A GERMAN woman who essentially ended up "looking after the business of several sex workers", after having been one herself, has been jailed for eight months.
Belfast Recorder Judge David McFarland told a weeping 40-year-old Nicole Monica Preisner she was a "facilitator" for the other women, and it was not the prosecution case she had forced or coerced anyone to do anything they did not want to do.
The Crown Court judge said he did not consider Preisner to be dangerous, nor were there any aggravating factors to her case, and that she deserved credit for her guilty plea to involvement in controlling a modest number of individuals for a modest level of profit.
Preisner, with an address on the Old Holywood Road, Belfast, at the time, pleaded guilty to a single count of controlling prostitutes between August 2011 and January 2012.
Prosecution counsel Rosemary Walsh said that Preisner controlled between a dozen to 15 women who worked out of a number of addresses around Belfast. Her role was to pay for and organise advertise for the escorts, their transport and the rents of the various apartments.
Ms Walsh said it was not the prosecution case that Preisner, who took half of the women's earnings, out of which these expenses were paid, coerced or forced any of the women to work for her.
Defence QC Gavin Duffy said that when police raided her home there were no large amounts of cash to be found or bank books of lodged monies, or indeed any evidence of any lavish lifestyle.
Preisner, he admitted, had herself worked as sex worker out of financial necessity, and over time others had joined her, helping to share the burden of costs.
However, Mr Duffy added that she ended up taking "responsibility for all of that" but had since come "to regret her involvement in this offence for a variety of reasons".
