Anne Gray Fischer

Anne Gray Fischer’s book-in-progress, Bodies on the March: How Prostitutes Seized the Seventies, has received a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, among other honors. She reviews books in a regular series, "Women in Trouble," for Ploughshares online.

Hooker Scare XLVI: The Super Bowl’s Prostitution Panic

By Anne Gray Fischer on January 27th, 2012
Women arrested on charges of prostitution during Super Bowl XIX in Tampa, Florida.
The sun rises in the East, and hookers come into town during the Super Bowl.
Tampa Police Capt. Brett Bartlett

I

Last July, Austria Andrews walked through the lobby of an Indianapolis hotel, holding a vanilla-frosted cupcake. Her braided hair was neatly twisted up, and she was dressed in a geometric-print wrap dress with some silver jewelry. Andrews looked like any other woman in the hotel that day: an unremarkable extra. If you saw her and thought anything at all, you would guess she was paying a birthday visit to a friend.

Up in a hotel room minutes later, Andrews was arrested on both criminal and civil charges for prostitution and fined up to $7,500, according to reports in the Indianapolis Star. The cupcake, her calling card, sat untouched on a nearby shelf. Andrews — fully clothed, arms crossed — watched on in muted outrage as patrolman Jeff Goodin — naked from the waist up — rifled through her purse.

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