[laughs]

... generally.

Like, I'd, I'd been this, you know, um, professional person in the public eye for over a decade, and I just was sick of it, and also I wanted to make money, and also I could, and it's this, you know, taboo thing.

But to me, it just felt like, you know, I, I've already been sort of s- spat out by my industry.

Um, let's see if I can do something else.

But what I realized was that because you make sort of the same amount in five hours of sex work as you do in a week of journalism, I had so much spare time, and I had an income that was reliable.

In fact, I had, I have more job security now than I did in journalism.

It's not funny.

So how has your experience been?

It's been really surprising.

Yeah.

Because I suppose when you're outside of the sex industry, you think that the people who book sex workers are potentially like creepy, definitely dangerous, you know, something like this.

Gross, creepy.

Gross.

Evil.

Oh,

Do you feel like you had a preconceived idea about sex work before you went into it? And then did that change post that experience?

I don't think I had too many preconceived ideas about sex workers because I knew a couple of them.

And, you know, I didn't have any kind of – there was no moral, ethical something about it that made me uncomfortable in any way.

So it wasn't that.

But I was unsure about who these clients are going to be and whether I'm going to be putting myself at – physical risk or, you know, danger to my mental or sexual health by having sex with people that are effectively strangers.

And what changed was that I realized that for the most part, and obviously this is only my experience, lots of other sex workers have different experience of it.

The clients that I had been getting were people who required intimacy.

What's the plan now, Benjen? Are you going to – because I know that you said in the Cheek article like you are working on like a really big story, right? Tell us more about that and what's the plan with it and what – yeah, your – where people can find you and help support and that kind of thing.

Mm.

And these, uh, separate accounts, like, these people seemed to be getting increasingly angry about the fact that I wasn't available right then and there.

And then I woke up the following morning, and one of those accounts sent me a message that said, "Hello, Mr. Siebert," and then issued a series of threats, um, about, um, you know, "I'm gonna make you really famous." And some of...

Like, the threats basically didn't make sense.

He was saying he was gonna report me to the cops and to my, to a health insurer, and, like, sex work is legal in Victoria.

Uh, so the threats were idle, and I didn't, um, he didn't follow through with any of them as far as I could tell.

But what it showed me was that there was a now permanent digital trail that led from my, my personal identity and my sex work identity to my journalism identity and that, uh, I couldn't do anything about that in the future regardless of what happened.

Mm

So talk us through then your mindset or what was going on in your head, and the moment that you realized you could use this work to fund your investigative journalism.

Well, that was much later.

So I did this booking, and then basically I spent the next few months, while I still had the redundancy money, applying for the big investigative journalism jobs.

I kind of said to myself, "I'm done doing the sideways moves trying to get another daily news reporter job." I was perfectly capable of doing radio, television, online, whatever, but I've been trying to be an investigative reporter for my entire career, and I keep on having to do daily news reporting and doing a lot of unpaid overtime doing investigative reporting, which I actually wanted to do, and I didn't get any of those jobs, basically.

Then the redundancy money started to run out, and I was kind of at the point where I was like, "Well, if, if I can't do investigative journalism, I, I can do something else, you know.

I, I can do some other career.

I can go back to uni." But then I started just seeing clients again, and God, the money is good, you know.

[laughs]