Two men held a female escort worker enslaved in apartments on the Upper West Side and Harlem, forcing her to have sex with multiple customers until — desperate to escape — she jumped from a sixth-story window, prosecutors said in describing a horrific rape-kidnapping case yesterday.
The unnamed woman had gone last November to an escort job at an apartment on West 92nd Street and Columbus Avenue — only to have her “john” steal her cellphone, money and identification, telling her, “You’re not leaving the apartment — you’re working for me and making me money.”
That first “john,” — allegedly Benjamin Gaston, 36 — struck the woman and held a pillow to her face when she protested, prosecutors say. The woman repeatedly snuck 911 calls on a cellphone she found in the apartment, but couldn’t give an accurate address, and police were unable to save her, officials said.
Gaston allegedly took the woman the next night to a second apartment on West 149th Street, where there were six or seven additional men waiting to have sex with her, including co-defendant Johnny Jackson, 53.
“You do what I say in there,” Gaston allegedly threatened her again.
Instead, she climbed out of a window of the sixth-floor apartment — attempting to use her jacket as a rope, but instead falling to the ground, breaking both of her legs and her back, according to the complaint against the two men who have been arrested as co-defendants in the alleged rape-kidnapping so far.
Jackson told cops that his only involvement was in lending his apartment out so Gaston could bring “a girl” over for prostitution. “She was OK with it,” he insisted. “She didn’t want to leave.”
“My client is an honorably discharged Marine — that’s all I feel comfortable saying right now,” Jackson’s lawyer, Arnold Keith, said after Jackson and Gaston pleaded not guilty in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“The facts of this crime are truly heinous,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., said after the arraignment. “These defendants are accused of holding a woman hostage in order to essentially enslave and prostitute her.”