Last week, Marylène Lévesque, a 22-year-old sex worker employed by a Quebec City massage parlour, was murdered by 51-year-old Eustachio Gallese. Lévesque agreed to meet with the man at a hotel in the city’s Ste-Foy district, but never made it home. Gallese later surrendered to local police and told them to retrieve her body from his hotel room.

The death of a young woman is horrific enough. But the details that would soon surface would make many of us question the inner failings of our justice system and a world that continues to treat sex workers as dispensable.

In 2006, Gallese was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal death of his girlfriend, with no possibility of parole for 15 years. Thirty-two-year-old Chantale Deschenes had been savagely beaten to death with a hammer and repeatedly stabbed. Gallese then took the time to scribble vile insults about her on the bedroom wall before turning himself in to police. This wasn’t a one-time offence. He already had a history of conjugal violence with a previous partner in 1997.

Even though the Parole Board initially found that he posed “a high risk of violence,” they later inexplicably changed that to a “moderate risk” and nine years later Gallese won conditional release to a halfway house. He had been out on day parole since March of 2019. While out, he was apparently allowed to see sex workers “in order to address [his] sexual needs.”

Say what?

Let me repeat those details to see if I can fathom their absurdity. A man with a history of misogyny, rage and extreme physical violence against women was released early. The same man who beat his girlfriend to death with a hammer, repeatedly stabbed her and scribbled “whore” on the wall was not only released early but permitted to interact with women to satisfy his sexual needs. A convicted killer who was once considered at high risk of reoffending was allowed out on day parole to interact with sex workers as a “risk management strategy.”

And thanks to the liberal conditions of his release, he invited one of them back to a secluded hotel room to do with her as he pleased. No one bothered to inform this young woman, or the massage parlour she worked at, that he was extremely dangerous and posed a risk to her life.

Quebec Justice Minister Sonia LeBel rightfully demanded explanations from federal public security minister Bill Blair, since it’s the Parole Board of Canada that oversaw Gallese’s case. And I sincerely hope she would have done the same if the victim were a person of colour or a trans sex worker.

The Gazette quoted LeBel as saying that, “while she understands the principles of social re-insertion, the Parole Board’s guiding principle is above and beyond all else the safety of the public.”

Collateral damage

And there resides the crux of the problem. When the Parole Board decided to allow Gallese to see sex workers as a halfway solution to his needs being met and his anger defused, they consciously or unconsciously took the decision to treat sex workers as less than human. (As if getting your sexual needs met is a male birthright. As if a bad man can f*ck his way to better behaviour.) They didn’t consider sex workers as part of the public they aimed to protect. Instead, they treated them as possible collateral damage, as the frontline to probable violence. It was an experiment they were willing to undertake with the bodies and lives of sex workers.

They knowingly gambled with these women’s safety as a way to provide a convicted violent killer with a human outlet. Even if the risk of violence was “moderate,” it wouldn’t be faced by the general public. After all, sex workers sign away their rights to safety and dignity when they start working in this field, right? Lévesque essentially paid the price of a parole board’s decision that a killer’s sexual needs superseded her value and humanity.

By treating sex workers as a non-consenting panacea for misogyny and violent tendencies, the parole board placed this young woman in a position where she was unknowingly providing services to a violent man who felt entitled to her, her body and, eventually, her life.

Blaming the victim

I’ve seen the online comments and the threads. I’ve seen the victim-blaming newspaper headlines that start with “Sex worker dies.”

This reduces her death to an occupational hazard instead of the consequence of a killer deciding to end her life. Gallese’s girlfriend wasn’t a sex worker and that didn’t save her from a violent death at his hands, did it?

The last 10 femicides in Quebec didn’t involve sex workers, but does anyone remember where those victims worked? Of course not, because their professions weren’t plastered on the front pages as the implied cause of their deaths. Society continues to judge sex workers and when one of them ends up dead we highlight their vocation. We remind everyone what they did, and blame them for their deaths, silently. Or, in the case of trash radio DJs like Jeff Fillion, loudly.

After all, should no tragic consequences befall people who choose to engage in such morally ambiguous behaviour and questionable choices? Should these women really have a right to safety? Don’t they know what they’re getting into when they agree to peddle their bodies to strangers? This is literally what I can read between the lines when people comment: “But what did she expect? She was a sex worker… she followed him to the hotel… it’s a dangerous profession.”

Less human than human

It’s a dangerous profession because we allow it to be. I honestly don’t care about people’s personal opinions about sex work because they are largely irrelevant. You don’t like sex work, don’t engage in it or promote it. But when people who willingly work in the sex industry are mistreated or debased, it doesn’t protect actual victims of sexual exploitation. It only makes it harder for them to come forward and seek help. It marginalizes people who are already marginalized.

Research has repeatedly shown that criminalization of sex work does not rehabilitate or protect sex workers. On the contrary, dehumanizing and stigmatizing sex workers forces the sex trade underground and makes them even more vulnerable. Violent abusers know they can get away with treating them as subhuman.

If you want a recipe for lethal violence, let a femicidal maniac interact with women viewed as dispensable by society. It was only a matter of time before Gallese would harm someone, and that’s exactly what he did last week.

The federal government has now ordered an investigation into the facts. Corrections Canada and the parole board have announced they will jointly look into the circumstances of this young woman’s death. It’s too late for Lévesque, but hopefully the investigation and any future measures taken can prevent such pointless deaths. ■

Read more editorials by Toula Drimonis here.