Purple Prose Promises Play for Pay in FiDi
A business calling itself Experience Lingerie Lounge, located at 108 Greenwich Street, is offering lap dances, wet t-shirt contests, and “girlfriend eXXXperiences” at prices ranging from $50 for admission up to $750 for a full night’s stay with a model in a “Gold VIP Private Bedroom.” (Budget-conscious customers may wish to opt for ten minutes in a “VIP Silver semi-private room,” which comes complete with a curtain, for $50.) Both options, according to the ExperienceLingerieLounge.com website, come with “complimentary sexy amiable hostess-served champagne and strawberries, cheese and hors d’oeuvres, romantic music; aphrodisiacal scents, and more VIP feel-goodies.”
In prose that reads as if it had been composed by a demented A.I. bot, the website continues, “at our Experience gatherings, we invite gentlemen to foray with a chosen female partner from our lovely companions to sip the wine that flows freely to those who are free through choice to be free and therefrom experience freedom.”
All of which raises several questions. First, the references to wine and champagne (along with mentions of a “cash bar with reasonably priced top-shelf alcohol”) might indicate that Experience Lingerie Lounge is engaged in commercial activity requiring a liquor license. A search of the online database maintained by the State Liquor Authority, however, found no reference to any licensed premise on the sixth floor (where the website says they are located), and none anywhere in the building with a name similar to Experience.
It is also possible to infer from multiple passages on the website that sex is being offered in exchange for money. This can lead to serious legal trouble. Under Article 230.25 of the New York State Penal Law, “a person is guilty of promoting prostitution in the third degree when he or she knowingly… advances or profits from prostitution by managing, supervising, controlling or owning, either alone or in association with others, a house of prostitution or a prostitution business or enterprise involving prostitution activity by two or more persons in prostitution.” This is a Class D felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison.
It is perhaps with the aim of avoiding these penalties that the proprietors of Experience Lingerie Lounge went to the trouble of creating an entire section of the website, entitled “Legal Beagle,” which is replete with caveats and disavowals. “Anyone with any law enforcement association whatsoever, of any type whatsoever, is/are strictly disallowed entry without a valid warrant: The 4th Amendment is invoked always, plus any other applicable Constitutional legal rights or other legal rights or other, ad infinitum, plus in perpetuity,” this section warns.
The same section goes on the record that “any possible monies possibly donated and/or tipped in any possible way at the door/entry or other is/are solely possible voluntary donations possibly donated for possible entry solely and not in any way a/an exchange for prostitution or any other illegalities whatsoever.”
Attesting to their benign intent, the proprietors insist that, “Experience is a private Marriage Making Association meet and great [sic], to help possibly get engaged group, merely bringing potential men and women together to potentially meet and enter a potential agreement to potentially engage to be married, and potentially exchange monies for a potential arrangement of a potentially immediate elopement, and/or other necessitating expenses of consenting adults.”
The source of the legal advice that guided the proprietors of Experience Lingerie Lounge to fashion these somewhat tortured passages is unclear, but an NYPD source advises that it is entirely without effect. One criminal lawyer who specializes in defending people charged with prostitution-related offenses (who asked that his name not be used) called the disclaimers “nonsense.” An email to Experience Lingerie Lounge requesting comment was not answered.