For her final argument Treva stood before the jury and read a short speech that she had handwritten in one of her notebooks. “I still say I am Brianna Rebecca Stewart,” she said, polite as always. “I don’t pretend to be anyone else but me.”
It was a slam dunk of a case, of course. The jury quickly found her guilty, and the judge sentenced her to three years in prison. The attorney who had been assisting Treva, Gerry Wear, made a last-minute request for the judge to state for the record whether he thought that Treva was competent to stand trial. “There’s no question in my mind, having spent as much time with her as I have, that she is of the opinion that she is Brianna Stewart,” Wear said. But it was too late. Judge Harris said he wished he could send her to a state hospital for treatment, but his only legal option was prison. The problem with prison in Washington State, he admitted, was that there were limited mental health services available for inmates. Nor was there any supervision for nonviolent offenders after their release. When Treva completes her sentence, she will be sent out the front door with a little money and perhaps a phone number for a women’s shelter. And without any help, she might resume her cross-country odyssey.
Treva told the judge she would immediately file an appeal. Before she walked out of the courtroom for the last time, she looked out a window. Rain was beginning to fall outside. With no wind, it came down in a sprinkling whisper, little drops flicking through the last of the maple leaves hanging on the trees. “It’s so unfair,” she said. “It’s so unfair.”
A reporter standing nearby said, “What’s unfair? Are you talking about what happened to you a long time ago?”
She looked at the reporter quizzically; then she gathered her law books and sheets of paper. “My name,” she said, “is Brianna Stewart, and I am nineteen years old.”
As bailiffs led her into an elevator, she said once again, in a much louder voice, to the crowd who had gathered to see her, “I’m nineteen! I’m not guilty of anything except being a teenager!”
In March 2001, I read a one-paragraph newspaper story about a 31-year-old woman, born in a small Texas town, who had been arrested in the state of Washington for fraud because she was pretending to be a high school student: taking classes, playing on the tennis team, and acting in school dramas. Why, I wanted to know, did a grown woman desperately want to be back in the one place, high school, that most teenagers wanted to escape? And thus began my year-long journey into the bewildering life of Treva Throneberry.
Because Treva wouldn’t talk to me about many episodes in her life, I had to do far more reporting than I thought I would need. I interviewed dozens of people from around the country, filed records requests in various states to get court documents, begged social workers to let me see their files, and finally traveled to Treva’s hometown in the windswept plains of North Texas, talking to almost anyone I could find, looking for evidence of long-held secrets. But it wasn’t just the mystery of Treva’s life that absorbed me. I realized that with this story I could try something rarely seen in nonfiction. Instead of creating a traditional narrative, I kept readers jumping back and forth through most of the story between the lives of two teenage girls who seemed to have nothing to do with one another whatsoever. Then slowly and inevitably I brought those two lives together.
RENE CHUN: SEX, LIES, AND VIDEO CAMERAS
From the corner of Broadway and Canal Street, SoHo Models looked like any other boutique modeling agency: the converted loft building; the flag with the agency logo billowing in the wind; the engraved brass plaque mounted above the intercom. Seeing all this, scores of would-be models rang the bell, proceeded to the elevator, and obeyed the sign that read, ALL MODELS PLEASE REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE THIRD FLOOR.
But once the elevator doors opened, the meticulously crafted illusion crumbled. There were no bookers working the phones. No photographers showing portfolios. Not even a dog-eared copy of Vogue.
Which isn’t to say there weren’t attractive girls. There were. Their names were scrawled in grease pencil on two large schedules opposite the reception desk: HOT LIPS, POISON IVY, CANDY ASS.
The girls worked in cubicles in an adjoining room. The 5-by-8-foot cells were just big enough to hold a twin bed, a wall-mounted Hi-8 video camera, a flat-panel screen, a keyboard, and a mouse. Somewhere in cyberspace, a prospective customer bought a block of time with a credit card, entered a chat room, selected a mate, and typed out instructions:
STRIP.
SPREAD YOUR LEGS.
TOUCH YOURSELF.
The girl in the cubicle read the instructions on her screen, complied, and tapped out a response:
HOW’s THE VIEW, BIG BOY?
I’M PUTTING ON “BOLERO.”
BUY SOME MORE MINUTES.
Although SoHo Models was clearly no ordinary modeling agency, it had the potential to be an incredibly lucrative operation, with a projected annual gross of $3 million, or even $6 million. These fantastic figures ultimately proved meaningless. By the time SoHo Models closed its doors last in December of 2001, its cash flow had slowed to a trickle. One night before the end, only three of the twenty booths were occupied. Depeche Mode played as models sprawled on cheap mattresses, staring vacantly at their flat panels. From time to time they composed offers of companionship. Finally a reply came back from the ether:
I WANT YOU TO STICK A BLACK DILDO UP YOUR ASS.
Just another day in the glamorous world of modeling.
Sex scandals have always plagued the modeling business. They’re usually fairly routine stuff: Milanese playboys booking talent for orgies at Lake Como, Parisian agents deflowering underage girls from the American heartland, coke-addled photographers demanding head for head shots.
But SoHo Models was something new-a fictitious agency used to recruit attractive young women for online porn. Even hardened veterans of the business were appalled. “This is the worst possible thing, because it undermines legitimate modeling agencies,” says Robert J. Hantman, a Manhattan lawyer whose firm specializes in fashion-industry litigation. “It’s outrageous.”
Yet the names of fashion insiders who were deceived by SoHo Models, or willing to suspend disbelief, reads like the guest list for a Bryant Park runway show. This is a testament to the persuasive powers of Jason Itzler, 35, who got his start with a phone-sex service in Miami, then took aim at New York with SoHo Models. Armed with little more than the backing of two clueless investors from New Jersey, the lease on a soaring loft space in downtown Manhattan, and a bottomless capacity for generating hype, he succeeded beyond his most overheated fantasies. “I was surprised big-time,” Itzler says from the jail in Newark, New Jersey, where he has been held since August 2001. “I thought to myself, this is a field wide open to be taken over.”
In many ways, he was right. Itzler blew into town at a time when fashion was in a slump. Budgets were being slashed; modeling agencies were downsizing. The charismatic agents who had presided during the glamour years had left the stage, replaced by joyless money managers. “There aren’t too many personalities in the business since Eileen Ford and I and a few other characters left,” laments John Casablancas, retired president of Elite. “The modeling scene is kind of dull.”
Itzler saw it the same way, and he was determined to remedy the situation.
Jason Itzler didn’t start out as a flimflam man. He didn’t even start out as Jason Itzler. He was born Jason Sylk in 1967, a nice Jewish kid from a good Philadelphia family. His mother, Ronnie Lubell, was a dark-haired beauty from Queens and “a bit of a Jewish Mafia princess,” Itzler says. He claims she gave him everything: brains, looks, charm, even his taste in women. “My mother was absolutely gorgeous” he says. “Growing up, everybody made comments about how they wanted to sleep with her. And if your mom happens to be drop-dead gorgeous and sexy, and you get comfortable interacting with that type of woman, those are the type of people you’re comfortable with.”