Bella Vendetta Is An Abuser
By: Naomi Lauren
Tags: Labor, Sex Work, Harm Reduction, Feminism, Strippers

Below is a letter I wrote to journalist Luis Feldman in response to his inquiries to my colleague seeking context for an article he was in the process of writing about a local strip club manager. His piece elaborating on that managers press release appears in this weeks Valley Advocate.

Hi Luis,

Caty Simon forwarded me your email to her asking about Bella Vendetta. Thanks for being interested in sex worker issues and for reaching out to Caty for context.

I am a long time stripper who has danced in most of the clubs within a 90 minute drive from Northampton over the last ten years. Since October 2017, Caty Simon and I have also been organizing with local street based injection drug using survival sex workers. You can learn more about our work here. (url redacted)

Because our members are extremely vulnerable in many ways, we try very hard to keep a low profile, particularly in spaces where police, clients, managers, and self-described allies with poor boundaries congregate. I am sending you the above link on background and to establish my credibility. I ask you to refrain from mentioning our organization by name or even referring to it conceptually in writing anywhere.

You have my permission to reprint anything else I say here as a quote from “Naomi Lauren, a local sex worker activist.”

I want you to know first and foremost that among strippers low on social capital or on the outs with management in any way, Bella has long been known as a serial perpetrator of harm. Several of our members are currently working as strippers, and many more have worked as dancers in the past. Through them and other community members, we know that while working as a dancer Bella:

-Routinely leveraged her positive relationship with management to successfully demand that dancers who threatened to outearn her be fired

-Outed strippers who inject drugs as such to management such that those dancers were not just fired from one club but blacklisted for several years from multiple clubs within the same ownership group, to financially devastating effect.

-Non consensually and unsafely exposed other dancers to her sexual fluids

-Routinely interrupted conversations between clients and low ranking strippers to sabotage those strippers’ earnings and peel their customers away.

-Was sometimes deputized by management to collect house fees from dancers who had had low earning nights. On multiple occasions, she dumped a dancer’s purse onto the floor in search of hidden cash while that dancer stood aside and cried.

If you ask Bella about any of the patterns of behavior on the list above it is likely she will deny them. She will be lying to you. Bella also seems to have made several demonstrably untrue statements in the press release she sent to you and others:

1/ Team Clear Heels 413 is absolutely not the first or the only organization for sex workers either locally or in the state:

-a- Eastern Mass has been home to vibrant sex worker organizing for years. SWOP Boston has been active in several incarnations since at least 2010, and it’s been joined recently by broader policy and ally group MASWAN. Mary Wheeler first unionized dancers in Boston in the late 90s at the Glass Slipper, winning a prominent court case confronting unsafe working conditions, extortion, and stolen wages in the club.

-b- Arise for Social Justice, a multi-issue low-income rights group in Springfield, MA founded in the 80s by four women on welfare, inaugurated the WISE (Women In Support of Each other) committee for criminalized women in the early aughts. In this group, sex working and drug using women ran an early decriminalization of prostitution campaign in Springfield as well as a longterm organizing effort against the building of the Chicopee women’s jail. They brought movement elder Carol Leigh, the renowned sex worker activist who first actually coined the term “sex work,” to speak in this area as early as 2002.

-c- Our group exists, and was founded prior to Team Clear Heels 413. I am attaching screenshots of a Facebook messenger conversation I had with Bella in December of 2017 where she tells me towards the end of the exchange that she would found a new organization specifically because she objected to my request to respect our members’ privacy. Her organization launched on Dec 17th of that year, with the event she begins this conversation offering to hold as a fundraiser for us.

What is true is that before Team Clear Heels 413, there was no organization dedicated to advancing the false premise that Bella Vendetta is an authority on sex worker activism. TCH413 excels at this task.

2/ You may have heard that the previous owner of Castaways was widely known to be a perpetrator of harm against sex workers. This is true. Please also know that Castaways has classified strippers as employees for years under his management, and has never in my memory charged house fees. Bella seems to be implying that these pay structures will be new or in some way innovative under her leadership. This is false. More importantly for your article, employee status and lack of house fees do not preclude a strip club from being an abusive work environment.

Some relevant subtext re the attached December 2017 conversation between Bella and I is that she wanted to publicly announce the time and location of our groups closed secret meeting, which she had never attended, in such a way that strip club managers and clients — people who routinely harm our members — would have access to that very sensitive information. You will notice that she became belligerent and withdrew her offer to fundraise for us when asked, very politely and diplomatically, to collaborate with me on finding less violating ways to show her support.

You will also notice that she continued forcing my participation in her kink — capitalizing the pronoun “Me” as if she were my domme — even after I specifically told her I objected to it. We have since become aware that Bella is a serial violator of the consent of people either low on social status or not useful to her. For example, we’ve heard from many sex workers that she has subjected porn workers she employed to both labor abuses and sexual exploitation on her sets as a director.

As evidence of her false claim that TCH413 does public health work, Bella may describe a campaign in which she and other TCH413 members asked local strip club managers to keep Narcan with other first aid supplies behind the bar. This campaign was conducted without the input of strippers who inject drugs. It was a failure. Of the five clubs who were asked, only one club that Bella does not manage agreed to keep Narcan officially on hand. (She did also allow this in her own club — -at the time of this campaign, Bella was already in negotiations to manage Castaways for the first time). At the other three strip clubs, strippers who do not inject drugs, and are not trusted by strippers who do inject drugs (our members), agreed to keep Narcan in their personal dressing room lockers. That’s where that Narcan will remain, unused in the case of an in-club overdose, because the Narcan-holding dancers are not in the confidence of the workers secretly injecting drugs at strip clubs, nor will they be deferred to by club management in the crucial first seconds of a medical emergency.

The entire campaign was conducted using language that centered the trauma strippers who do not inject drugs experience when co-workers overdose. We were disgusted by this framing. People who use opioids are the people most harmed by the overdose crisis — -full stop. The deaths of sex workers who inject drugs are not a tool to advance the public health careers of people who have been fucking with their money for years.

Further, when Bella made a Facebook post to a local harm reduction page announcing the supposed success of her Narcan in strip clubs project, she included some warnings about “rumors” that she is a “rat”. The suggestion was that if people who had been harmed by her shared information about those bad experiences with others in an attempt to keep those others safe from similar harm they would be “putting her life at risk”. This is a very common narrative perpetuated by abusers to isolate and discredit their victims while also limiting the spread of information about the abusers’ capacity to inflict harm. Bella’s statement in this case was especially disgusting to me because it leans on and perpetuates very racist ideas about both Springfield as a town and drug economies more generally. Incidentally, just in case this needs to be stated, no one is ever executed by drug cartels, other crime syndicates, or random residents of Springfield as punishment for being known to cause harm to people who inject drugs. Our members are preyed upon with impunity.

More subtly, I’d like to push back on the idea that the LGBTQ nights that Bella has hosted in area clubs benefit queer sex workers or that overtly queer programming at Castaways will inevitably do so. It’s important to remember that people surviving on their sex work income do their jobs for money and not for vague feelings of empowerment or to have their identities confirmed.

During Bellas LGBTQ events, a community unused to strip club patronage enters the space in groups. They pay cover charges and buy drinks, which is how the house makes its money. Ownership is thus often perfectly happy to host these events. The dancers on shift don’t necessarily benefit economically however, since, in my experience, attendees of these events generally spend less money on lap dances than conventional strip club customers do. Being scheduled to work these events at all, which might occur on a night a dancer would normally work and can’t afford to skip, even if they can guess that earnings will be lower than usual, is often predicated on identifying as or reading as queer by middle class white standards.

Strippers have always been queer. We do not need special themed nights or customer validation to be so.

In my many years as a queer stripper, it has been my experience that when a club receives an influx of patrons unused to strip club cultural norms, especially when a critical mass of those new customers are women, higher spending regular customers feel uncomfortable and change their behavior. Sometimes those regular customers leave, embarrassed. Sometimes they stay but their spending is depressed. Worst of all, experienced strip club patrons sometimes find they are able to turn to the strip club’s new female clients for free attention and the emotional labor that they would otherwise pay strippers to give them.

Working class queer dancers end up enduring financial losses because of these nights at the very same time that they are pressured to out themselves to club patrons in order to fit in, and possibly in order to be allowed to work at all, sacrificing their privacy and any work/life divide they might want to maintain.

I have been following the story of Bella’s impending and former management of Castaways with alarm.

I worry about the veteran working class strippers who’ve been cultivating their regulars at Castaways for years (decades in some cases), who will be fired to make room for younger, thinner, more culturally savvy dancers who have a bigger social media presence and more options in life — new dancers who will also, critically, be indebted to Bella for their jobs.

I worry about those same new dancers who might be doing in-person sex work for the first time as strippers at Castaways. They will believe Bella’s schtick about empowerment and her own personal importance in the industry. They will have their power, their boundaries, and their privacy subtly and continuously undermined while the middle class queer community in Northampton cheers and these beginner strippers struggle to find language for why it all feels less and less okay.

I worry about dancers both old and new who will need to choose beween identifying as queer in their client-facing branding or losing shifts.

I worry about everyone working at Castaways who will need to do extra emotional labor telling the manager’s cheapskate timewasting friends how cool they are when those friends come in to loiter and lecture the dancers on sex work activism. These hangers on will need to be continuously praised for their wokeness when they insert themselves into and even presume to elect themselves leaders on issues where they are not stakeholders.

I thank you again for seeking context in writing this article. I hope you are able to find a way to write a piece that functions as something other than an advertisement for the business interests of a dangerous person.

-Naomi Lauren

Edit: Saturday Oct 12. Except from a novel length comment I made deep in the bowels of the comment section of the public post promoting this piece on the wall of my Facebook page:

You don’t understand strip club dynamics- that is true. Stripping is first and foremost our job that we do for money. Customers of any sexual orientation finding spiritual fulfillment or identity solidifying community in our work spaces is a secondary concern to us vs managing our exposure to privacy violations and emotional abuse while also making money to pay our bills. Queer customers often assume they are doing me a favor merely by existing in the clubs I work in- especially when they arrive in overtly queer multi person groups. In fact queer customers tip badly, attempt to extract far more emotional labor and time from me than my straight customers do, condescend to lecture me on activism topics where they are both uninformed and uninvested relative to myself, are consistently and significantly worse at consent and respecting boundaries re physical contact than straight customers, and are the only customers who have ever outed me in the larger community. For emphasis: I am queer.

Turning Castaways into an all purpose gay bar catering to Northampton queers is gentrification. This will be doubly bad for currently working strippers because Bella is going to fire everyone who does not owe her fealty, advance her personal brand, or consent to participate in her kink. Access to good shifts will be conditional on assuaging her ego, as was also true under Jimmy. Bella will use the language of social justice as a tool in the fucked up non consensual self promoting power games she plays and she will use communities that congregate around justice issues as collaborators in her abuse. Jimmy only used misogyny. I and many other people I know find abusers like Bella far more violating, insidious and isolating to interface with.

I hope trans sex workers make all the money in the world. Your are correct that Jimmy would not have hired a pre op trans woman. I’ll go further and say that it is my understanding that no local club hires trans people of any gender or transition status unless they make the very headfucky economic choice to pretend to be cis for pay. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and in this case Bellas desire to be publicly lauded as an expert and hero on social justice issues has the happy side effect of creating economic opportunity for the trans community.

A word to any would be new Castaways hires reading here, especially if they are young or new to a public facing performance job or sex work, and triply so if they are either trans and/or a POC:

Bella is using you and the idea of you to promote herself and accumulate social power. Get what you can for yourself out of that. Do not believe her when she says she has your best interest in mind. Do not let her define for you the emotional, physical or privacy boundaries you draw with her, her friends, your customers, or the public at large. Keep a piece of yourself for yourself. Expect her to neg you and push back with ever escalating force on your boundaries when they do not serve her. Be tactical about navigating that. Understand that there are sex workers who came before you who Bella does not speak for or understand and in many cases is deliberately speaking over and displacing. If you are able to hustle up Bellas patronage and extract benefit from it, do not let her weaponize you against people who decline to participate in that dynamic. If something doesn’t feel right but you can’t say why, it is your right to just not- even if you’ve done it before, even if everyone else feels comfortable with it- and you don’t owe anyone an explanation. Be intentional about how much of yourself you give to your paid work. Save your energy. Make money. You are a fucking badass and deserve to thrive.