It might yet turn out to be what everyone seems to hope and expect: a tale of sex and power, secrecy and scandal, hypocrisy and comeuppance. So far, though, what we seem to have is a tale of murky motives, shifting legal strategies and chutzpah.

We’re talking about the tangled matter of one Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who is being prosecuted in connection with what the authorities say was a pricey prostitution ring in the Washington, D.C., area that serviced as many as 15,000 clients between 1993 and 2006. A federal indictment was handed up in the district on March 1.

Ah, seen that movie, you may be thinking: Mayflower Madam, Hollywood Madam, now the D.C. Madam. Boldface names turn up among the customers, faces are reddened, reputations punctured, all good gossipy schadenfreude fun — and the poised, polished businesswoman at the center of the affair probably winds up with talk show appearances and a book deal.

Well, not quite so fast. There are some distinctly odd twists this time around, and we’re not even talking about the rather postmodern fact that Ms. Palfrey apparently ran the business in question, Pamela Martin & Associates, while living a continent away in Vallejo, Calif., north of San Francisco. (She insists it was a legal escort service, not a call-girl ring.)

Ms. Palfrey, evidently short of money for legal defense since prosecutors froze her $400,000 in cash and stocks last fall, attracted a good deal of attention over the last few weeks, some of it perhaps of a panicky nature, by threatening to sell her business’s phone records, showing the telephone numbers of thousands of customers, to the highest bidder.

(But wait: If, as she insists, nothing naughty went on, who cares who her customers were? Isn’t the list only worth something if it points a finger of guilt at some famous johns — and therefore at Ms. Palfrey too?)



On Tuesday, Ms. Palfrey changed course. Her lawyer told WTOP radio in Washington that she had decided not to sell the records. Instead they will be handed over to a news organization, free of charge. Which one? Nobody is saying yet.

What, if not money, does Ms. Palfrey get out of that? The news organization’s help in combing the records and identifying customers, who can then become witnesses for the defense, the lawyer, Montgomery B. Silbey, told WTOP. And what does the news organization get? The opportunity to break the news if it finds anyone prominent in the list. About everybody else, we are told, the news organization has promised to be discreet.

Mr. Silbey said Ms. Palfrey shied away from a sale, and the presumable mass revelation of names to follow, because “she doesn’t want to do the average customer any harm, unless that customer would be critical to her defense.”

More twists abound. Prosecutors usually like to lay out damning evidence publicly, but in this case, they tried for a court order to prevent Ms. Palfrey from giving anyone the phone records or any other evidence from the case. (The motion is on The Smoking Gun here, along with archived copies of Pamela Martin & Associates’s web page offering a flat $275 rate for 90 minutes, and a help-wanted ad seeking atttractive women over 23 with at least two years of college.)

And another: Ms. Palfrey is herself suing 15 woman she formerly employed as escorts, 14 of them as yet unnamed, saying that when they did things with customers that amounted to illegal prostitution, they were violating their contract with her. (Oh, so something naughty was going on, after all?) The number of respondents in that suit happens to match pretty closely the number of former escorts who testified before the grand jury, according to charging documents cited on The Smoking Gun.

That suit won’t go ahead until the criminal charges are disposed of, a judge ruled last week. Meanwhile, whoever might be embarrassed to be found in those phone records is now no longer just at Ms. Palfrey’s mercy, but also at the mercy of that mystery news organization. Wonder how long before we know.