TO qualify as ‘Manchester’s Most Notorious Escort’, porn star Kat Lee first had to score a couple of salacious headlines in the nationals:
University students are my biggest customers
‘CORRIE HOOKER SELLS SEX ON VIRGIN TRAIN'...
'HOOKER'S SEX CAB IS DANGER TO ALL GIRLS'...
'TAXI W*NK'...
And her most recent stunt: ‘RANDY UNIVERSITY STUDENTS GET SEX LESSONS FROM MANCHESTER PROSTITUTE'
But is any of it, the bonking on public transport, alleged celebrity hooks-ups and NUS discounts, actually true?
“Of course it’s all true,” says Lee, forcefully.
It was around 7pm on a Tuesday night when I first managed to get hold of her. I had called three times but was surprised to be put through to her secretary’s voicemail (a secretary? How busy was she?).
On the fourth attempt I was taken aback by an uncomfortably childlike voice on the other end of the phone; sweet, giggly, feminine. I'd half-expected a voice raspy from a life of hard knocks and umpteen fake orgasms.
I asked Lee first about the rumoured student discount. “University students are my biggest customers," she explained. "They find me through my porn site and contact me there. I’m incredibly busy every fresher’s week. They’re usually incredibly sweet, nervous. I feel bad when they only last 30 minutes as I charge £140 per hour.”
The thought of Manchester’s supposed bright and enlightened young things blowing both their loans and loads with a porn star is enough to shock any parent, especially if they're paying the rent.
Lee tells me many of her punters lose their virginity with her before moving on to further partners.
“I feel guilty that they are spending so much money on me – they really should be spending their loans on books.
"So I thought giving a 20% discount was a good idea. But they get addicted, I get millions of messages asking me out on dates. I tell them to go out to parties, see other girls, but they would rather pay for it,” she explains.
University students are Lee's biggest customersWhile Lee shows concern for her younger clients, at a similar age she had just started working as a porn star alongside her twin sister ‘Kit’ (as in kit-kat?). As the porn industry became saturated with free-streaming sites and live cams, Lee's escort service became her bread-and-butter. As somewhat of a veteran in the sex industry, Lee now owns her own escort business – hence the secretary.
On Lee’s insistence, the conversation turns from a tepid blue to a raunchy red.
Ten years in the sex-industry means many clients and a whole lot of sex... daily. Lee gives me a rundown of her daily carnal activities, in a sort of Secret Diary Of A Call Girl monologue... but with no Billie Piper or strained Kensingtonian accent.
Just that afternoon, Lee was visited by one man currently serving a partial prison sentence and spending much of his free time paying her for sex; then there was a ‘computer specialist’; a couple (heavy work satisfying two people at once, apparently); and a student - her main clientele.
“I can get bored,” reveals Lee. “It’s obviously all about the performance but sometimes I hope they ask for the doggy position so I can just watch television. Once I was asked to do a 69 and just got on top and watched Corrie,” she giggles.
As girl talk goes, this had to be one of my most explicit chit-chats. Yet we talk nonchalantly about her prostitution, in between casual conversation about family, shopping in Matalan and her lunch in Wetherspoons.
For Kat Lee, work is simply that, work. And business, she tells me, is booming. Right now, she’s ‘on tour’ in Glasgow.
“Oh they’ve been weird in Glasgow,” shares Lee, with an exasperated laugh. “One of my clients bought some underwear for me to wear then came out of the bathroom wearing the same thing. You never know what you’re going to get when they walk out of the bathroom.”
The anecdotes get more bizarre the longer we talk; mental images of the care worker with a ‘granny stocking fetish’ and the one that ‘turned up just to share a curry’ will linger long in the memory.
Every so often I found myself stopping to check my own moral compass. What about disease, criminality, safety and the infidelity that come part and parcel with her career choice?
“80% of my male clients have a ring on their finger,” says Lee. “One client booked a session during the afternoon. Turns out his wife had a nail appointment in Selfridges and told him to come back in an hour – so he called me up. I spotted them in the town centre afterwards. He went bright red.”
That's where my moral compass began to spin wildly.
“No, I don’t class it as an affair. Emotional affairs are far worse than physical. I can give people my body but not my heart.”
The giggles stop.
In the headlines...From the get-go, it’s evident that Lee’s notoriety stems from her innovative approach to selling sex and her ability to blinker herself to what others would find emotionally crippling.
Yet, if you take away the seediness and questionable legality of Lee’s business, you can’t help but admire, in some small degree, her acumen for self-promotion. She knows how to spin a story, that’s for sure.
Lee sees prostitution as merely 'one of the world’s oldest professions' and a viable career choice, and given the oldest profession in the world contributes over £5bn to the UK economy, it's easy to see how the quick and lucrative gains sucked in this girl from Sunderland.
“I’m not getting any younger and I don’t want to be doing this when I turn 50, so I started my own escort business,” she explains.
“We have a lesbian couple on the books now,” she says, giving it the hard sell. “They both worked in Tesco before sacking it off to become escorts – I think you should write a story.”
No thanks, that's one scandalous headline too many.
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