When students picked up The Herald on the morning of March 11, 1986, they saw a front-page story that would shock both the University and nation.
Four days earlier, '86 and Dana Smith '87 had been arrested for soliciting payment for sex from an undercover Providence Police officer. The following week, local and national reporters swarmed the campus. It was, as Joseph Finkhouse MA'84 PhD'91 told The Herald a few days later, "the stuff TV movies are made of."
Twenty years later, prostitution remains an issue in Rhode Island, if not at Brown. Local activists' interest in human trafficking has been growing, and two state coalitions are lobbying for the State's General Assembly to pass a bill that would close a legal loophole that currently allows indoor prostitution.
Toby Simon, director of health education at Health Services at the time of the prostitution scandal, said the police were not primarily interested in prosecuting the women but rather in finding the leader behind an alleged prostitution ring.
Following their arrest, and Smith told police that Stanley Henshaw, a local insurance agent, had coerced them to join a prostitution ring he was running. Police then raided Henshaw's home and found small amounts of cocaine and marijuana and over 100 photographs of 46 women, six of whom were later identified as Brown students. Some photographs even had names and addresses written on the back.
The Associated Press reported that University officials had alerted police to the situation. "(Then-Providence Police Chief Anthony) Mancuso said administrators made the initial contact after a female Brown students spoke to an administrator," read a Mar. 13, 1986 Herald article. University officials then called Providence police, sparking the investigation.
But while the University tipped police off about the alleged prostitution, Brown officials were supportive of and Smith. Robert Reichley, then vice president for University relations, told The Herald that University officials did "not have sufficient information which would cause us to consider disciplinary action" and that the University's primary concern lay with the two students and their families.
Before the arrests, Simon, who is now director of the Women's Center at Bryant University, said several women had come to see her about an unidentified man who had approached them outside the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center with a business card, offering them modeling opportunities. After the women came to the man's apartment, he would encourage them to remove their clothes for the photo shoot and have sex with him, Simon said.
"Here was this guy who was sort of considered a man of decent standing and living in a respectable home and going to all the right clubs ... and he was pimping these girls out to his friends at the Agawam Country Club," Simon said.
In exchange for their cooperation with the case, police dropped the charges against and Smith. But even with the testimony of and Smith in the Superior Court case, prosecutors could not convince jurors that Henshaw was guilty of engineering a prostitution ring. In December 1987, Henshaw, whose defense team included David Cicilline '83 before he was elected mayor, was acquitted of all prostitution charges and found guilty only of drug possession.
"I don't like what he was doing, the way he was doing it," juror Helen Potter told the Providence Journal after the trial. But she added that there was not enough evidence to link Henshaw to prostitution.
A United Press International headline summed it up in another way. "Jurors say Brown co-eds were 'asking for sex,'" it read.
University reaction
With media outlets including the New York Times, CBS and Time Magazine covering the story, reporters from around the nation converged on College Hill to cover the trial.
"Because it was Brown and because it was a prostitution ring, people really latched onto it," Simon said. "I think in some ways it was quite blown out of proportion."
Howard Swearer, then the University's president, and Reichley lambasted the press for their intense focus on the University's involvement.
In a letter to almost 10,000 parents and alums, Swearer said he and other officials were "stunned at what seems to us as grossly sensationalized media reports," while Reichley held a press conference soon after the incident to correct mistakes already made by the media and Mancuso.
Reichley "was pretty skilled at dealing with the media and the press," Simon said. "He stood by in supporting our students."
Though the campus initially greeted the news with shock, it was quickly absorbed into a University-wide conversation.
"Students spent a lot of time talking about it, and there were (discussion forums)," Simon said.
"It probably bounced around for about a month or so," Miller said. "There were a couple of undercurrent discussions that surfaced at the time."
Discussions ranged from the need for more financial aid to keep students from resorting to prostitution to arguments over whether The Herald should have published the names of the two students arrested.
"It was a crazy, crazy, really intense time," then-Herald Editor-in-Chief Jill Zuckman '87 told the Herald in March 2004. "It was a fast-moving story that put us all (at The Herald) to the test."
Zuckman's staff was especially tested Mar. 11, when a student - said to be the boyfriend of one of the women arrested - stole some 2,000 copies of the newspaper to conceal the identities of the women.
But Simon remembers the sense of understanding and respect that marked the student body's reaction to the event.
"Brown students were pretty sensitive about not being too invasive or getting these women to come forward and talk about it," she said. "Some were rather blase about it. There were women who stripped at the Foxy Lady (Gentleman's Club). It was good money."
