Kathy has never bought or sold sex. But she maintains she and her children are victims of prostitution.
Because of her husband's involvement in prostitution, her life and the lives of their four children were shattered. Kathy and her husband, Ray, estimate he spent between $50,000 and $75,000 on prostitutes in a three-year period.Ray said he first paid for sex about six years ago. It became a crutch.
Ray preferred escorts to streetwalkers. Although escort services are legal businesses in Utah, area vice officers say it's no secret that some are merely fronts for prostitution.
"I justified a lot of reasons for it," Ray said. He heard about a service on a TV news story and "followed up on it."
"I just got drug in," Ray said. "I never looked at it as an addiction."
But he now knows he was very much an addict. He visited escort services as often as two or three times in one night. He satisfied his craving early on by using phone sex numbers.
For Kathy, discovering her husband's addiction to sex cost her more than money. A devoted house-wife and mother, the safety and comfort she'd believed were hers were ripped from her almost overnight.
She was, in her own words, naive. She trusted her husband to handle all of the family's money and business dealings. He trusted her to raise their children.
When their youngest daughter entered school, Kathy went to work for her husband in his fledgling construction business.
"I saw money discrepancies in the books," she said. "I asked him about it. He jumped all over me at first."
She backed off, but thinking he might be gambling their money away, she asked again. This time he admitted to using escort services.
"My first thought was, `I would have gone to dinner with you,' " Kathy said. She was shocked to learn he had been buying sex and had "not an inkling" of her husband's addiction. Any symptoms, she said, were easily explained away.
"We were starting a new business, so it was understandable to me that he was never home, that we had no sex, that we had no money," she said.
Kathy had a hard time dealing with her discovery because she knew nothing about the world that had seduced her husband. She decided to educate herself by visiting escort services and even talked with the women who worked there.
With the knowledge she gained, she lost the life and the trust she'd known for 19 years.
"I was deeply depressed," she said. "I had a really tough time envisioning what this (prostitution) was really all about. It was probably helpful (to visit the escort services) in one way because I'd envisioned, oh, I don't know, Julia Roberts.
"The places are sleazy, they're dirty, icky," Kathy said, grimacing.
Ray financed his addiction by not paying taxes. Their debt to the IRS forced them to sell the home they'd lived in for 13 years. They had to sell much of what they owned, including a boat. They took out a Chapter 13 bankruptcy and will be paying the IRS $2,000 a month for five more years.
"There were just a lot of losses for me and the kids," she said. But despite her husband's deceit, she didn't leave him.
"At first I didn't think about it (leaving)," she said. "I just wanted to keep it all together because divorce is ugly - long-term ugly."
They told their children as little as possible, a decision Kathy now regrets. She tries to put into words how her life has changed and what she's lost, but it's impossible.
One of the hardest losses to bear was moving from the community and church congregation she'd associated with for 13 years.
"They were our support . . . everything - our world. We had no intentions of ever leaving."
It was even harder on her oldest son, she said.
"He's never recovered from the move. He was 15 at the time. He'd earned his Eagle Scout; he was one of those kids you never had to force to go to church. He had to leave his home, his friends and his church. A month ago he overdosed on cocaine. We almost lost him."
As the boy lay in a detoxification bed, his father told him about his own addiction. He told him how it had cost them and why they really had to sell the house in the neighborhood he loved.
Kathy said her husband's addiction started in his teenage years with an appetite for pornography. In his adult life, it would become the way he dealt with problems or stress.
Ray said he was an addict, just like an alcoholic, who believed he was in control.
"Every time was the last time," he said. "That's what my life was all about. We lost our home . . . we're still not out of the woods yet. There's no way I could have been stopped."
What did turn Ray around was being caught by his wife and asked by his church leaders to seek counseling. At first he thought he didn't need it - that buying sex was "normal."
"I was pretty much forced into it," he said. "I didn't think there was anything wrong with me. Once you get into (counseling) . . . you realize how (messed) up you really are."
He believes attitudes about prostitution are lax because people don't realize how rampant it is.
"There's a lot more of it than people would like to believe," he said. "These places aren't in business because they're not making any money."
As far as who is victimized by it, Ray believes everyone is.
"Everybody pays for it," he said. "It's not victimless."