Too many people talk about Aileen or make media about her and what happened to her for their own benefit and don’t discuss her words or the things she cared about. This is something she, herself, explicitly condemned. So we’re going to start off with some of her words from shortly before she was executed.
Aileen stated: “You sabotaged my ass, society and the cops and the system, a raped woman got executed and was used for books and movies and shit, ladder climbs, reelection, everything else. I got a big finger in all your faces, thanks a lot.”
She was very clear about how she felt regarding media coverage of her, and the day before her execution she made it clear in an interview with Nick Broomfield what her positions were about discussion of her. She explicitly stated that she was only interested in doing the interview if Nick would let her talk about the cops and their involvement in her suffering. In talking about Aileen here, I intend to do exactly that – to discuss the danger sex workers like Aileen face and how the police tie into that.
In one segment of her last interview with Nick Broomfield, Aileen discusses her use of self-defence and her certainty that the police allowed it:
Nick: “I am asking you what got you to kill the seven men?”
Aileen: “And I’m telling you because the cops let me keep killing them, Nick, don’t you get it?”
Nick: “Not everybody is killing seven people. So there must have been something in you that was getting you to do that.”
Aileen: “Oh, you are lost, Nick. I was a hitchhiking hooker.”
Nick: “Right.”
Aileen: “Running into trouble. I’d shoot, shoot the guy if I ran into trouble, physical trouble, the cops knew it. When the physical trouble came along, let her clean the streets, and then we’ll pull her in. That’s why.”
Nick: “But how come there was so much physical trouble? Because it was all in one year. It’s seven people in one year.”
Aileen: “Oh well.”
For context, we’ll also keep in mind her earlier claim in the interview:
Aileen: “I know that the cops knew who I was after Richard Mallory died. I left prints everywhere and they covered it up. And let me kill the rest of those guys to turn me into a serial killer. I know they did because I was no professional serial killer, murderer, or anything, whatever you want to call it, you know. I wasn’t special, I was… did some sloppy work, you know, and I left prints.”
The response that Nick Broomfield had to Aileen in his last interview with her, in asking the question “how come there was so much physical trouble?” is a common one. In fact, it’s one of the first responses many people have when someone suggests they believe Aileen Wuornos was indeed killing in self-defence and that these killings should not have been considered murders. People struggle to believe that Aileen’s safety could have been so consistently at risk. This tells me that people have no idea how much risk homeless sex workers engaging in survival sex work experience.
Aileen calls herself a “hitchhiking hooker” when she’s trying to get this point across. Though many would now use terms like “homeless survival sex worker” the concept is the same – she was someone who could easily be raped or killed without the rest of society caring about it. She was broadly considered disposable and failed over and over again for her entire life. When you’re in that kind of situation, rape is a common occurrence. Within sex work in general there is a significant rate of violence, due to criminalization and stigma making us all vulnerable, but it must be pointed out that the bulk of this violence happens to the most vulnerable even within the larger at-risk group.
The reason Aileen came across such a significant number of violent men was that they would explicitly seek her out. It’s not a coincidence. Aileen isn’t suggesting that by random chance she happened to come across all these violent men in a year at a rate they’d be present in the population, she makes it clear that her situation is what puts her at so much risk.
It is not hard for me to believe that Aileen could have been under threat of rape and/or death so many times in a year, because I’ve been at risk of rape several times in a year as a sex worker… and I’ve never been in a situation that was as dangerous as Aileen’s. I know many other sex workers, and several of us (when at the most vulnerable times in our sex working lives) have been raped several times in a year. Through my time meeting other sex workers and sharing our experiences, I’ve met people who had pasts eerily similar to Aileen’s that might report being raped a dozen times in a year whilst doing survival sex work as homeless women. The difference between them and Aileen in many cases is only that they weren’t able to defend themselves.
As I see it, Aileen lays out her story as being that she’d lived a life of being assaulted many times. Then Richard Mallory, unlike men before him who had raped her, explicitly threatened her life. She killed him in self-defence, due to the threat to her life. She was aware after that point that her prints were everywhere and she was soon likely to be arrested for this crime. The next time someone attempted to rape her, she defended herself. The time after that, she defended herself again. She carried on like that until she was finally arrested.
When discussing this with friends of mine, one pulled up an article with the quote: “After that [incident], I believe she put into effect her own personal affirmative action program. If a guy wanted to do something to her that she didn’t want to do, not even for money, or if a guy got rough with her, she killed him.”
Another friend of mine responded with “I wonder what getting rough with someone is called when it happens to women who aren’t socially considered disposable”.
I think this kind of attitude is interesting. People are willing to believe that Mallory, who was a known sexual abuser, was killed by Aileen in self-defence due to threatening her life. They are either unwilling to believe that the other men threatened her at all, or, in my opinion even more disturbingly, believe she should not have defended herself unless she was sure they were going to murder her. The idea that Aileen might defend herself from rape with the only means she had to do so, a gun, is considered too far. According to that reasoning, if Aileen were to follow what they wanted, she’d have to not use her one successful and effective method of fighting back against rape.
Women like Aileen often end up dead. Sometimes at the hands of their clients and sometimes at the hands of police and sometimes from the cold when sleeping rough on the streets. If Aileen had done what she was supposed to do and had refused to defend herself, I’m sure she’d have eventually been killed by one of the violent men who assaulted her. Perhaps some of the men she killed would have raped her and then let her go after, there’s no way to know, but the expectation that she tolerate being raped over and over until one of those clients finally killed her isn’t something that makes sense to me.
Through the years, Aileen had many dealings with the police and was known to them, but they never helped her. This is unsurprising, given the criminalization of sex work and the fact that police are some of the worst culprits for the mistreatment of sex workers. It’s clear that Aileen was not a methodical and calculated killer, and she believed the police knew all along that she’d killed Richard Mallory and yet chose to do nothing about it.
There were so many opportunities for various people and organisations to help Aileen and yet they didn’t. She was at constant risk of assault and death via various avenues and any material help that stopped her from having to take so many risks would have stopped this from occurring. So many people want to pathologize Aileen or sensationalize the idea of a female serial killer. The truth of the matter is that an extremely vulnerable woman who was repeatedly abused was put in various situations where her life and body were at risk and the police did nothing but watch.
According to what the rest of society and the police wanted, Aileen Wuornos was supposed to be killed by Richard Mallory. She wasn’t supposed to fight back, she was socially considered disposable. When she did not die, when she fought back, there was no possibility for her to call the police and receive help and support after the trauma she’d endured. Everything after that was a result of her refusal to allow herself to be violated or killed when she knew she was capable of defending herself.
Men who target vulnerable sex workers are allowed to get away with it whilst sex workers themselves are arrested for trying to earn money to survive. Men like Samuel Little, who confessed to 93 murders (mostly women, many of them sex workers) and was the most prolific known serial killer in US history, get away with so many of their crimes because of who they target. Peter Sutcliffe, also called the Yorkshire Ripper, managed to avoid being caught for a decade because his victims were sex workers. Only when he started to kill “innocent young girls” as opposed to sex workers (in the words of the police) did the police start to care at all.
The police fail sex workers over and over again. The police harm sex workers, they arrest us, they create conditions which make our work more dangerous… and then they turn away and let it happen when we’re assaulted or killed.
Aileen Wuornos’ story is not exceptional among sex workers in terms of the violence she faced. It’s not exceptional in terms of the lack of care from the police force. What is exceptional in her case is that she didn’t die at the hands of Richard Mallory.
With most killers, it’s hard to pinpoint what would have prevented them from killing. For Aileen, it seems simple to me. If Aileen had not been left with no option but to sell sex to survive in a manner that put her in so much danger, where selling sex was criminalized and stigmatized to create that dangerous environment, she wouldn’t have killed a single person.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 