British ‘madam’ who ran escort agency gets four years in jail for pimping

A 45-YEAR-OLD British woman who ran a Europe-wide escort agency offering sex to rich businessmen was sentenced to four years in jail and fined €150,000 by a Paris court after she was found guilty of pimping.

Before her arrest at a Paris hotel last year, Margaret MacDonald had hundreds of call-girls on her pay-roll operating in cities across the continent and advertised their services via the Internet and the International Herald Tribune newspaper.

A convent-educated former marketing executive who speaks five foreign languages, denied the charge of “aggravated procuring for the purposes of prostitution”, telling the court her employees took part voluntarily in the agency and were at liberty to refuse to sleep with their clients.

But the prosecutor in last month’s two-day trial accused her of being a “modern pimp - a cyber-pimp” and said she could not pretend she was not selling sex.

Police who raided MacDonald’s room near the Arc de Triomphe in May 2002 discovered records on 538 girls and 56 boys. The court was told she had no fixed address.

She has already spent 18 months in prison and her lawyer Emmanuel Marsigny immediately announced his intention to appeal.

“My client is extremely disappointed.

"In affairs of this nature it is only people like Margaret MacDonald who end up paying. No-one troubles the call-girls or the clients,” he said.

One of her former employees described the verdict as “scandalous”.

“She didn’t force anyone to be a prostitute. All those eastern European and African girls you see when you come home at night - that’s compulsory prostitution. They get a bullet in the knees if they stop,” said the woman, who gave her name as Axelle.

Dubbed a new “Madame Claude” by the French press after a brothel-keeper famous in the 1970s, MacDonald’s trial has received blanket coverage in the British papers.

Speaking in flawless French she told the court last month that much of what was said about her was exaggerated. She took a third of the money - between €460 and €760 - paid to her girls but spent most of it on travel and telephone expenses, she said.

A former escort girl herself, she insisted her agents were never obliged to have sex but admitted that sex was in everyone’s minds when the meetings were arranged.

And she appeared to incriminate herself when - asked if a client who did not have sex paid the same as one who did - she replied: “No you only pay for what you consume.”