.” This is admirable on her part, for in a relationship of mutual confidentiality, when one party breaks the agreement, the other party is ethically relieved from the obligation to keep the secrets involved. Calling him scum seems excessively severe to me, however. I doubt that he volunteered to be the repository of that magnitude of secret. She chose to burden him, trusting a virtual stranger with her news and scandal-worthy story, and bears the majority of the responsibility for what transpired. If Bruce Wayne, indulging his secret fetish for stripping, tells a young woman who is stuffing twenties into his silver-sequined jock-strap, “Just between us, I’m Batman,” he can hardly call her “scum” if she tips off TMZ. Tipping off the Joker would be wrong, however.
- Hamilton loses ethics points by trotting out the “anyone can make a mistake” trope where it is obviously absurd. “Everybody in this world makes mistakes. I made a huge mistake. Huge,” she is quoted as saying. Which of her gazillion mistakes is she referring to, I wonder? Telling the client who she was, for example, was a mistake….downright stupid, in fact. Signing with an escort service was a mistake. Engaging in prostitution in states where it is illegal was a mistake, every time she did it. “Everybody in this world makes mistakes” is something you can say when you put your wife’s Cashmere sweater in the wash, or mistakenly record “Undercover Boss” instead of “Downton Abbey.” When the “mistake” is being a secret call girl for a year, this is just a rationalization. There was no mistake. Hamilton did what she wanted to do, knew the risks, did it anyway, and was discovered.
- On the plus side, Hamilton says that she let her husband know about her new passion from the start. He was not supportive, she says.
Fancy that.
_______________________________________
Pointer: The Blaze
Facts and Graphic: The Smoking Gun
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
Don’t forget the john’s . . . there always seems to be a focus on the woman. Homewrecking begins with the man in this instance. I’m not letting her off the hook, but married men who go to prostitutes need to look in the mirror when their marriage tanks.
Yup. You’ll get no argument from me. They better not have contracts with Disney,either…
The only ethical failure here is when Suzy Hamilton misrepresented her image to Disney, and the kids that look up to her as a role model, in order to sell it.
Prostitution like this is subjectively distasteful but not unethical.
Prostitution is unethical where it is illegal, which was the case in many of Suzy’s “dates.” It is also an unethical system that exploits and victimizes vulnerable women, and facilitates breach of vows, family responsibilities, loyalty, honesty, and is a bright line betrayal You can advocate its legalization if you want but it is certainly unethical.
Focusing on the ethics of prostitution itself, and not on the ethics of breaking the law, the argument against it is largely based on stereotype. And though stereotypes can be a useful shorthand for careful observation or thought, they are far from universal. Consider this: Suzy Hamilton was obviously not exploited or victimized. She didn’t need the money and engaged in prostitution ostensibly for kicks. Assume for a moment that the men she slept with weren’t married. Where is the ethical failure in that?
The point is that prostitution, like all professions, is situationally ethical or unethical. Unilaterally condemning it regardless of circumstance or qualification is unjustifiable moral extremism.
Ethics are not situational. The specifics of situations call for analysis of ethical effects, but the ethical principles remain the same. It is disingenuous to call the exploitive and sexist aspects of prostitution “stereotypical.” Few women enter the trade because of choice–it is dominated by the poor, uneducated, and drug-addicted. Men use prostitutes to cheat on girlfriends and wives—Yes, this is not universally true. But is a uniquely ugly, damaging, exploitive and unethical profession. And you can’t take the law out of the ethical equation. Lawbreaking is wrong.
Repackaging an argument is not the same as disproving the counter argument. Though, giving credit where its due, I’m fairly certain the obtuse line about analysis of ethical effects was meant to counter my assertion that the ethics here are situational.
If you feel my premise can indeed be proved false, I ask you start with “Consider this: … Where is the ethical failure in that?” I felt the answer was so clear as to be rhetorical but we may press it into service anyway.
Huh?
The fact that an unethical business, trade and occupation does not always have unethical results does not make it “situational.” The business itself, as a whole, has demonstrable, regular and predictable unethical consequences to individuals and society at large, and thus it is wholly appropriate and accurate to say that it is unethical. There are legitimate arguments to be made that it should be legal, but your “situational” dodge is just a handy ratioanalization.
Once again your arguing that a stereoptype is a universal rule. Prostitution as an occupation or a business is not inherently unethical, in much the . There are ethical ways to practice it and there unethical ways. Simply because the current state of the “industry” (for lack of a better word) is largely unethical does not make prostitution, as a whole or as an idea, unethical.
-“in much the”
It’s not a stereotype; it’s the norm. Outliers don’t invalidate a norm. The fact that there may be ethical ways to practice it, but the business remains, as you say, “largely unethical” after thousands of years would suggest to me that it is intractably and inevitably unethical, or unethical, for short.
Prostitution remains one of the great human tragedies. This woman, however, is one of those who took it up without coercion or even the excuse of need. Apparently, she did it just for the thrills. Anyone who would deliberately demean themselves in this near-ultimate manner has personal problems. The ethical compromises increased when this woman undertook to represent the entire nation in the Olympics, thus spreading the shame of her conduct to us all upon the inevitable revelation. And if that wasn’t enough, she took a proferred contract with Disney. What a “Favor” to America’s kids! And then she has the unmitigated gall (rivalling that of some congressmen I could mention) to call her sex business a “mistake” and her “outer” a “scum”!! Immorality and criminality are more than mistakes- and she has no room at all to be throwing the word “scum” around at anybody. She epitomizes the label all on her own.