A Prostitute's Clients: Fair Game?   

Police called her a middle-class hooker and arrested her for prostitution. Reporters called her a major news story. Now there are Kathy posters, Kathy bumper stickers, a Kathy 900 number, Kathy T-shirts (designed by a local journalist), Kathy buttons and a Kathy interview on "Larry King Live."

Kathy Willets, a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac, is like a character in a TV miniseries, but her story dominated Miami newscasts in early November when a judge released names of her alleged customers. South Florida newspapers have assigned up to 14 reporters in a single day to cover Willets, whose trial begins February 3 in Fort Lauderdale.

Police say Willets is accused of servicing as many as eight men daily from October 1990 to July 1991 in her home in a Fort Lauderdale suburb while her husband took notes and sometimes videotaped her and the men. Nymphomania made her do it, Kathy explained in one story. The anti-depressant Prozac caused her nymphomania, she said in another. The couple said on national TV that husband Jeffrey, who was arrested and suspended from his job as a sheriff's deputy, peeked from the closet as therapy for impotency. (The therapy apparently wasn't surefire: Once, the news media reported, Jeffrey Willets was so bored by the sexual performance of one customer he fell asleep in the closet.)

There was no question that Kathy Willets made good copy. But the local media faced a problem in instant ethics when some of the men's names were released October 31. Media attorneys had fought in court for the release (as many as 30 more names have not been disclosed), but no man was charged with a crime since all received immunity to testify against the couple.

Minutes after the judge released the names, Miami radio station WIOD-AM aired them from the courthouse. "I truly did not read this list to sensationalize," says WIOD News Director Chuck Meyer. Meyer believes the Willets story was tawdry and originally not newsworthy but became so with the court fight to release the names.

However, Miami TV stations did not broadcast the names that night, except for one already publicly disclosed: Doug Danziger, Fort Lauderdale's former vice mayor. The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale and the Miami Herald printed the names within two days, after it was able to confirm them.

The issue provoked some public soul-searching. Miami Herald Executive Editor Doug Clifton asked readers to "help us decide" whether to print the names. Slightly more than half of 140 readers who responded said yes. Fifty-eight percent of viewers responding to a WCIX-TV call-in poll also wanted the names aired. But News Director Paul Stueber says he had already decided not to: "The gentlemen on that list have not been charged with any crime...I wasn't sure what public purpose was served and whether the public had a pressing need to know."

In an editor's note, Sun-Sentinel Editor Gene Cryer countered, "Misinformation has been rampant about the identities of the men...To refrain from publishing the list would perpetuate that misinformation and unfairly punish those innocent victims."

Perhaps a bigger issue is whether reporters should have paid so much attention to Willets and her attorney Ellis Rubin, whose maneuvers won him the Fickle Finger of Fate award for outrageous conduct presented annually by the local Society of Professional Journalists.

Charles Fair of Florida International University's journalism school says the story didn't warrant so much coverage. "We needed to keep in mind this story was about a prostitute," he observes. "There are more important trials going on that affect more people."