WASHINGTON — Inside a congressional office building on a recent Tuesday, Kate D’Adamo had a tough sell.

D’Adamo had spent the year lobbying in the US Capitol on behalf of sex workers, a workforce that’s often maligned and portrayed cartoonishly on TV dramas. On this August morning, as her phone perpetually charged from a giant battery, she was trying to unravel a law passed last year designed to tackle human trafficking that had, in the process, outlawed the online platforms that many sex workers used to screen clients. Known as SESTA-FOSTA, the law has caused more sex workers to work without those tools, making them more vulnerable to predators on the street.

Part of a growing national network of activists behind a backlash against the law, D'Adamo has quarterbacked a bill that’s expected to be introduced in Congress this fall to study the ramifications of the law — part of a larger goal of repealing it and, one day, decriminalizing sex work nationwide.



And on this day, she sat across from a legislative aide to a House member from California, looking for members willing to cosponsor the bill.

“The Congress member understands, you know, the harms that the bill that was signed into law has done,” the aide told D’Adamo and two fellow activists from LGBTQ organizations who’d joined her. “But I can’t see the Congress member coming out publicly and supporting this, just because I feel that we would get a lot of backlash in the district.”

“We definitely have people in our district that are against legalizing or making sex work the norm,” the aide added.

A bill that merely studies the harms of SESTA-FOSTA may seem like an easy sell, but some, clearly, fear it will be a marching band crashing into Congress’s long silent treatment of sex workers. Many are reluctant to get behind the issue publicly, and the aide allowed BuzzFeed News to sit in on the meeting with D’Adamo, provided the Democratic lawmaker he works for remained anonymous. While Democrats ostensibly champion LGBTQ people and women of color who often bear the brunt of poverty and violence — populations far more likely to rely on the sex trade to pay rent — the stigma around sex work has made it a third-rail issue for some lawmakers.

Democratic voters tend to feel differently. This year, a poll by Decrim NY and Data for Progress found that 56% of Democratic voters nationally support decriminalizing sex work (more than three times the number opposed); another poll, by Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News, found 83% of LGBTQ people support decriminalizing sex work involving consenting adults.

In his meeting with D’Adamo, the aide explained that since SESTA-FOSTA passed, there’s been an uptick of sex work on the district’s streets, leading to more 911 calls from constituents. “That’s not to say that the Congress member wouldn’t vote in favor of this on the floor,” he explained. “The people in our district are just very religious. Because of the taboo behind sex work, the Congress member doesn’t want to scare away supporters.”

D’Adamo could have shot back a hard rebuttal — after all, this is merely a study — but she softened.

“That makes so much sense about the rising calls,” she said in a disarming moment. “It’s one of those ironic things,” she said, connecting the dots between how SESTA-FOSTA shut down websites, thereby driving sex workers into gentrifying neighborhoods.

“How can we actually have this type of conversation for just the regular, you know, everyday, average working person in our district?” the aide asked, possibly cracking the door open for his boss.

“I never go into a conversation and try to change someone’s thoughts on prostitution,” D’Adamo told the aide. “It’s disrespectful for me to think that I can. It’s the body, and it’s commerce, and it’s a lot of different things. I just try to say let’s, as a society, change the circumstances that we are creating.”

The conventional wisdom of far-left activism tends to be revolution or bust. But as D’Adamo explained, she and fellow advocates didn’t attempt a more ambitious bill to repeal SESTA-FOSTA this year because, she said, “I didn’t wanna shoot my wad on a messaging bill that gets so much pushback.”

That D’Adamo can have these conversations on Capitol Hill at all reflects a seismic shift: Democrats took the House, local lawmakers introduced bills aimed at decriminalization, and the public has taken notice.

D’Adamo is all but allergic to being seen as the face of a movement, and yet she has filled a niche on Capitol Hill, where she’s widely respected both by advocates in Congress and by activists on the ground working directly with sex workers.

“She is one of the most vocal and effective advocates on this issue,” said Rep. Ro Khanna of California’s Silicon Valley, who plans to introduce the bill in the next several weeks to study SESTA-FOSTA’s impacts after being approached by D’Adamo and her fellow activists.

“She’s really, I think, driving the conversation about the humanity of sex workers and the vulnerability of sex workers,” he said.

The measure, which has yet to be finalized, would call on the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health to study the fallout of SESTA-FOSTA.

And it could open a pathway to decriminalizing sex work more broadly, said Khanna, who notes that it traces lines drawn by the drug policy reform movement. “It started with data about the mass incarceration epidemic and how many people were filling our jails because of low-level drug offenses,” he said. “Those studies helped us get over our own assumptions about a war on drugs. And I think similarly, it’s going to be the same — it’s not going to be a quick process, but we need studies and information so that people can make rational public policy about sex work.”

The extent to which SESTA-FOSTA succeeded in its stated goal of shutting down sex traffickers is unclear, but Khanna said anecdotes have flooded in that the measure has forced sex workers to walk strolls to meet clients, causing “more violence, more harm to the public.”

“It was a wrong vote,” said Khanna, who was one of just 12 Democrats to oppose SESTA-FOSTA. “We need to now study it and understand the consequences, which I don’t think Congress fully considered. I can’t see any reason for opposing the collection of data.

“I thought what made us Democrats is an empathy for people who don’t have a political voice,” he added. “Sex workers almost by definition represent the most marginalized members of our society. They’re often people who come from great economic hardship. I always thought that the Democratic Party stood for that.”