Ron DeSantis: Hot for Teacher? | Popular Teacher Parties with Prep Schoolgirls

Jake Tapper tweeted a quote from Alex Leary's Wall Street Journal piece "Trump Says It Would Be a Mistake for DeSantis to Run for the White House in 2024" (Nov 8, 2022) 

Trump threatens DeSantis: “If he runs, he runs. If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.”

Consequently, readers wondered what "very [un]flattering" information Trump may have on DeSantis.  Well, Bess Levin related in a Vanity Fair piece that "Donald Trump, Longtime Friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Suggests Ron DeSantis Groomed High School Girls"

Levin wrote:

On Tuesday, [February 7, 2022] the 45th president shared two posts on Truth Social that included the same photo of DeSantis apparently partying with high school girls while he was working at a private school, with the image claiming to show DeSantis “grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.” Adding his own commentary, Trump wrote: “No way?” and “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”

To elaborate, Trump responded sarcastically to the meme "Here is Ron DeSanctimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher" with "That's not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!

And to Dong-Chan Lee's Truth Social post, "DeSantis was having a "drink" party with his students when he was a high school teacher. Having drinks with underage girls and cuddling with them certainly look pretty gross and ephebophiliaesque.", Trump asked, "No way?"

It's not clear if there's any truth to DeSantis' grooming allegations, but per the New York Times report "Pranks, Parties and Politics: Ron DeSantis’s Year as a Schoolteacher" (Nov. 5, 2022), DeSantis "hung out at parties with seniors" at the Darlington School, a boarding school in Georgia, and "[...] Mr. DeSantis was popular among many students." [Emphasis added]

The Vanity Fair subheading, "As a reminder, the ex-president has literally been described as Epstein’s wingman, and he once called the deceased predator a 'terrific guy' who was 'a lot of fun to be with.'", inferred that Trump has some audacity to imply that DeSantis had an affair with (at least) one of his prep school students, which reminded us of a previous post where we recapped Karen Ruiz's Daily Mail post "Donald Trump was allegedly recorded having a threesome with a teenage girl and a porn star in a Mafia-run Times Square brothel in the 80s, book claims" (October 18, 2019). 

In the post, Ruiz wrote that, per the book All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, Donald Trump was (allegedly) recorded having a threesome with a teenage girl and a porn star in a Mafia-run Times Square brothel in the 80s! 

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING's Child Bride Connection | Earl Stokes (42) & Rita de Acosta (15)

Rosemary Counter opined in her Vanity Fair piece, "The Apartments That Inspired Only Murders in the Building Have Their Own Bloody History" (July 6, 2022), that "Though it’s filmed at the nearby Belnord, the Arconia building in the Hulu series seems much more closely linked to the Ansonia—a real-life apartment complex [on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Street] that’s been home to murder, mayhem, and a swingers club."

The Ansonia building in New York City.
LEFT, FROM GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT, COURTESY OF HULU. 

Counter related that the Ansonia has everything from Juliet balconies to marbled staircases with four-bedrooms going for about nine million:

Made up of 17 stories and around 400 unique units, the building is every New Yorker’s real-estate dream come true: Parisian-inspired with Juliet balconies, round turrets with gray terracotta details, and an opulent archway entry. Inside are hardwood herringbone floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a sweeping marbled staircase spiraling beneath a grand domed skylight. Today, a 3,000-plus square foot, four-bedroom, three-bathroom unit in the building is listed for almost $9,000,000.

Earl Dodge Stokes and Rita Hernandez de Alba de Acosta

But it's Earl Dodge Stokes, the Ansonia's founder, who's most relevant to this blog, because, per Counter, Stokes was: "[...] said to be very fond of young, newly pubescent, girls." Consequently, after Stokes spied a photograph of Rita Hernandez de Alba de Acosta, a 15-year-old heiress, he decided that she would be his nymphet bride.

Born-and-bred New Yorker William Earl Dodge Stokes, with a million dollars in his pocket having sued his own brother after their father died [...] spotted a photo in a shop window of 15-year-old heiress Rita Hernandez de Alba de Acosta and decided she’d be his teenage bride. He was 42 and said to be very fond of young, newly pubescent, girls. 

Interestingly, Counter wrote that it was "thought" (i.e., assumed) that Rita "reluctantly" married Stokes, but that it was money that was her tipping point. (Ah money - the bane of teen OnlyFans stars and schoolgirl prostitutes.) And was it the money that kept Rita around for six years of marriage?

It’s thought that Rita reluctantly married him for money, produced a single male heir, and walked away around age 21 with what was rumored to be the largest divorce settlement on record at the time—$2 million in cash and $36,000 annually in alimony, allegedly.

Counter may have been wrong about why the teen heiress married Stokes, but Counter was correct about Stoke's foundess for (much) younger women, because, per the New York Times, subsequent to his divorce from de Acosta, 59-year-old Stokes married 24-year-old Helen Blanche Ellwood.

Brooke Shields & Calvins: Naive or Complicit Sexualized Teen

Vogue posted on its YouTube channel "Brooke Shields Tells the Story Behind Her 80's Calvin Klein Jeans Campaign" (Oct 28, 2021). In the video, Shields shared that, unsurprisingly, no extras were allowed on the set and that Richard Avedon, the photographer, was nervous:

"The shoot itself, nobody was allowed on the set [...] I think he [Avedon] was a bit nervous." 

Unbelievably, Shields said that she was naive about the sexual nature of the "Nothing Comes Between Me & My Calvins" video, and she mentioned her body double in Blue Lagoon to justify her naiveté:

"I was naive. I didn't think anything of it. I didn't think it was - [it] had to do with underwear. I didn't think it was sexual in nature [...] I was a kid. And where I was - I was naive. I was a very protected, sequestered kind of young woman [...] in Blue Lagoon I had a body double [for the completely nude scenes]."

Interestingly, Shields thanked Harpers Bazaar for naming her 14-year-old topless Blue Lagoon swimsuit scene iconic. Body double? 

Brooke Shields | Pretty Baby (1978)

And are we to assume that Shields didn't realize that her role as a pre-teen prostitute in Pretty Baby (1978), where her virginity was sold for a whopping $400, was not of a sexual nature. 

Although, Shields claims that she was naive at 15, at 56 she appears to condone the Calvin advertisements by admitting that (teen) sex sells:

"Yeah, at 56, I can go back and look at the camera, and say, "Oh well it's zooming in. And yeah, it's sort of on my crotch area. And then it comes to my face." Like, okay, but sex has sold since the dawn of time." 

As for her second contradiction, Shields reminded the viewers that there was something in her eyes on her magazine covers, but then she states that at 15, she was sans sexuality. 

"Every single cover I've been on, I don't care it I was 15 or whatever, there's something in the eyes."

"And there is an assimilation of sexuality now, which I certainly didn't have when I was 15."

Wait, what about Shield's 13-year-old "womanly" bikini pose in Life magazine that was written about in the Vanity Fair piece "The Photo That Changed My Life". 

Richard Prince's Spiritual America (1983)

And I won't mention Richard Prince’s Spiritual America exhibit at the Guggenheim where a photograph of a nude 10-year-old Shields was on display. (Interestingly,  Shields' mothers sold the photograph to Playboy Press for a whopping $450.)

Lastly, Shields admitted that, due to the allure appeal of nymphets, her Calvin campaign was "extremely successful", she admitted that Avedon and Klein "knew exactly what they were doing", and she shared that her Calvin campaign was life changing for her and Klein. #rightplacerighttime:

"The campaign was extremely successful."

"There's an appeal to it that is so undeniable. And they tapped right into it. You know, they knew exactly what they were doing."

"[...] he [Calvin Klein] said it changed his entire career and life. And it put Calvin on the map [...] which was what I think they had hoped for it."

"He said, 'You know, you changed the course of my life and my career.' And I said, 'Well, you did mine too.' We were in the right place at the right time."

TAN: Quick Bites | Bari Weiss' Schoolgirl Classmates Perform Oral Sex

We're starting a new feature called TAN: Quick Bites, which are TL;DR posts about the allure of nymphets in pop culture. 

We'll start this feature with a post about Bari Weiss' schoolmates at Shady Side Academy. 

Bari Weiss shared with Evgenia Peretz for her Vanity Fair profile MAD ABOUT BARI WEISS: THE NEW YORK TIMES PROVOCATEUR THE LEFT LOVES TO HATE (May 2019) that  freshman nymphets (i.e, 14 and 15-year-olds) at Shady Side Academy, Weiss' private Pittsburgh high school, fellated in ski houses:

At her traditional high school, “where freshman girls were giving guys blow jobs in their ski houses,” Weiss says she felt excruciatingly nerdy and alienated, though she was student-council president. 

Of course, we're not surprised - especially after Tom Wolfe related in Hooking Up that in high schools and junior high schools, from the plush suburbs of Washington to the underprivileged schools of the South Bronx, 13 and 14-year-old girls were performing fellatio on boys between classes.

Famous Ephebophile: Peter Arno | The NEW YORKER Cartoonist and the Nymphet Debutantes

Peter Arno and a young model in his (dining-room) studio (1949).

We shared in The Allure of Nymphets that J.D. Salinger was enraged  after he learned that Oona O'Neill, the love of his life, left him for Charlie Chaplin. O'Neill married 50-year-old Chaplin only days after her 18th birthday.

"You cad! You're not fit to touch the hem of her skirt." 

"Please sir! This isn't my table."

But before O'Neill married Chaplin, she dated Peter Arno - the New Yorker cartoonist and (open) nympholept. 

Ben Schwartz wrote in his Vanity Fair feature “The Double Life of Peter Arno, *The New Yorker’*s Most Influential Cartoonist” (APRIL 5, 2016): 

“In 1942, [38-year-old Peter] Arno dated his last “Debutante of the Year,” Oona O’Neill, 17-year-old daughter of Eugene O’Neill and future wife of Charlie Chaplin. “Oona only slept with two men before she married Chaplin,” says her biographer, Jane Scovell—“Peter Arno and Orson Welles. She was looking for older men [...]”  

"Do you have the same thing in a cook?" 

"Gee, Mr. Payson! Mere words can't express my appreciation - I guess."

And Schwartz shared that prior to O'Neill, 34-year-old Arno dated 17-year-old Brenda Diana Duff Frazier - the original celebutante.

But despite Arno's highly publicized age-gap affairs, he was more famous for his cartoons that often depicted old(er) men with lovely young women. 

"Why, George Carter! What keeps you in town?"

"Good Lord, Hawkins! You might at least have said, 'Ahem'!"

Netflix's JEFFREY EPSTEIN: FILTHY RICH (Episode 1) | Reaction: Molested Survivors Versus Teen Prostitute Survivors

Episode 1 of Netflix's Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich opened with an important confession from Epstein:

Lawyer: "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?"

Epstein: "Yes."

Lawyer: "What was the crime of which you were convicted?"

Epstein: "[...] procuring a minor for prostitution"

Epstein's confession that he was convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution is important, because one can't be convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution if there aren't any minor (i.e., teen) prostitutes. 

A mistake this documentary series makes is labeling all of the nymphets involved with the Epstein case as survivors/victims when there should be (at least) two categories: molested/sexually assaulted survivors and teen prostitute survivors. 

Let's look at two examples from the molested/sexually assaulted survivors category:

At the New York Academy of Art graduation night art show (1995), Eileen Guggenheim, the former dean of students, literally twisted Maria Farmer's arm and demanded that she sell one of her "Alice in Wonderland" paintings to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Guggenheim's "dear friends", at a 50% discount. 

Two months later, Epstein gave Maria at job at his New York City mansion, and Maria introduced Epstein to Annie Farmer - Maria's 16-year-old sister. 

At Epstein's Zorro ranch in New Mexico, Annie alleged that Maxwell massaged Annie's nude breasts while Epstein looked on and that the following morning Epstein cuddled with Annie - without her consent. 

The following year, Epstein and Maxwell, asked Maria to do an artist-in-residency in a 26,000 square foot home behind Les Wexner's house in New Albany, Ohio. For an unexplained reason, Maria decided to do a series of paintings "[...] about puberty - girls partially nude [in] voyeuristic kind of private moments but not sexual." The painting were based on nude photographs that Maria took of her nymphet sisters. For example, Annie was 12-years-old in her nude photograph. 

After Maxwell informed Maria that Epstein would like to have his feet rubbed, Maria alleged that Epstein and Maxwell massaged her breasts - without her consent. 

Subsequently, Maria said that she informed the NYPD, who directed her to the FBI, that she was assaulted by Epstein and Maxwell, but nothing came of it until Maria was contacted by Vicky Ward who was writing a Vanity Fair profile on Epstein. Ultimately and inexplicably, Vanity Fair did not include the sisters' stories of being molested by Epstein and Maxwell in the profile. 

Now let's take a look at the teen prostitute survivors:

The special investigation unit of the Palm Beach Police Department (PBPD) began investigating Epstein after a parent reported to the police that her 14-year-old step-daughter was found with $300 that she earned from giving Epstein a massage. 

This next point is important. 19-year-old Heather confessed to a detective that she was introduced to Epstein, "Through a friend. About two years ago." Thus, she was recruited by another teen, and she went back and forth to Epstein's house for two years.

Interestingly, when asked how she was introduced to Epstein, Michelle Licata shared with a detective that her friend informed her in class that she could make $200 for Christmas by massaging Epstein for 45 minutes. 16-year-old Licata replied, "Okay. That seems weird, but okay." Upon arriving at Epstein's mansion, Licata's friend urged Licata to lie about her age. 

Shawna Rivera first met Epstein after Rivera's friend, a repeat visitor to Epstein's residence, picked Rivera up at her modest West Palm Beach home where the 14-year-old nude nymphets gave Epstein a massage. Some time later, upon Epstein's request, Rivera took a cab back to Epstein's. Why? Rivera shared, "I assumed if I went back, I would get more money."

Prostitutes prostitute for a variety of reasons. For example, Rivera said that she went to Epstein's for over three years, because she was poor. Some of the more wealthy teen prostitutes in Italy and Japan do it for luxury goods. But the fact remains that they're (teen) (consensual) prostitutes. 

Dr. Kathryn Stamoulis, an adolescent sexuality psychologist, erroneously stated that Epstein, "[...] targeted girls that [sic] were so vulnerable. And this is something that most sexual predators do [...] The first step in the grooming process is spotting a vulnerable victim - someone who is financially disadvantaged or that [sic] already have some sexual trauma in their past. Sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein have an eye for picking out someone who is in need of something and they identify that need, and then they exploit it [...]"

This is erroneous, because, per the documentary, Epstein didn't "target" the nymphets. The Palm Beach nymphets were targeted by other Palm Beach nymphets. Eileen Guggenheim introduced Maria Farmer to Epstein. And Vicky Ward shared of Ghislaine Maxwell, "She was a great connector for Jeffery."

Haley Robson shared that she was introduced to Epstein by a high school friend when she was 16-years-old who informed Robson that she could earn $200 per massage. Robson shared that her immediate reaction was, "This is my ticket out of West Palm - this is my way out." But interestingly, and in contrast to Dr. Stamoulis' expertise, Robson was a competitive equestrian and Robson's mother was a banker and her father was a police officer. However, Robson did share that she was raped when she was 15 by a 21-year-old man. She shared, "It was my first experience with a man." But she didn't shared if it was statutory rape or violent rape. Alan Dershowitz argued that there's an important distinction between the two. 

Robson shared with a detective that after Epstein touched her with his hands and a vibrator in inappropriate places, she rejected his advances, but she volunteered to deliver him nymphets for $200 per head. 

Detective: The girl that was going knew she would have to massage him?

Robson: She knew everything. 

Detective: How long have you been working for him?

Robson: I probably worked for him for a year.

Robson went on to share with the documentarians, "I probably recruited maybe 24 girls."

Robson: Those girls brought other girls, too. 

Detective: Okay.

Robson: So, it's like a train.

Detective: Who else was underage?

Robson: Under 18? All of them. 

Robson to documentarians, "I would recruit girls that were friends. I would just casually bring it up. And we would drive together to his house. I would take them to the room, and then I would walk out. Sometimes I would wait out by the pool. When the girls would leave, Jeffery would come outside to pay me [...]"

Detective: "At this point, you've clearly implicated yourself in a crime. Okay? You've taken girls to somebody's house for the purposes of [teen] prostitution [...] Now that's a pretty significant second-degree felony."

Robson correctly asked the documentarians, "What about the girl who recruited me. What happened to her? What about the girl that recruited the girl that recruited me?"

However, Dr. Stamoulis inexplicably opined, "The girls that [sic] are recruiting the other girls are definitely victims of Jeffery Epstein [...]"

But some, like Stuart Pivar, co-founder of New York Academy of Art, opine that the nymphet recruiters were criminals, like Epstein, who recruited nymphets for the purposes of consensual teen prostitution, but who were given a reprieve by the PBPD for their help in Epstein's investigation.

Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Babies" i.e., Child Brides

"Crazy Babies" is the third track on Ozzy Osbourne's No Rest for the Wicked (1988). The album cover features Ozzy surrounded by three nymphets - scantily clad and beautified with make-up. 

We had no idea that the nymphets were portraying Ozzy's child brides until we read the following in Vanity Fair  (November 12, 2013):

When she [Liberty Ross] was 10, a family friend who was also a model agent asked her parents whether their daughter might be interested in posing as Ozzy Osbourne’s child bride for his new album cover. The response? Why, naturally. Liberty wore a tattered gauzy dress for her modeling debut and had to hold Ozzy’s hand while he sat on a throne adorned by rats and large slithering snakes. “It’s etched in my brain for life,” says Liberty. “I remember thinking, Gosh, he’s very sweaty and shaking a lot.”

Here are some intriguing lyrics:

Crazy Babies

Born to live on a permanent high

Nobody's gonna change them, change them

They've gone over the top

Nobody's gonna tame them, tame them

They're never gonna stop

Crazy Babies

When they were born they were born to be wild

No Rest for the Wicked (1988) went Platinum in Canada and double Platinum in the USA. 

The "Real" Lolita and Humbert: Sally Horner and Frank La Salle

Sally Horner and Frank La Salle

In Lolita, Phyllis’ mother, Mrs. Chatfield, “with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity”, "attacked" Humbert: 

Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank LaSalle [sic], a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948? (289) 

For some reason, in The Annotated Lolita, Appel didn’t annotate the rhetorical question. However, in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Boyd noted:

Nabokov undertook research of all kinds [in preparation for Lolita.] [...] He noted newspaper reports of accidents, sex crimes, and killings: “a middle-aged morals offender” who abducted fifteen-year-old Sally Horner from New Jersey and kept her for twenty-one months as his “cross-country slave,” until she was found in a southern California motel [...]” (211).

But it was Alexander Dolinin who made the connection between the rhetorical question and Nabokov’s research. Dolinin wrote in “What Happened to Sally Horner?: A Real-Life Source of Nabokov's Lolita”:

The phrase [...] is a deliberately planted riddle that invites the reader to do some research in old newspaper files. However, the necessary information is difficult to find, because major American media didn’t cover the La Salle case [...].

By that time, [Nabokov] “beset with technical difficulties and doubts” (Strong Opinions, 105), he had almost halted work on his new novel and would not have missed an interesting prompt provided by the “given world.” [...] their story reads as a rough outline for the second part of Lolita.

The second part of Lolita abounds with echoes of the story [...] elements of the novel’s nightmarish plot seem both to derive from the real-life precedent and to refer back to it. The sequence and time-span of events are strikingly similar.

Humbert made a previous reference to the Sally\La Salle case:

“Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave […] I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you (150).”

Appel made an annotation here but not in reference to the Sally\La Salle case. However, Dolinin noted: 

Changing the age of the girl, Nabokov indicates that in the inner calendar of the novel the allusion to the case of Frank La Salle is an anachronism: Humbert is talking to Lolita in 1947, that is a year before the real abduction when Sally Horner was nine or ten years old. Yet the legal formulae used by the narrator as well as his implying that he, in contrast to La Salle, is really Lolita’s father, leave no doubt that the passage refers to the newspaper reports [...]

Sarah Weinman’s post “The Real Lolita: The story of 11-year-old Sally Horner’s abduction changed the course of 20th-century literature. She just never got to tell it herself” provides the details about how La Salle seduced Sally. Here’s an abridgment: 

On June 13, 1948, 11-year-old Sally Horner was a student at Northeast School in Camden, New Jersey. Urged on by her middle-school classmates, Sally walked into the Woolworth’s on Broadway and Federal to steal a five-cent notebook. 

Once inside, she reached for the first notebook she could find [...]. She stuffed it into her bag and sprinted away, careful to look straight ahead to the exit door. Then, right before the getaway, came a hard tug on her arm.

“I am an FBI agent,” the man said to Sally. “And you are under arrest.” She cried. She cowered. 

He pointed across the way to City Hall, the tallest building in Camden, and said that girls like her would be dealt with there. If it went the way they normally handled thieving youths, he told her, Sally would be bound for the reformatory.

But his manner brightened. It was a lucky break he caught her and not some other FBI agent, the man said. If she agreed to report to him from time to time, he would let her go. Spare her the worst. Show some mercy.

Sally felt her own mood lift, too. He was going to let her go. 

On her way home from school the next day, though, the man sought her out again. Without warning, the rules had changed: Sally had to go with him to Atlantic City—the government insisted. She’d have to convince her mother he was the father of two school friends, inviting her to a seashore vacation. He would take care of the rest with a phone call and a convincing appearance at the Camden bus depot.

His name was Frank La Salle, and he was no FBI agent [...]

Sally and La Salle—he used the alias “Frank Warner” at that time—moved into a rooming house at 203 Pacific Street in Atlantic City. She called her mother on several occasions, always from a pay station, to say she was having a swell time. For six weeks, Ella Horner thought nothing was amiss—she believed her daughter was on summer vacation with friends.

After the first week, Sally said she’d be staying longer to see the Ice Follies. After two weeks, the excuses grew more vague. After three weeks, the phone calls stopped. Ella’s letters could no longer be delivered. Sally’s last missive was the most disturbing: she and “Warner” were leaving for Baltimore. Something woke up inside Ella’s mind: she’d been duped, her daughter snatched away not with violence, but with sweet-talking stealth. Ella received Sally’s final letter on July 31, 1948. She called the police later that day.

Cops in Atlantic City descended upon the Pacific Street lodging house, where they learned the man called Warner had posed as Sally’s father. They’d found enough evidence to arrest him, but it was too late: he and Sally had disappeared. Two suitcases full of clothes remained in their room, as did several unsent postcards from Sally to her mother and friends. There was also a photograph, never before seen by Ella or the police, of a honey-haired Sally, in a cream-colored dress, white socks and black patent shoes, sitting on a swing. Her smile was tentative, her eyes fathoms deep with sadness. She was still just 11 years old.

Sally Horner in Atlantic City in 1948

The man called Warner was really Frank La Salle, and only six months before he abducted Sally, he’d finished up a prison stint for the statutory rape of [...] five girls between the ages of 12 and 14. 

Having cleared out of Atlantic City, knowing the police were in pursuit, La Salle and Sally settled in Baltimore by September 1948. They kept up the father-daughter pose [..] —until April 1949. She attended Saint Ann’s Catholic School at 2200 Greenmount Drive [...]

They left Baltimore and headed southwest to Dallas, the timing of the move appearing to coincide with Camden County indicting La Salle a second time. Back in 1948, prosecutor Mitchell Cohen indicted La Salle for Sally’s abduction, which carried a maximum sentence of three to five years in prison. This second, more serious indictment, for kidnapping, handed down on March 17, 1949, carried a sentence of 30 to 35 years. If La Salle did get word of the new indictment—he told Sally they needed to leave Baltimore because the “FBI asked him to investigate something”—he didn’t want to be in striking distance of Camden, where police could find them.

Using the last name of LaPlante, they lived on Commerce Street, a quiet, well-kept trailer park in a more run-down part of Dallas, from April 1949 until March 1950. Their neighbors regarded Sally as a typical 12-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one never let out of his sight except to go to school. But she seemed to enjoy taking care of her home. She would bake every once in a while. She had a dog. La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner. And while La Salle, as LaPlante, set up shop again as a mechanic, Sally attended Catholic school once more, at Our Lady of Good Counsel. 

A copy of Sally’s report card from her time at Our Lady of Good Counsel between September 1949 and February 1950 indicates she was a good student [...].

[...] the consensus about Sally and her “father” was that they “both seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other.” Nelrose Pfeil, a neighbor, said, “Sally got everything she ever wanted. I always said I didn’t know who was more spoiled, Sally or her dog.” Maude Smilie, living at a nearby trailer on Commerce Street, seemed bewildered at the idea of Sally being a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”

Ruth Janish was married to an itinerant farm worker. During a fallow period at the beginning of 1950, the Janishes lived in the West Dallas trailer park at the same time as Sally Horner and Frank La Salle. Soon after she met them, Ruth began to suspect that Frank was not, in fact, Sally’s father. 

Ruth tried to cajole Sally, still recovering from her appendectomy, to tell her the “true story” of her relationship with La Salle in Dallas.

The Janishes left for California in early March 1950, thinking they’d have better luck finding work there, but on arrival, Ruth hatched the beginning of a plan. First, she wrote La Salle, urging him and Sally to follow them to the San Jose trailer park, where they could be neighbors again. The Janishes had even reserved a spot in the park for them.

La Salle was in. He and Sally drove from Dallas to San Jose, the house-trailer attached to his car, and arrived in the park by Saturday, March 18, 1950.

Before leaving Dallas, Sally mustered up the courage to tell a friend at school of her ordeal at La Salle’s hands. The friend told Sally her behavior was “wrong” and that “she ought to stop,” as Sally later explained. As her friend’s admonishment sank in, Sally began refusing La Salle’s further advances. And on the morning of March 21, 1950, Ruth Janish’s determined concern and Sally’s burgeoning need for change collided in a San Jose trailer park.

With Frank La Salle safely away for several hours, Ruth invited Sally over to her trailer. Knowing this was her only chance, Janish gently coaxed more honesty out of the young girl. She wanted to go home. She wanted to talk to her mother and older sister. Janish then showed Sally how to operate the telephone in her trailer so the girl could make long-distance phone calls.

Sally called her mother first, but the line was disconnected;...Next, she tried her sister Susan, who lived with her husband, Al Panaro... “Al, this is Sally,” she said. He tried to contain his excitement. “Where are you at?” “I’m with a lady friend in California. Send the FBI after me, please!” Sally cried. “Tell mother I’m okay, and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.” Sally’s brother-in-law assured her he would do that if she would stay where she was.

After Sally hung up the phone, she turned to Ruth. “I thought she was going to collapse,” Mrs. Janish said. “She kept saying over and over, ‘What will Frank do when he finds out what I have done?’”

The next day, La Salle was charged with violating the Mann Act for transporting a female along state lines with the intent of corrupting her morals. 

Judge Rocco Palese sentenced him to 30 to 35 years at Trenton State Prison, with the shorter sentence for abduction to be served concurrently. 

La Salle never saw the outside world again. He died of arteriosclerosis in Trenton State Prison on March 22, 1966, 16 years into his sentence. He was just shy of 70 years old.

[15-year-old] Sally and the young man, 20-year-old Edward John Baker[...], set out as planned [from a resort in the shore town of Wildwood] in the early morning hours of August 18, 1952. Just after midnight [...] Baker drove his 1948 Ford sedan into the back of a parked truck on the road, knocking it into another parked truck. Baker emerged from the four-car collision with minor injuries[...] The crash killed Sally instantly.

If you haven’t read (The Annotated) Lolita for some time, Dolinin notes some pointed similarities between Sally\La Salle and Dolly\Humbert:

The second part of Lolita abounds with echoes of the story. Lolita’s captivity lasting nearly two years, the “extensive travels” of Humbert Humbert and his “child-bride” all over the United States, from New England to California, their soujourns in innumerable “motor courts,” a stay in Beardsley where Lolita goes to school, the hero’s constant claims that he is the girl’s father, “not very mechanically-minded [a hint at La Salle’s profession] but prudent papa Humbert” (208)—all these elements of the novel’s nightmarish plot seem both to derive from the real-life precedent and to refer back to it. The sequence and time-span of events are strikingly similar. Sally Horner lived with Frank La Salle for twenty-one months, went to school in Dallas where she confided her secret to a friend, resumed travels with the kidnapper and finally, three weeks later, made a crucial telephone call asking for help, escaping her captor. After twenty-one months with Lolita, when the pair stays in Beardsley, Humbert suddenly realizes that she has grown up and is slipping away from his power. He suspects that she has told everything to her schoolfriend Mona, and might be cherishing “the stealthy thought … that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself” (204). They have a terrible row, but Lolita manages to escape and make a mysterious phone call, afterwards telling Humbert: “A great decision has been made” (207). They resume their travels and about a month later Lolita manages to escape. When in the final chapter of the novel Humbert states that he would have given himself “at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges,” he mimics Frank La Salle’s sentence.

Several details transposed by Nabokov from newspaper reports seem to underscore an affinity (or, better, a “rhyme”) between Sally Horner and Dolly Haze. Both “nice looking youngsters” are daughters of widowed mothers; both have brown hair; Lolita’s “Florentine hands” and “Florentine breasts” evoke not only Boticcelli but also the first name of Florence Sally Horner. It was in the sad story of the New Jersey girl that Nabokov found a psychological explanation of Lolita’s acquiescence in her role of sex-slave. Copying La Salle, Humbert terrorizes his victim with threats that if he is arrested, she “will be given a choice of varying dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home…” (151).

In the Books section of the August 2018 issue of Vanity Fair, Sarah Weinman wrote about two new books about the Sally\La Salle case. In her piece, “Two new books go in search of the real Lolita”, Weinman mentioned her book with is hyperbolic title, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World (out in September from Ecco) and T. Greenwood’s novel Rust & Stardust (out in August from St. Martin’s).

Calvin Klein, Lulu & Sexualized Children in Advertising and on Social Media

We recently received the new issue of Vanity Fair (September 2017), and the photo below got our attention due to the youthful look of the model. The caption reads: "Lulu, the new Calvin Klein jeans model." Besides the picture of Lulu, the article, "Capturing Calvin Klein", included a reference to the book The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes and related that nineteen-year-old Paris Jackson has been named the face of Calvin Klein.

A Google search revealed that Lulu's last name is Tenney, but it did not reveal her exact age. Model agencies do a great job of keeping that a secret; however, she is at least eighteen-years-old, because an underwear model has to be at least eighteen in Britain. 

However, that didn't prevent Rachel Ashby, a concerned parent of an eleven-year-old, from complaining about a Calvin Klein advertisement outside of the House of Fraser boutique. The advertisement pictured Lulu tugging on her black Calvin Klein bra. Ashby posted on her Facebook wall: "This huge billboard outside Cavendish House advertising women's lingerie...It's 2017 ffs and Calvin Klein are [sic] still using what look [sic] like 12 year old girls in their campaigns. It is just  me..??!!"

Ashby told the Daily Mail, “The fact that she looks underage in terms of body shape and somewhat vulnerable facial expression, combined with the fact that she is wearing very little and is adopting a strangely provocative pose means it could be deemed to sexualize children.”

We agree 100% with Ashby. There is absolutely no doubt that Lulu was chosen by Calvin Klein, because she looks like a nymphet.  However, orthodox Muslims and Jews would argue that no one, no matter the age, should be on a billboard modeling underwear. And Ashby missed another point. Her very own eleven-year-old daughter probably has more provocative pictures, videos and snaps on her social media than Lulu's underwear advertisement.

For example, here's the text to a link next to Ashby's article on the Daily Mail': "Cindy Crawford's model daughter Kaia Gerber shares candid [Instagram] images from the family's fun-filled vacation in Canada, as they play host to A-list guests like Harry Styles and singer Madison Beer"

But the above pictures of fifteen-year-old Kaia Gerber and eighteen-year-old fellow model Charlotte D'Alessio, which were posted on the Daily Mail, are tame compared to some of nymphet's other Instagram photos. For example:

Instagram / @Kaiagerber

 

Instagram / @Charlottedalessio

Ashby is correct to complain about what she refers to as "sexualize[d] children" in the advertising and modeling industries, but "children" "sexualize" themselves on social media far more often.