The Battle for Brothel Town
Written by Mimi Lamarre
Alice Little leaves work late tonight, looking over one shoulder as she walks out into a parking lot – a relatively small slab of concrete surrounded by Nevada desert. Under the still cover of a stark black sky, the vast landscape is ominous. She slips into her car and starts the engine.
She drives towards home, checking her mirrors to examine the dark desert road stretching deep into the night.
One turn. Two. Three.
As she takes a fourth, a white van slithers into pace behind her. It follows each turn that she takes – not too far, but not too close. She curses under her breath as her heart rate spikes. She knows what this is; she’s been here before.
Her palms begin to sweat. She places a hand on the side door compartment, where, inside lays a gun. It’s reassuring.
Taking a sharp turn, she drives a bit further, to the police station that she knows lies just down the road.
Half a mile, and the van seems to have missed a turn.
She curves into the parking lot, the nondescript building’s ambient glow reflecting on her front windshield.
She parks her car, turns off the engine, and tells herself to take a deep breath, even as she prays that the van won’t come back to follow her.
Turning around in her seat, she watches as it continues unstoppingly down the road and snakes around a mountainous bend, its yellow lights disappearing into the night.
Her heart rate slows with each breath she takes. She starts her car engine, and once again begins her drive home – just another evening commute for the highest-paid prostitute in the country.
In the Fall of 2018, Alice meets a colleague at a convention hall in Lyon County, Nevada. The four-foot-eight redhead wears high-heeled boots and a tan leather jacket.
The two women – Alice and her colleague – are instructed to sit at the front of the room at a long, folding table across from two white, middle-aged men with grey hair – pastors from nearby Smith Valley. Average-looking townspeople sit in plastic linoleum chairs throughout the room, their focus painted on the four keynote speakers for today’s event.
The conversation begins.
One of the pastors, grey-haired and donning a handlebar mustache, starts by quoting scripture. He takes a deep breath, “When anyone – whether they be prostitutes or politicians – pushes to legitimize acts of promiscuity, whoretry and adultery, they are actually seeking to annul the need for repentance, and therefore hinder the propagation of the gospel. So that’s why I’m here tonight.”
He sits down. The second man, younger and wearing a blue shirt, adds: “I wanted to share with you, I am not against you. I’m against what you do, but I’m not against you. I think there can be a separation there… Because the most loving thing that you can do, if you see someone who’s in danger, the most loving thing you can do is to say, ‘You’re in danger.’ We do that for our kids, for our children.”
Alice’s colleague, also red-haired and in her mid-twenties and aptly named Ruby Rae, quickly retorts: “I appreciate your concern, however, I am a full-grown woman, and I don’t need anyone to save me, or try to push their beliefs on me. I’ve made my decision, and this is what I want to do.”
She continues, “To care for me or women like me does not mean taking away our jobs when we are telling you to your face that we are doing what we want to do.”
Alice lets a characteristic smirk play across her face, even as she says nothing. Her expression is derived from living a life that many – like the people in this room – deem unscrupulous. While others scowl, stare, comment crude things on social media, quote scripture, or follow her home at night, she smirks – or, better yet, smiles.
More than a decade earlier, in 2009, Jason Guinasso sat at a work dinner. It was the kind of thing he often attended as a lawyer – advocacy is the name of the game. But this one ignited a fire in his belly that he hadn’t anticipated.
The purpose of the event, put on by an anti-trafficking organization called Awaken, was to educate the public on the harms of prostitution – and there was no better place to do it than in Nevada, the only place in the U.S. where the sex trade is legal, and even regulated in the form of brothels.
Jason, a middle-aged man with dark brown hair and scruffy facial hair, listened and – excuse the cliche – learned.
Over the next months and years, Jason threw himself into the work of making prostitution illegal in Nevada. He did research, attended more events. He allied himself with anti-trafficking organizations – like Awaken, Exodus Cry, and the National Center for Sexual Exploitation – all of which believe that any form of prostitution is linked to human trafficking, and that brothels are inherently exploitative for women and should be outlawed.
Hordes of studies and statistics surveying those in the illegal and legal sex trade have found that it can in fact be an incredibly exploitative and violent line of work. One 2012 study published in World Development found that countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited.
Jason – a lifelong Nevadan, an evangelical Christian and a family man – cites statistics like this one emphatically.
“I liken living in Nevada, with legal prostitution, to what it might have been like to live in one of the Southern states when slavery was part of the culture and the economy – how people would have rationalized and justified it,” he says one Monday afternoon. “I think we have a similar thing in Nevada, where we rationalize and justify prostitution, and have this cognitive dissonance as to how that choice relates to sex trafficking in our state and the tourism that comes with it, and that sort of thing.”
As he wrote in an op-ed in The Nevada Independent, “Rather than empowering so-called sex workers, it is my view that any form of legalization is actually another form of invidious misogyny that satisfies the insatiable sexual fantasies of men at the expense of those being bought and sold.”
Let the battle begin.
A sign beckons customers into the world-famous Chicken Ranch Brothel in Pahrump, Nevada. Credit: Mimi Lamarre
The Palace Station Hotel and Casino sounds like it should be a jewel of the Las Vegas Strip—a shimmering, luxurious haven befitting its royal name. In reality, it’s a yellowing three-star hotel nestled between a bustling Chick-fil-A and a row of unremarkable apartment buildings, far enough from the neon glow of the Strip. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about any of it—until the elevator doors slide open, and Alice Little steps out.
It’s five years after those scary late-night car chases of 2018, and the now-33-year-old is wearing a pair of leggings and a brown leather backpack slung over one shoulder. She repeatedly checks her phone as she exits the elevator. She walks across the lobby, steps out of the automatic doors, traverses the parking garage, and settles into her gray car.
She’s about to make a 60-mile commute to work, through the Nevada mountains to Pahrump, a small town of around 45,000 people. Pahrump is an image of tan-and-green – single-story bungalows and desert shrubs dot the landscape nestled in the Mojave Desert. It’s the kind of place where you get the feeling you can see for miles in every direction.
Each month, this is her routine. She spends two weeks on a farm that she owns in Colorado and then two weeks in Nevada, staying at the Palace Station Hotel and commuting out to Pahrump for clients.
Alice comes to the town to meet men – or, occasionally, women or nonbinary people – from all over the United States, and the world. Many of them have found her through social media, or through her website. She spends weeks beforehand getting to know each of her clients over the phone – exchanging social media DMs, text messages, and even phone calls – all to make them feel comfortable and at ease before their appointment.
A few hours before each session, Alice drives past the Lakeside Casino Resort in Pahrump, down a long road called Homestead, and arrives at Chicken Ranch brothel, where she works.
The town’s two main brothels, Sheri’s Ranch and Chicken Ranch, are right next door to each other. The brothels and the town seem to have an ironically transactional relationship — the brothels bring visitors and tax dollars, and Pahrump township officials allow them to operate.
“Oh, they love us,” Alice says earnestly, speaking of the town’s residents.
It's a late December morning when Alice arrives from Vegas. The ranch, which appears to be in a constant state of expansion, is a blue house with multi-colored trim with many misshapen additions on each side.
Alice pulls an energy drink from her car cup holder and walks to the front gate, waiting to be buzzed in. It might not look like a sophisticated physical structure, but it doesn’t lack security. There are cameras, night guards, two-way mirrors, and strategically-placed panic buttons in every room.
A dark-haired, bespectacled manager lets Alice in through the front door. She walks into a low-ceilinged, run-down-looking front room, with recliner sofas and a Christmas tree.
To the left is a small, rectangular room with a large examination table in the center, labeled “the doctor’s room.” State law (Nevada Admin. Code § 441A.800) says that all persons employed as sex workers must submit to HIV and syphilis testing monthly, and, if they are female and have a cervix, weekly to test for gonorrhea and chlamydia.
Alice walks out of the reception area and through a narrow, wood-paneled, low-ceilinged hallway with a pink mirror lining the wall. Above the mirror is a bedazzled sign, reading “Line Up.” This is where women on shift assemble when a customer drops in for a session without an appointment.
But not Alice.
“I’m lucky enough that I have reached a point in my career where I don't have to just be available all the time,” she says. “People will go out of their way to see me.”
It’s not just her schedule that she controls. Alice, it seems, tries to shatter almost every negative trope about her line of work. And, she says, it’s working. It’s widely reported that she's the highest-earning legal sex worker in the country—and likely the most publicly-recognized as well.
Nothing she does is secret. She books clients through her website. She also has YouTube channels that help bring in clients – like “The Intimacy Couch with Alice Little,” “Sex Toy Reviews” and “Brothel Tours.”
She pulls in views mostly through well-timed social media stunts and press. Case in point: in June 2023, Alice snagged a headline on TMZ.com by offering free “services” to the Golden Knights hockey players after a big win. The headline? "Nevada Sex Workers Offer Golden Knights Free Orgy After Golden State Win." It went on to quote her as saying she was ready to throw “the most extravagant, orgiastic sex party” the champs would ever witness at the Chicken Ranch’s sprawling 40-acre playground and VIP bungalows.
In this way, Alice is very different from most of the women who stand under the “Line Up” mirror. Most of the others cannot be so public, for fear of personal and professional backlash. The divide is even greater when compared to the average U.S. sex worker – often in a desperate, manipulative or forced situation that both victimizes and criminalizes them at the same time.
Alice Little’s reality is far better – and she knows it.
“There's a very big difference between a woman putting herself in a situation for her own profit and benefit and somebody who is being trapped in a location that they don't have the freedom to leave,” she says.
She’s only used the panic button one time in eight years of work – because of a spider. “I mean, this thing was a fucking tarantula,” she says, laughing.
Unlike many other brothels, Chicken Ranch does not require its workers to be on for 12 or 24-hour shifts, or to stay at the brothel during their two weeks on “tour.” Instead, women are allowed to come and go as they please, as long as they show up for their shifts. For Alice, this means arriving whenever clients book her independently.
When she’s there, she’s fed – one of two female cooks in the ranch kitchen shouts,“If the girls go hungry it’s their own fault!” as she passes by – cared for, and has friends.
Alice’s workspace for today is a Marilyn Monroe-themed room with a king-sized bed and an attached bathroom. The room is small and unassuming – not what you might think of as luxurious – but it’s clean, quiet, and private.
Alice usually works out of an RV, permanently parked at the back of the ranch, which gives her and her high-priced clients more privacy. But today, her client has mobility restrictions. He’d messaged her that he needed to be accommodated for certain sex positions, and Alice doesn’t want him to struggle with the steps up to the RV.
“I see literally everyone – as long as they’re twenty-one,” she says with her characteristic smile.
A few moments later, it’s time for Alice to meet her client.
And… an hour later, she’s done. She comes to the door of the bar in the front of the brothel wearing a red dress and black high heels.
“He was a nice guy,” she says, almost shyly.
A television in the bar connected to Chicken Ranch displays an advertisement for Alice’s services. Credit: Mimi Lamarre
Alice was born in Ireland and grew up in New York. By all accounts, she lived a normal, white-picket-fence existence for much of her childhood. It was in high school that her friends and family thought she might be different: she was in a polyamorous relationship. Her parents didn’t seem to mind, though.
She went to a New York state school and, after, moved to New York City, where she decided to take a job working front-of-house at a BDSM (which stands for bondage, discipline, dominance, submission or sadism) dungeon. The dungeon was a members-only club, hidden in a nice, nondescript building. “It was less ‘50 Shades of Gray,’ and more refined cigar lounge feeling,” Alice says. People would come to learn more about kink, like how to tie their partner up in a safe way.
When a dungeon instructor called in sick one day, Alice volunteered to teach a flogging session. From there, dungeons across the city — and, eventually, the U.S. — hired her to teach classes. She moved to the Midwest, where she helped friends set up their own dungeons.
It shouldn’t have been a huge surprise, then, that at the age of 25, Alice decided to move to the only place in America where prostitution is entirely legal and regulated – Nevada. She first worked at the Sagebrush Ranch, and then went on to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a rural brothel located near Carson City.
“It’s something that I really took a shining to,” she says. “I found it very fun and enjoyable. It's cool to get to connect with so many different people And I just had a lot of fun with it. So I jumped in with both feet and opted to do that full-time for the next year.”
It was at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch that she first came into contact with the opposition to her line of work, including at town halls and in late-night car chases.
One of Chicken Ranch’s many rooms, where Alice saw a male patron in Dec. 2023. Credit: Mimi Lamarre
Alice first heard the name ‘Jason Guinasso’ while serving as one of the leaders of the Nevada Brothel Association, a pro-brothel advocacy group that held town halls and county votes to affirm brothel legalization and make it more widely accepted amongst Nevadans.
In 2019, long into his advocacy work at this point, Jason filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman named Rebekah Charleston, who claimed that she had been sex trafficked in Nevada’s brothels. The filing claimed that legal brothels in Nevada violate state and federal law by enabling sex trafficking across state lines. Steve Sisolak, the governor of Nevada, the state of Nevada, and the legislature of the state of Nevada were named as the defendants in the suit.
Despite seemingly well-intentioned legal actions like this one, many of the organizations that Jason works with have religious foundations and beliefs, including Exodus Cry.
In 2013, the founder of Exodus Cry, Benjamin Nolot, tweeted: “I oppose homosexual marriage on the premise that it is an unspeakable offense to God and His design for marriage between a man and a woman.” The tweet has since been deleted, and Nolot later walked it back.
Nonetheless, the tweet caused HBO and actress Melissa McCarthy to apologize and denounce Exodus Cry after including them in the 2020 campaign “20 Days of Kindness.”
“We blew it. We made a mistake. We backed a charity that, upon proper vetting, stands for everything that we do not,” McCarthy said in an Instagram video posted in Nov. 2020.
Jason was quickly on the case, coming to the defense of Exodus Cry in a tweet.
“Seems like the way they dropped Exodus Cry is legally actionable as a form of defamation or business disparagement,” he wrote.
Nolot, a filmmaker and advocate, started Exodus Cry in 2008 as a religious organization, although he now says it’s a secular one that, according to its website, aims to “break the cycle of exploitation and help those sold for sex, because every person should be free.”
Like similarly-focused organizations, Exodus Cry leans into Hollywood-style messaging – powerful media narratives used to propel their point of view. The organization would go on to fund a film in 2023 through its production company Magic Lantern Productions, called “Buying Her,” which depicts greedy, sex-crazed male sex buyers.
And the organization’s religious undertones are laid bare in the film.“I love you and God loves you,” one former sex buyer says on screen.
In a showing of the film at a conference held in a basement room of the United Nations building in December of 2023, attendees often veered into other subject matters, like pornography and abortion.
“Abortion is linked with trafficking in that it facilitates it,” said one female conference attendee in casual conversation, explaining that her work at an organization that runs hotlines often gets calls from women “who see the results of their abortion on their bathroom floors.”
Still, Exodus Cry supports many legal actions in Nevada, like the one that Jason Guinasso filed in 2019.
And, on that matter, in Oct. 2019, Miranda Mai Du, a Nevada district judge, dismissed the case that Guinasso had filed on behalf of Rebekah Charleston because the plaintiffs failed to “demonstrate that the Court has standing to exercise jurisdiction over the matter.”
But the battle wasn’t quite over yet.
A “line up” sign demarcates where Chicken Ranch workers assemble when patrons drop by. Credit: Mimi Lamarre
It’s probably no surprise that brothel legalization is a highly contested issue. By the letter of the law, today, prostitution in most places in the U.S. remains illegal. In some cities and states, like New York City, it is de facto decriminalized, meaning law enforcement avoid arresting those who work as prostitutes.
In Nevada, the debate over the legality of prostitution goes back to 1971, when a ranch about 20 miles east of Reno, called the Mustang Ranch, was founded and licensed by the state. Some public officials, fearful that a deluge of brothels would follow, passed a state law prohibiting brothels in counties above a certain population – today, that population cap is 700,000. (This, by the way, means it’s still illegal in Las Vegas).
Since then, Nevada brothels have entered the cultural psyche as lightning rods of pleasure and debauchery draped in muslin reds and golds. In 2015, for instance, NBA star and former Kardashian spouse Lamar Odom reportedly paid $75,000 for a 24-hour companionship at the Love Ranch Vegas. And, in 2002, an HBO special, “Cathouse,” centered on brothel workers at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch.
Queue the articles, the cameras, the think pieces, the videos, the social media posts. The women behind that gaudy imagery are often left in obscurity, shrouded in a debate over choice and coercion.
And the most successful prostitute in those havens of vice (reportedly), Alice Little, became one of the centerpieces of the cultural war.
Despite the fact that Alice and brothel workers like her are obviously in favor of their line of work, they don’t deny that their places of employment are occasionally discriminatory and exploitative.
There is only one ranch in Nevada, for instance, that is owned by a woman. It’s called Hacienda Ranch and owner Madam Bella Cummins, a high-profile figure who calls her employees “courtesans,” said that she aims to differentiate herself as a madam through “respect, understanding, and wanting to help the workers grow – instead of it being only about the money.”
But, still, Cummins takes 50% out of her employees’ rate – a standard for all of Nevada’s legal brothels.
Alice says that she’s seen the profit margins for multiple brothels in Nevada and believes the split remains unfair.
“They can afford to pay an extra ten percent to the girls across the board,” she says. “They would still make plenty of money.”
Chicken Ranch’s website shows that the majority of women who work in the ranch are cis-gender white women. Less than a tenth of them are non-white as of Jan. 2025.
“You typically won't see more than one Black girl working at a time at any location in the (legal) industry,” Alice says. “There isn't enough demand to support two ladies at the same time.”
These are real problems that need to be addressed, she says, but they are missed when the debate is stuck on the issues of the legality of the work.
“It's interesting because when you think about violence against sex workers, everyone thinks of physical violence,” Alice says. “But really we're talking about housing discrimination, banking discrimination, financial discrimination, employment discrimination.”
And experts agree. Researchers Barbara Brents, Crystal A. Jackson, and Kathryn Hausbeck wrote in their book The State of Sex, “To conclude that brothel workers are free from constraints is just as naïve as to believe that women are shackled into sex work. The narratives of brothel workers’ lives are so much more complex than a debate over coercion versus choice.”
Alice looks at Chicken Ranch merchandise in the brothel’s parking lot. Credit: Mimi Lamarre
Much of what Jason does is in pursuit of knowledge about the brothels and their goings-on. In 2017, for instance, Jason used the Freedom of Information Act, which allows citizens to request public information, to request the names, addresses and social security numbers of the women who work at legal brothels in Lyon County for the last 10 years – which just so happened to be where Alice worked at the time.
Jason says it was an attempt to further understand the women and how they might have gotten there. He contends that he found instances of many Asian women relocating to Nevada to work at brothels from a small suburb of New York – evidence, in his words, of a link between trafficking and the brothels.
But Alice, working at Bunny Ranch, found the requests invasive and frightening. She wondered why strangers needed to know where she lived or what her social security number was, if not for sinister purposes?
Jason doesn’t deny his Freedom of Information Act requests may make some brothel workers scared. But the fear is more reflective of the dangers of the industry than it is of those requesting the information, he says.
“I don't discount the idea that information being in the public domain presents risk to those in the industry,” Jason says. “But as long as it is public information, I think utilizing it to assess the health, safety and well-being of the industry is a valid and appropriate thing to do.”
Like many of them before, his FOIA requests were denied.
Still, he remains undeterred. In 2024, Jason filed a federal lawsuit, once again in conjunction with NCOSE, on behalf of a Jane Doe who claims that she was trafficked in four brothels – Desert Rose Club, Mustang Ranch, Bella’s Hacienda Ranch and Chicken Ranch – between 2017 and 2023.
The suit claims that the brothels levy fees and fines that drive workers like Jane Doe into debt; that she had to pay for regular STI testing; and that she was coerced into commercial sex acts. Jane Doe also asserts that more than half of the women at brothels had external pimps or traffickers, and that the brothels she worked at failed to protect her and other workers from violent clients.
In Aug. 2024, the court approved the government’s motion to dismiss. The court also denied Jane Doe’s claims for declaratory and injunctive relief by the brothels, but allowed claims of damages by the brothels to go forward.
In Oct. 2024, the court denied Jane Doe’s request for a protective order and found that she must disclose her identity in order to go forward with the case.
In Feb. 2025, when Jane Doe had not revealed her identity, the brothels went so far as to file a case against Jane Doe and her co-plaintiffs for legal fees, claiming that the case was one of many “frivolous” attacks against the brothels. The case remains pending as of this writing.
And so the war of words continues.
That night in 2018, Alice Little arrives home. She takes off her clothes, gets into bed, and watches television. She’s still a bit shaky from the day’s events – not from her work, but instead from the whole shindig with the van.
It wasn't masked kidnappers who had followed her home for weeks, but members of a local church who claim that they are concerned for sex workers’ well-being and want to ensure that they “get home safe.” It’s the conundrum inherent in a business like this one: oftentimes, measures that attempt to make women more safe just end up making them feel less so.
By 2025, Alice might just be better equipped to face this form of harassment: she is now almost used to the diatribes on social media, the shrouded stalking, and the altruistic lawsuits.
For now, each month she continues her routine, driving from the Palace Station Hotel to the Chicken Ranch brothel, and back. At the end of her work days, she rides back up the elevator of the understated hotel whose name makes it seem much fancier than it really is. She dons the casual outfits that she has on when she leaves in the morning. Her face is scrubbed clean of makeup. She looks young again.
And so, the next day, and, perhaps twenty years from now, Alice will meet more men in that Marilyn Monroe-covered room. In her time off, she will go to Colorado to be with her horses, whom she loves. She’ll talk to her parents across the country. She’ll post on social media, record videos. She’ll put on makeup. She’ll take it off.
And, maybe, I’ll return back to Chicken Ranch 10 years from now to learn that the ranch has a brand new owner, one who pays her workers far more than they could have dreamed. I’ll walk into her high-ceilinged office and a shock of red hair and blue-green eyes will lock with mine, and we’ll smile knowing that there is nuance to every story.
There is also another world, one where the brothels close down – and Alice goes to work in an office or a restaurant or a store, where the realities of misogyny are still apparent, yet women are often grossly underpaid. She would probably be safer – and she wouldn’t be having sex for a living, which, admittedly, is a rather vulnerable way to make ends meet.
But on Alice’s personal continuum from coercion to choice, you can imagine where each option would fall.
Mimi Lamarre is a New York-based journalist and writer. She works for CBS News, and is a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Virginia.
