Category: Communications

Recently, a licensed Nevada sex worker approached me with a question about earned media. She wanted to know how she could generate more attention for herself and strengthen her personal brand.

After years of working in communications and marketing in Nevada’s legal brothel industry, I have become accustomed to these conversations. Courtesans want their own websites, press coverage, stronger search results and audiences that extend beyond the brothel where they currently work.

Twenty years ago, that conversation would have looked very different.

In the early 2000s, HBO introduced much of America to Nevada’s legal brothel industry through Cathouse, a 2002 documentary filmed at the Moonlite BunnyRanch that eventually became a television series. Dennis Hof was nominally the star, but several of the women who appeared on the show became personalities in their own right. Air Force Amy was arguably the most famous.

Amy was already an experienced Nevada courtesan before Cathouse, and she proved particularly adept at using the national platform the show provided. Television appearances, radio interviews and the seemingly endless publicity generated by the BunnyRanch helped make her one of the industry’s most recognizable modern celebrity courtesans.

Others followed. In 2008, Natalie Dylan appeared on The Howard Stern Show and announced that she planned to auction her virginity through the BunnyRanch. The stunt generated international coverage. Hof became remarkably good at placing individual sex workers into national conversations, usually with the BunnyRanch name attached.

The women had personalities and brands of their own, but the publicity machine was largely controlled by the brothel. The formula worked. Making his courtesans famous made Hof’s brothels famous, and the women benefited from the enormous media platform he had built. By the middle of the next decade, that dynamic was beginning to change.

I was working at a well-known Southern Nevada brothel during the rise of social media. In 2015, Re/code reporter Nellie Bowles visited during CES and wrote about courtesans using Twitter to communicate directly with customers. Dozens of women there were cultivating their own social media followings.

I blogged about the same phenomenon around that time. One courtesan told me that social media allowed her to communicate with customers thousands of miles away, maintain relationships when she wasn’t physically at the brothel and build anticipation for future visits. A courtesan no longer needed HBO, Howard Stern or a brothel website to reach an audience. She could speak to one directly.

Alice Little became one of the best examples of how far this could go. Before the pandemic, Alice had built substantial social media followings, produced her own content and written for publications including Refinery29. She had a podcast, a YouTube show and an assistant. Her public identity extended well beyond a profile on a brothel website.

In 2019, after I temporarily left brothel employment and began working independently in communications, Alice became one of my clients. Other licensed sex workers did as well. They weren’t hiring me to promote the brothels where they worked. They wanted help promoting themselves.

Then COVID-19 arrived.

Nevada ordered its legal brothels closed in March 2020. They would remain closed for more than a year. Courtesans who had built careers around working inside licensed brothels suddenly had no legal workplace available to them.

OnlyFans became particularly important during this period. Some licensed sex workers who could no longer earn money at the brothels began producing online content instead. Before the shutdown, a courtesan’s online audience was still largely a way to attract customers to the brothel. Now some women were able to generate income directly from that audience.

Alice also took a more public step. While she was my client, I worked with her on an effort to challenge Nevada’s continued brothel closure and connected her with the attorney who would represent her. In October 2020, she sued Gov. Steve Sisolak. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, but Alice’s decision to challenge the governor reflected the same shift I had already seen in her approach to communications. She had spent years developing her own public identity and was now independently advocating for her ability to work.

When Nevada’s brothels finally reopened in May 2021, the women returned to work. I assumed that, in time, most things would return to normal. The conversations didn’t.

Within months, I noticed more licensed sex workers thinking differently about their careers. They were increasingly interested in building audiences and identities that could follow them from one brothel to another.

For more than a year, the brothels had been unable to provide a place for these women to earn money. When they returned, some seemed less willing to build their careers entirely around an institution they did not control.

One of the most successful personal brands to emerge from Nevada’s legal brothel industry in the post-COVID era belongs to Dacé, better known as Modern Working Girl.

She spent more than eight years at Mustang Ranch while building a large audience on TikTok with videos about her experiences as a legal Nevada sex worker. By early 2025, she had more than 277,000 followers, and her videos had reached millions of viewers.

Then her relationship with Mustang Ranch abruptly ended. Dacé left the building. Modern Working Girl went with her.

Her audience knew her through a personal brand she had spent years developing. Mustang Ranch had been an important part of that story, but it didn’t own the story.

Of course, plenty of Nevada sex workers have no interest in becoming influencers or media personalities. Some deliberately maintain a limited public presence, work quietly and eventually leave the industry without wanting their time in legal sex work to follow them. For others, public visibility has become part of the business.

Social media has its own risks. Accounts can be suspended, algorithms change and rules governing sexual content can become more restrictive. Nevada brothel workers recently experienced this on X when accounts used to promote their legal businesses were suspended. An audience that takes years to develop can disappear with little warning.

The courtesan who recently approached me about earned media already had a clear idea of what she wanted. She was thinking about her own public identity and how to build a career that wasn’t entirely defined by the brothel where she worked.

There will probably always be famous brothels in Nevada. Increasingly, the women working inside them understand that the most valuable name they can build may be their own.

Most of us don’t learn about unfamiliar institutions during ordinary moments. We learn about them during extraordinary ones.

For many people, commercial aviation becomes interesting after a plane crash. Nuclear energy becomes a topic of conversation after an accident at a power plant. Increasingly, artificial intelligence enters the public conversation through stories about deepfakes or concerns about losing jobs.

In October 2015, former NBA star Lamar Odom was found unconscious inside the Love Ranch, one of several licensed Nevada brothels owned by the late Dennis Hof. Odom was married to Khloé Kardashian at the time, and the story quickly became international news.

More than a decade later, the story continues to attract attention. In March 2026, Netflix released Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom, a documentary examining Odom’s life and the events surrounding his near-fatal overdose at the Love Ranch.

After the Odom story broke in 2015, news organizations found themselves explaining Nevada’s legal brothel industry to readers who knew very little about it. The Associated Press explained Nevada’s county-by-county brothel laws. TIME examined the industry’s history and legal framework. CNN answered questions that had little to do with Lamar Odom himself.

The week Lamar Odom was hospitalized produced the highest search interest for the term “Nevada brothel” since Google began collecting the data in 2004. Search data obviously can’t tell us what people believed after reading those stories, but it does tell us this: people who may never have given Nevada’s legal brothel industry much thought suddenly wanted to learn more about it.

At the time, I had already spent several years working in Nevada’s licensed brothel industry, and I found myself wondering how the industry would be portrayed now that the story had become international news. I was concerned about whether the public’s first real introduction to these unique and enigmatic businesses might be shaped by a single extraordinary event.

The day before the story became public, a public relations representative called me after a major entertainment news outlet contacted him asking whether the incident had occurred at the brothel where I was working. It hadn’t.

“This is it,” the representative said.

“Dennis Hof is done.”

I remember answering, “Let’s see what he does.”

At that point, nobody knew exactly what had happened. Law enforcement was still investigating. Nobody knew whether the brothel had done anything wrong or what the long-term impact on Nevada’s legal brothel industry might be.

What interested me was how Dennis Hof would handle the decision. From a communications perspective, he had two primary choices. He could remain silent and allow others to shape the public narrative while the investigation continued, or he could speak for himself, knowing that every interview carried risk. Neither option was obviously correct. Given Dennis’s reputation and long history of embracing media attention, I suspected he would speak.

As the story unfolded, representatives for Khloé Kardashian reportedly asked Dennis to stop speaking publicly while Lamar Odom remained hospitalized. He refused. At the time, I wasn’t sure I agreed with that decision. In retrospect, while I understand what a difficult decision it was, I believe it was the right one.

I want to be careful here. This isn’t an endorsement of Dennis Hof or every decision he made throughout his career. Dennis was a complicated individual, and there are plenty of decisions he made that I wouldn’t defend. This decision is different, particularly in retrospect.

Dennis made a gamble. He believed that if he remained silent, someone else would define not only what had happened at the Love Ranch, but what Nevada’s legal brothel industry represented. Looking back, I believe the potential reward justified the risk.

The investigation ultimately produced no criminal charges related to the Love Ranch. The business remained open. Customers continued to visit. I suspect the publicity may even have increased awareness of Nevada’s legal brothel industry. Taken together, that’s why I believe he made the right decision.

Watching Dennis navigate the Lamar Odom crisis left a lasting impression on me. Shortly thereafter, I picked up the phone and called him. Within a week of our first conversation, I joined his staff.

Working alongside Dennis didn’t change what I thought about Nevada’s legal brothel industry. It changed the way I think about navigating communications.

The biggest communications mistake someone can make during a crisis involving an unfamiliar institution is assuming the audience understands that institution as well as the people inside it do. Most readers had never visited a licensed Nevada brothel. They had no way of knowing what was ordinary, what was unusual, what happened every day and what almost never happened. For many of them, the Lamar Odom story became their introduction to the industry.

A plane crash shouldn’t become someone’s complete understanding of commercial aviation. A reactor malfunction shouldn’t become someone’s complete understanding of nuclear energy. A celebrity deepfake shouldn’t become someone’s complete understanding of artificial intelligence. Yet that’s often how public understanding begins.

Extraordinary events don’t just shape public understanding. For many people, they become it.

Featured photo: January 28, 2007, photo by Michael Sandoval