Dennis Hof, the owner of several legal brothels in rural Nevada, died at his Love Ranch, in Crystal, on October 16th, just three weeks shy of Election Night in his campaign, as a Republican, for State Assembly in Nevada’s Thirty-sixth District, a race that he is still favored to win. If Hof wins posthumously, commissioners from the three counties composing the district—Nye, Lincoln, and Clark—will appoint a representative from the same party. Some plan to vote for Hof out of purely partisan strategy: a Republican is a Republican, supporters say, no matter that the name most often floated to receive Hof’s appointment is James Oscarson, the incumbent Hof beat in the primary, in part by dubbing him a RINO—Republican in Name Only.
The self-described “Trump of Pahrump” had much in common with the President, including multiple rape allegations, an innate gift for publicity stunts, grifting, and misogyny, and a public image made palatable by a book deal and reality TV. (HBO’s “Cathouse” was set at one of his brothels.) Hof’s circle of friends extended beyond the Nevada porno culture into law enforcement and politics. He spent the evening before he died celebrating his seventy-second birthday with a political rally at the Pahrump Nugget, the ritziest hotel and casino in town, where he was joined by Grover Norquist and Joe Arpaio. After the rally, Hof retired to the Love Ranch to continue the festivities with friends, including the adult-film actor Ron Jeremy and the reality-TV personality Flavor Flav. The next morning, Jeremy went to Hof’s suite, to rouse him for a campaign event at the Pahrump Senior Center, and found him dead.
“Right now, as we speak, you’ve got Flavor Flav crying his eyes out,” Jeremy told reporters outside the Love Ranch. He stood beside Heidi Fleiss, Hof’s former fiancée and an infamous Hollywood madam, who once had ambitions of a brothel empire of her own, beginning with a “stud farm” where the prostitutes would be men. In the video, Fleiss speculates that Hof’s death was related to his diabetes, but authorities have yet to determine the cause. An autopsy is under way.
New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.
Driving west from Las Vegas over the Spring Mountains to Pahrump, the Joshua trees give way to billboards. I counted about fifty of them rising from the creosote before I arrived at one of my home town’s three stoplights. Some billboards are blank; others display sun-faded and barely legible pitches for pre-recession housing developments. The fresh billboards, though, feature firework warehouses, speedways, and numerous visages of Dennis Hof in his accessory of choice, a white Stetson, haunting the highway.
One of Hof’s former madams, T. J. Moore, had agreed to meet me in a Denny’s in Pahrump. She had recently shaved her head, and her fierce silver hair shone in the sunlight streaming into the diner. In September of 2013, Moore was hired as a shift manager at Hof’s Love Ranch, a position she described as “like a mom who runs the house.” She did the laundry, cleaning, and cooking, and she “recorded the sex parties.” In May of 2014, Moore was promoted to be the assistant to the madam. She was promoted again, in October of 2014, and became the madam and general manager of two Hof properties, the Love Ranch South and Alien Cat House. That, she says, is when she began to see the dark side of Hof’s supposedly legitimate business.
Moore’s disillusionment was complete on October 13, 2015, when Lamar Odom, a former N.B.A. star and then the husband of Khloe Kardashian, overdosed at the Love Ranch. “The girls yelled at me to come down,” Moore told me. “They said something was wrong.” Moore had driven Odom out to the Love Ranch from Henderson, a ninety-minute drive during which they chatted and shared some Skittles. She liked him. Now he was on his back in bed, his nose and mouth foamy with blood. “To keep him from asphyxiating”—Moore had trained as a certified nursing assistant—“I turned him on his right side. I had to get all of that out of his mouth.” She shudders. “The feeling, the smell—it’s all still there.”
Hof died in the same suite—in the same bed—where Moore scooped frothy blood from Odom’s open mouth. (“In Lamar’s stains,” she said.) Odom had tried to speak to her. She iced his head until Ryder Cherry, one of the prostitutes Odom had hired, said, “You’re doing it wrong!” and put the ice on his genitals. They were trying to bring him back. They did bring him back. Odom’s drug use had induced kidney failure, and put him in a coma in which he had twelve strokes and six heart attacks, but he survived. His tab, paid to Moore by credit card, was seventy-five thousand dollars. For this he received two women for twenty-five hours. “I walked out a week later,” Moore told me, “and never looked back.” She left the Love Ranch not because of this painful experience with Odom, though it was obviously still with her, but because of Hof’s cruel reaction to Odom’s near-death. “Dennis Hof was so happy and so giddy,” Moore said. “He thought it was going to triple his business. Physically it made me sick that someone could actually be that way over another human being.”
Violence always lurks beneath the gallant cowboy’s façade. Jennifer O’Kane, one of Hof’s former employees, told me that Hof raped her multiple times without a condom while she worked at one of his brothels. She would have liked him to go to jail—“I’m sorry he wasn’t somebody’s bitch,” she said—but his death feels like the “ultimate justice.” “My first reaction when I heard he was dead was excitement,” O’Kane said. “Then happiness. Then I didn’t believe it. I had to have someone go to the scene. They sent me a picture of his body, covered. That’s what it took for me to believe: my rapist is dead.”
O’Kane began working at Hof’s Love Ranch, in Crystal, Nevada, on December 31, 2010. After the traditional welcome for new “girls”—dinner with Dennis in Pahrump—O’Kane was returned to the Ranch and told to “go get dressed for the floor.” It was New Year’s Eve, and, although the brothel hoped to host a massive party, O’Kane said that “there were only four or five people in the bar.” One of Hof’s madams told O’Kane to go to her room. Hof was there, waiting. “Dennis pats his little fatty hand down on the bed and tells me to come sit down,” O’Kane said. Hof began to choke her, whispering insults in her ear. He ordered her to get undressed and then forced her to give him oral sex. “By that point I was crying. I said, ‘Hey, you’re my boss. What are we doing? You’re not a customer.’ And his response was ‘I’m gonna try. I try.’ ”
O’Kane’s room, which she had rented from Hof, had no windows, no bathroom (just a sink), and only one door. “I had no way to leave,” O’Kane told me. Hof forced her to have sex with him. “I found out what anal sex was,” she said. “That’s what he did to me. There was blood. He then penetrated the front—not clean.” Hof did not wear a condom. “When he was done, he told me to clean up. And I was just crying. I cried and cried. It hurt. And he left.”
O’Kane carries Hof’s serial rapes in her body. “The damage that he did to my anus—there’s permanent damage because I’m ripped inside,” she said. “ ‘Tears’ is what they called it, in my anus. I bleed still.” The trauma remains in her mind as well; O’Kane is being treated for depression, severe anxiety, and P.T.S.D. “I relive it every day, honey,” she told me. “I take three different kinds of medicines from my psychiatrist just to sleep through the night. . . . I have a beautiful lake that I should be fishing on every single day and I’m afraid to go outside.”
What makes a grotesque campaign like Hof’s viable, even in death? Along with publicity stunts, billboard saturation, and pledges to repeal taxes and protect gun rights, Hof’s campaign strategy centered on a very unsexy issue: water. Many in Pahrump dismiss climate change as a hoax, yet they live with a palpable climate dread. Money for construction projects, landscaping, and irrigation dried up during the Great Recession; the town’s springs and its largest golf courses also dried up. Alfalfa fields turned to dust. In Pahrump, fear of drought clung to folks like cigarette smoke.
Water is not an abstract issue in this district. Lake Mead—where the Hoover Dam gathers drinking water and generates electricity for much of the Southwest—is expected to drop so significantly that the city of Las Vegas built a new “straw” to slurp up drinking water from the very bottom of the lake. Although Las Vegas is nationally lauded for its conservation efforts, voters in the rest of the state view the city as a threat to cheap water in their over-allocated basins. When the Southern Nevada Water Authority proposed a pipeline to import water from rural eastern Nevada down to Las Vegas, an effort that was halted by the state engineer in August, it was seen as the first shot in a long-coming water war.
At a “water-rights conference” in April, Hof shared the stage with Ryan Bundy, whose family has twice engaged in high-profile anti-government occupations, first at their ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, and then at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon. The event was held at Patch of Heaven, an evangelical church camp located in the Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge, near Pahrump. The camp’s owners are in a legal battle with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for rights to water that has been diverted away from their property to the habitat of the endangered pupfish.
Bundy, who is a candidate for governor, spoke for nearly an hour, flanked onstage by a yellow Gadsden flag—a rattlesnake ready to strike, above the words “Don’t tread on me”—and a projection screen displaying an aerial view of arid land. As Hof looked on, seated just behind him, Bundy began with a prayer, then moved on to politics. “Let me ask you,” he said, “is there any place within the Constitution that allows the federal government to own or control water?” “No,” some in the audience said. Bundy looked around, feigning confusion. “Then what’s going on here, I wonder?” “Unconstitutional,” someone offered. “That’s right,” Bundy said, “they’re breaking the law.” When an audience member mentioned hopes of raising money for Patch of Heaven’s legal fees, Bundy said, “I wonder, is it really necessary that we should go through the court? Isn’t the documentation and the history enough? . . . Where’s the question? Why shouldn’t this dam be taken out first thing in the morning?” The small crowd erupted in whoops and applause.
For a party that claims to disbelieve climate science, the Nevada G.O.P. freely gathers its posse by ringing the alarm of environmental collapse and apocalypse in the parched West. This is because the voters of Nevada fret about the Trump Administration twice proposing funding to reopen Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, in Nye County, and live under the daily existential threat of the Colorado River’s over-allotment. But Nevada’s Republicans and Libertarians would rather that voters look to the past rather than the future. Throwbacks to the good old days of consequence-free killing and consumption are not what the right does instead of responding to climate change—cowboy barbarism is the response. The G.O.P. is positioning itself and its backers to get rich off the disasters that will destroy this place for the rest of us. Hof’s billboards read “I’ll Fight for Your Water.” The slogan is tellingly ambiguous. It could mean “I’ll fight for your water for you.” Or it could mean “I’ll fight for your water and keep it.”
National-level Nevada G.O.P. candidates, such as Senator Dean Heller and the gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt, avoided Hof like nuclear waste, but their campaigns make similar appeals to the cowboy ethos. Heller, who has remained competitive against his challenger, the congresswoman Jacky Rosen, in part by accepting hefty checks from the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, appears in promo materials in a camo hunting cap. Meanwhile, twelve members of the Laxalt family—a political and cultural dynasty of Nevada Basques—published an op-ed, in October, accusing Adam Laxalt of leveraging the family name to transform himself from an attorney who grew up in Washington, D.C., into the sort of hardscrabble sheep rancher the original Laxalt immigrants were a hundred years ago. His strategy of staging fund-raising events like the recent “Cattledrive for Laxalt,” in Elko, the Laxalt clan wrote, “perfectly encapsulates the Adam Laxalt candidacy: the phoniness of the setting and costumes, the pretense of folksiness used as a prop for Washington power players like Kellyanne Conway and Devin Nunes.”
Part of Dennis Hof’s appeal was that he wore this costume convincingly, but his cowboy dress-up routine was often paired with a telling obsession with authenticity. Another of Hof’s mailers reads “Fix Rural Real Nevada.” Being a fake cowboy becomes the only way to be a real Nevadan. In Hof’s mold, a real Nevadan is a white, rural, rich man. Everyone else exists in a service capacity, if at all. Women, immigrants, the indigenous, the land itself—all are there for his pleasure, there for the taking. Hof’s is the logic by which the West becomes “Westworld.” From beneath the brim of a white Stetson, the supposedly rugged individual doles out paternalism and misogyny to the women who do the demeaning, poor-paying jobs that run the Nevada economy: the maids, the change girls, the cocktail waitresses, and, as they’re known locally, the whores.
Despite attention from fringe figures like Bundy, residents of Nye County more often feel ignored and used by the city that glitters over the mountains. This urban-rural resentment has been inflamed by the state’s legal-prostitution regulations, which in 1971 banished brothels from Las Vegas and Reno. “We’re all whores out here,” Callie, a bartender at the Pahrump Nugget, told me. She and I grew up together—she asked me not to use her real name—and I asked her to tell me, again, my favorite whoring story.
One evening, just as Callie started her shift, three elderly men sat at the end of her bar and placed a bag on an empty stool beside them. The three men ordered four drinks, one for each of them and one for the bag on the stool. They toasted the bag. When Callie asked them about the bag, they brought out an urn and explained that it held the cremains of their recently deceased friend, P.J.
They asked Callie for directions to the nearest brothel and advice for the negotiating process there. Callie gave these without judgment. The fellows returned later in Callie’s shift to report their success. At the brothel, they’d paid a woman to “take a tablespoon of old P.J. and give him one last run through.” For this service, they said, they paid five hundred dollars, half of which went immediately to management—meaning a woman inserted human cremains into her vagina (wearing a female condom, I pray) for two hundred and fifty dollars.
Some of Callie’s regulars were still mourning Hof, and seemed to agree with the Pahrump Valley Times’s assessment that Hof “shook the political stage in Nye County and potentially across the state and nation.” A man named Casey, who is thirty-eight and manages his family’s chain of fast-food franchises, had seen videos on Facebook about how he could still vote for Hof, which he planned to do, as a tribute. He also suspected that Hof was murdered, that “somebody probably poisoned his ass.”
No one I spoke to at the bar had heard about the rape allegations against Hof, though the Las Vegas Review-Journal (owned by Sheldon Adelson) has documented at least three credible cases. Brian, a public employee, rejected the rape allegations outright, though he had only just heard of their existence. “If that stuff was true he’d be denied licenses,” he said, and pointed to the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. “If he was guilty he wouldn’t be confirmed. Show me the evidence.”
“Then again,” Jim, a retiree from Florida playing video poker at the end of the bar, offered, “the F.B.I. investigation was limited, so how could they find evidence? I think his second testimony was disqualifying. He’s got the wrong temperament. Mentioning the Clintons? Come on.”
Jim’s wife, Karen, joined us, and Callie brought her a “froufrou drink.” Karen said she’s “voting straight D, all the way down.” She amended that: “I might vote Independent if it’s a woman.” Asked why, she said, “Look at this President! Calling Stormy Daniels ‘Horseface’? Grow up.”
On the other side of the bar, an elderly white woman and her adult daughter mounted their stools and slid their players-club cards into their machines. Callie brought them diet sodas. The daughter was from out of state and her mother did not feel like talking. “I always vote but I never talk politics,” she said, before adding, “The Republicans are devils.”
Wandering around the Nugget, where Hof held his very last political rally, I met Elizabeth, who was working the cash register of the gift shop. She won’t vote, she said. “There’s no one for me.” Lisa, a hostess in the Nugget’s Golden Harvest Café, will not vote either, and neither will the woman manning the bar in the bowling alley, nor the woman wiping down the bingo vault. I did not find a single female employee who planned to vote besides Callie, who was not permitted to talk politics at work. I said goodbye to my friend, and pushed the black glass doors of the Pahrump Nugget open into the desert night. Their gilded handles are meant to be prospectors panning for gold. They looked to me like a panhandler begging for spare change.
One of the planks of the Hof campaign was “Fighting Sex Trafficking,” and he frequently offered his brothels as an answer to this horror. In reality, after a series of public-records requests beginning in December of 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office conducted a four-month internal investigation into Hof’s Lyon County brothels and found them to be rife with violations. The “Lyon County Sheriff’s Office Internal Audit Report on Brothel Compliance Requirements” found that “at minimum 83 prostitutes generated positive indicators of human trafficking that should have required additional investigation.”
Yet, the report admitted, since 1990, when work cards issued by the sheriff’s office were made mandatory for sex workers (a protective measure that Hof opposed), the sheriff’s office had “implied responsibilities to conduct regular and periodic compliance checks” at the brothels, but, “due to agency staffing levels, this function has not been accomplished in decades.”
T. J. Moore told me that, in addition to being required to split their negotiated fees for a “party” with the house, prostitutes in Hof’s brothels are charged for rent, rides to the doctor for their mandatory S.T.D. screenings, and rides to the sheriff’s office for their cards. From the moment they arrive at the brothel, they start accruing a tab, tallying every expense, down to condoms, tampons, or ten dollars for a hamburger patty. Moore said it was common for a woman to be paid five hundred dollars for sex and then see her fifty-per-cent share eaten up by the brothel’s fees. “She’d walk away with nothing.” Moore has seen women, desperate after days without clients, accept a fee as low as a hundred and sixty dollars. “And that might be the only business she has for a week,” Moore said. Women lured by the façade of a game and empowering sisterhood on “Cathouse” “leave broker than when they got here.” And that’s pretty broke. Moore said, “Some came in with only their purse.”
If a disillusioned woman hemorrhaging money wanted to leave Hof’s brothel, Moore said, she had to pay for a ride back to town, a twenty-five-mile drive. If she didn’t have the money, Hof instructed Moore to tell a driver to leave the woman in the open desert.
I grew up down the road from a couple of brothels, the Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s. My school bus passed them every morning. I wasn’t shocked or disgusted or traumatized by them. I loved them—loved their vibrant colors, their anachronistic stick-built architecture of flower boxes and dormer windows in a dusty, forgotten town of stucco and trailers. When I was a girl, the brothels made me proud of my home, proved us a place where we mind our own beeswax. Like quick divorce, legal gambling, all the booze you can drink, and, most recently, recreational marijuana, the brothels said to me that Nevadans were a welcoming sort, not prudish, not hypocrites, that we refused to shame people for their deeply human urges. I thought legal prostitution proved rural Nevada to be a place of independent-thinking pioneers, blazing new trails in a new land, refusing to bring patriarchal shame and religious hypocrisy with them when they came West. I thought it meant we celebrated them, the women who absorbed our society’s pain. When I dressed up for Halloween or, later, the Pahrump harvest festival, my favorite costume was that of a whore.
The feminist utopia of empowering decriminalized prostitution positions sex work on a spectrum of emotional work, the caring work that people do to stabilize and heal our society: teaching, social work, nursing, cleaning, cooking, mothering, whoring. For Moore, being a madam was also being a mother and a nurse, rolling a six-foot-ten-inch, two-hundred-and-twenty-nine-pound man onto his side, scooping bloody foam from his mouth. I used to believe in this fantasy version of legal sex work. I wanted to live in that place, a place where a frontier spirit translated into a total dismantling of the patriarchal legacy of women as property. I wanted our wide-open desert to dissolve systems of oppression and misogyny built into law and language, to erode the sexual double standards that encourage commodification and objectification, which women may adapt to, even convince themselves they enjoy, but which offer us little hope of real wealth, security, or power.
There is the feminist fantasy, and then there is the reality that the Nevada economy runs on exploitation. There is the costume of the liberated whore and, underneath that, a woman alone in the desert with nothing but an empty purse.
On Election Day, voters in Lyon County will vote on a non-binding measure to recriminalize prostitution there. If the measure passes, there’s a chance the county will shutter the majority of Hof’s brothels. But the viability of Hof’s posthumous candidacy suggests that the revolt against sexual violence represented by the #MeToo movement will not extend to the prostitutes of rural Nevada. What does it say about the voters of Nevada’s Thirty-sixth District, if they elect this “Weekend at Bernie’s” Trump? Is this, finally, an answer to the question that the country has been asking of its Trumpists since the “Access Hollywood” tape: How low will they go? Will the voters of my home town follow this Trumpian pimp into his grave?
Whatever else she is, Hof’s Democratic challenger, Lesia (pronounced “Lisa”) Romanov is an outsider, a gun-owning assistant principal who has never run for office before (unlike Hof). Electing a Democrat may be a stretch, but surely the voters of this district don’t want to surrender their democracy to the party insiders whom they have long called phonies and fakes by letting the county supervisors choose a candidate for them. Perhaps, if Hof is posthumously elected, the independent-minded, change-hungry voters of the district will insist on the appointment of another outsider candidate. Moore, a Republican, has asked to be considered.
In a campaign press release, Hof wrote, “Let me be absolutely clear here: Jennifer O’Kane’s outrageous, trash-talking allegations are absurd and . . . absolutely politically motivated.” I asked O’Kane what she makes of the possibility that neither her accusations nor Hof’s death seem to have ended his candidacy. “I’ve always thought that the people who know what he does and know how sick he is, and who vote for him anyway, they are just as sick as he is,” she said.
O’Kane, who no longer lives in Nevada, used to be a Democrat, but she’s been a Republican for some years now. I asked her, if she were still a voter in the state’s Thirty-sixth District, whom would she vote for: the dead Republican who raped her, serially, anally, without a condom, or his Democratic challenger, a gun-owning assistant principal running on education reform, gun safety, and protecting water rights? She offered some kind words about Romanov (“I like her a lot—she’s a nice person”), then paused for another breath, tired. “I won’t make you read between the lines,” she said. “I’d vote for Dennis.”
A previous version of this post overstated a potential outcome of the Lyon County ballot question about legalized prostitution.
