A year ago last month, two seemingly bright, popular, and well-grounded young women went to work in Nashville. Apparently, neither of them had any reason to think that day would be different from any day that had gone before.
They were normal young women, except that they had jobs at a sleazy Church Street massage parlor called Exotic Tan for Men. As it turned out, that day was different. They never made it home. Instead, someone decided to kill them, brutally stabbing the girls again and again until they lay lifeless.
If it’s at all possible, the crime is made worse by the fact that the owner of Exotic Tan for Men could simply pack his bags and head back to his home state of Texas without facing penalties for running such an apparently sleazy business. What’s more, the murderer hasn’t been found. Metro Police, who don’t know whether the attacker was a customer or someone who knew the girls through some other connection, are still working on the case.
For Gail Chilton, who still grieves for her daughter, 18-year-old Dawn Chilton, the girls never should have been able to work at Exotic Tan in the first place. Chilton says there should be—and should have been then—restrictions on adult establishments, requiring workers at such businesses to be at least 21 years old.
Dawn Chilton was a freshman studying psychology at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, and her mother says she had all the appearances of being “very mature.” Trusting those appearances, she says, “was a mistake I made as a parent.”
Gail Chilton says the truth is that her daughter “was 18 years old, and she was persuaded to come into that profession because of the money. Teenagers think they’re immortal, and they make terrible mistakes. The one my daughter made cost her her life.”
The deaths of Chilton’s daughter and her daughter’s friend, Tiffany Campbell, have helped inspire at-large Metro Council member Chris Ferrell to draft legislation that would create a strict licensing procedure for any so-called “adult business” in Metro. The bill, which Ferrell plans to file for Council consideration in the next few weeks, would also require anyone working at an adult business to have a permit to work there.
“If they had to get permits, it would deter a lot of younger people,” says Chilton, who met with Ferrell in recent days to talk about the legislation. “They wouldn’t want to have to go downtown and have their name put in the public record. And this law would also prevent businesses like the one where my daughter worked from quietly opening up shop and then suddenly disappearing.”
No sex, please, we’re Tennesseans
Nashville has never passed any special legislation to regulate adult businesses, a category that includes places such as adult bookstores, adult motion picture theaters, or more mainstream adult cabarets such as DĂ©jĂ Vu or the now-closed Classic Cat.
In other cities, the small community of adult-business owners has spent a lot of time and resources challenging any regulation. In fact, adult-business owners recently lost an important case in Chattanooga. For Ferrell that case serves as a critical precedent for the legislation he’s proposing for Nashville.
In 1986, the Chattanooga Board of Commissioners enacted a bill to regulate adult businesses there. The bill was enacted on the strength of the argument that the sexual activities that go on in adult businesses present serious health risks. As well, the argument was that adult businesses create conditions that lead to prostitution and other crimes. While requiring adult businesses and entertainers to have licenses and permits, the bill also banned intercourse and, in legalese, “oral or anal copulation or other contact stimulation of the genitalia.”
After the law was enacted, several Chattanooga adult business owners brought suit to challenge it on First Amendment grounds. In East Tennessee’s U.S. District Court, Judge Allan Edgar upheld nearly all of the legislation’s wording, ruling, as one summary put it, that the bill “was directed to the content-neutral goals of the prevention of crime and disease and that most of the ordinance’s provisions were narrowly tailored.”
Edgar did not agree with the legislation, though, when it demanded that an adult business owner be a resident of the city of Chattanooga and be “of good moral character and reputation in the community in which he or she resides.” After the ruling, the Board of Commissioners removed the requirements that had not passed muster in Edgar’s court.
For a while, things went pretty well in Chattanooga—until 1995, when the City Council amended the adult-club legislation. The Council expanded the adult-business definition to include more mainstream cabaret-type clubs; extended the permitting requirement to include all adult-business employees, not just entertainers; and, in its most controversial move, created a “six-foot rule” that required entertainers to stay six feet away from their customers.
It was this third provision that sent the club owners back to court. Appearing again before Edgar, Chattanooga’s Diamond and Lace Showbar challenged the constitutionality of the entire ordinance, not just the new provisions.
After a five-day trial, Edgar again upheld most portions of the law. Again, the city revised parts of the legislation in order to comply with the judge’s ruling. The plaintiffs appealed Edgar’s decision to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, again challenging the entirety of the bill, even though portions of the law had been upheld in other lawsuits by the U.S. Sixth Circuit.
Despite their protests, Diamond and Lace Showbar and its owner lost the case. The federal appellate court affirmed Edgar’s decision. As a result Chattanooga currently requires licensing, permitting, and a six-foot buffer rule for adult businesses.
Ruling passions
Nearly all of the provisions of Council member Ferrell’s proposed legislation are also included in Chattanooga’s law and have, therefore, been deemed constitutional by a federal court and by a subsequent appellate court. That’s going to make it more difficult for Nashville club owners to try to litigate their way out of regulation.
“There’s a precedent now,” Ferrell says. Metro staff attorney Shayna Abrams, who actually wrote the legislation at Ferrell’s request, agrees, saying, “We have every reason to rely on the Sixth Circuit opinion.”
Under Ferrell’s proposed legislation, the scores of adult businesses peppered throughout the city would be regulated by a newly created board, the Metro Adult Entertainment Board, which would include seven members, appointed by the mayor and approved by Metro Council.
In that aspect, Ferrell’s bill differs from the Chattanooga ordinance, which empowers the city council, rather than a board, to consider requests for licenses and permits. “Chattanooga is a much smaller city,” Abrams says. “After discussing it with the mayor’s office, we created a board because that’s the way comparable things are done in Metropolitan Government.”
The most controversial portion of Ferrell’s bill deals with the age requirement for persons who work for adult businesses. As the draft legislation reads now, no one under the age of 18 would be granted a permit. Ferrell may try, however, to change the minimum-age requirement to 21.
“There are several changes I want to make before filing,” Ferrell says. “One of them is the age requirement, although the lawyers are saying it would be difficult to defend.” The Chattanooga law, after all, only requires workers to be at least 18 years of age.
Gail Chilton, though, would argue that what happened to her daughter is precedent enough for trying to get the more stringent requirement passed. “As far as this law goes, the hardest thing about getting it passed is the age-21 requirement. But if we had had this law earlier, my daughter wouldn’t be dead.”
Assuming that all the provisions of the proposed legislation for Metro have indeed been upheld by the federal courts, it’s likely that Metro Council members who represent voters in this Bible Belt town will agree with Chilton—if not on the age-21 limit, then on the idea that what happened to her daughter—in the midst of an unregulated, unwatched, and often forgotten industry—shouldn’t happen again.
