Bella Robinson is the Executive Director of the Rhode Island chapter of Call of Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE RI), an organization that advocates for policies and laws that protects the health and supports the safety of people who are involved in the sex industry. COYOTE offers programs and services including (1) Re-Entry services: a program that provides case management support and help to create a release plan along financial support in the form of gift cards for clothing and food items, (2) Coyote Closet: a clothing donation program that also offer other necessities like hygiene packages and overdose prevention kits, (3) Sister to Sister: an online support group for formerly incarcerated women, (4) Healing Hustlers: an online support group for sex workers and (5) Podcast: a platform where sex workers, former sex workers and survivors share their stories. COYOTE has led several legislative campaigns among them are: H7833/S2651, a bill that would criminalize sexual assault by police officers and House bill 6064 which grant immunity to sex workers and sex trafficking survivors reporting crimes.   

Bella Robinson was interviewed by Patsy Lewis in 2022. In 2024, Bella provided updates on COYOTE’s work and additional context, which can be found in the footnotes to the transcript. This interview has been edited for length.

00:00:00

Bella Robinson

My name is Bella Robinson and I’m the Executive Director of COYOTE Rhode Island, which stands for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.  We’re a sex worker rights organization, and COYOTE was actually founded in the 70s by Margo St. James, who filed a case called Coyote versus Roberts.  And she sued Providence police and proved that women were not receiving equal protection under the law, because when they arrested men for solicitation, they didn’t prosecute them if they testified against the women. So the case was dismissed as mute but it did change the law.1  From 1979 until 2009, indoor prostitution was decriminalized in Rhode Island.  And of course, they then criminalized us.2 

I’ve been a sex worker for 40 years, and I’ve been studying government’s narratives.  Part of the work that I’m doing with the National Council3 is to understand how all of this started with slavery, which created capitalism, which then became part of the 13th amendment, and how we’ve whitewashed that history, and public education and why I grew up thinking colonization was a good thing, and our founding fathers were nice guys, and all these lies that are ingrained into our life.  And how this aligns with sex workers is the sex traffic hysteria, that the government has created these narratives and I’ll give you an example.  While I was in Atlanta at the airport every 15 minutes, I could hear the intercom saying, “we need to fight human trafficking.  If you see something suspicious, please dial 911.”  And we know very little human trafficking ever takes place at an airport with all that security.

But we’ve seen many racist things happen. We’ve seen Asian men and women dragged out of the airports. This has led to really racist raids on massage parlors by ICE and Homeland [Security].4 And basically, sex workers have something in common with undocumented people. We’re being hunted by ICE, the FBI, Homeland [Security], the DEA, all these government entities under the guise of saving victims.5 And we’re not saying there aren’t victims, but there’s very few of them.  And we know criminalization stops people from coming forward to report violence and exploitation because they’re going to be threatened with arrest.  So one of our reasons for joining the National Council is, we know there’s too much [police] presence; we understand that this system does not rehabilitate people.  I’m formerly incarcerated, I did two prison terms in Florida, at Lowell CI, which back then was the second biggest women’s prison in the country.  And in December of 2020, the DOJ wrote a report that they violated the woman’s constitutional rights by allowing this sexual abuse to continue; and guess what, nothing’s happened.  It happened to me when I was there in the 90s.  So it took them 20 years to even investigate, and they write a report and nothing happens. 

We believe that the monies being spent on prisons need to be reinvested in poor communities of color, so we’re starting to reimagine what our future could look like if we stop waiting for the government to do the right thing, and we do it ourselves through mutual aid networks.

00:03:35

Patsy Lewis

You’ve focused a lot on human trafficking, but first, what are some of the other issues your group faces, and how do they play out within the state of Rhode Island more specifically?

00:03:56

Bella Robinson

Well, we focus on that (human trafficking) because it’s like the drug war. Think about how Clinton and Biden got up and told everyone, using language like super predators, we need to keep your family safe and guns and borders, and gangs and all these labels that they use to dehumanize people and make these populations something other than us.  And of course, these things are usually placed in poor communities of color; those are the first people to go down.  We’re not saying it doesn’t affect white people; I’m white, I ended up in prison, but we know it affects them more. We’re also looking at a law they created after the crime war, which is called ASFA (Adoption and Safe Families Act), and it basically allows the state to terminate your parental rights if your child has not been in your custody (in state care) for 15 out of 18 months. And this has created the foster care to prison pipeline. I think in the 90s 40% of the kids in foster care were kids of color. They also target poor people. And I just read an article yesterday that these kids that were placed in care in Texas were being sexually abused and trafficked. And DCYF knew about it for five weeks before they removed the children.6 

So again, before the 70s, before 1972, people went to an asylum or an orphanage.  But we realize the family court and what they’re doing by kidnapping kids, is not much different than the prison industrial complex.  So some of the things that we’re working on, and like I said, we focus on sex workers, but our job has become bigger, because when you think about racism, poverty and systems of oppression, and undocumented (people), all these dots connect, and my job becomes much bigger.  So we do things as far as mutual aid. We have several projects going called the coyote closet,7 We also do a lot of legislation work.8 So it’s not just about decriminalization, although we are getting a decrim bill this year. We only have one in the Senate.  We know it’s not getting out of committee, and we’re not going to win.  But as a strategy, the more legislation hearings we have and the more they have to listen to us. It’s kind of like going on notice; it’s in public record, that way later they can’t claim they didn’t know how they were harming us because yes, you did.  You just didn’t care.

00:06:28

Patsy Lewis

Can you tell us what’s in the bill that you’re proposing?

00:06:30

Bella Robinson

This is just a straight decriminalization bill for prostitution.  And keep in mind that exploiting people, using minors, forcing people, all those things will still be illegal.  I’m going to tell you why I believe they came up with the trafficking narrative. 1913 Hoke versus the United States said the federal government could not regulate prostitution, so long as you didn’t cross the state line, which is the Mann Act or the 1910 White-Slave Traffic Act. The federal government shouldn’t be involved, it was left up to the states.  So federally, trafficking is forced coercion or fraud, or a minor being involved.  Well, all the states came up with their own trafficking laws, and Alaska has the worst of them wherein any level of prostitution is considered trafficking; and through public records request, our research director Tara Burns, when she did her research on Alaska9, found out that they had actually charged a woman with trafficking herself. This idea, even when you look at their campaigns, they’re based in racism. With an eight year old White girl in chains with a Black or Brown hand over their mouth, as if pimps always have to be Brown and Black, or that they have to be men.  And I think we’re intelligent enough to know that women can exploit people too.  A gay guy, anyone can do it because in any population, we’re just people.  So we also are looking at harm reduction.

 I’ve come to the conclusion that if we win decriminalization, they’re just going to try to take it away like they do abortion rights.  So when’s the fight ever going to be over? So this year, we’ve been doing it for three years. We’re still stuck in committee. We have a bill called H 6337.10 And it basically says–we use the word peace officers;  this includes police officers, probation officers, correctional officers, fire marshal, a park ranger, anyone that has the power to threaten you with arrest, or who can engage in sex with people detained or in custody, and we’re trying to get it amended to (include) people under investigation.  I think we can agree that when police officers lie to us using fraud, to engage in sex with us to arrest us, and then steal our money and lock us up, it’s kind of state sponsored rape.  We’ve known that they’ve done this during the drug war. 

And again, when you’re thinking about it, they’re using force, coercion and fraud, which is the definition of trafficking.  And somehow I know a lot of people are gullible.  And I think if you ask them, if they’re the police, they have to tell you, entrapment is illegal.  And you know, I always focus on where these things are placed. Because in sex work, the average client is white males in their 50s. They have disposable income.   But when they do these things (entrapment), they go to poor communities, or they go to spas where their customers can’t afford $400; they need to go to a spa and pay $60 Because they’re poor people.  And they tend to be Latino or Black.  So when they do the news, that’s the pictures that you see.  And they don’t get the nice doctors and lawyers and legislatures, who are the majority of our clients.  So we work on this with different levels, as far as we consider these little things a harm reduction step. 

When I started the process, I have to say it was really intimidating.  The only thing I knew about how the government works was that little cartoon about how to make a bill on Capitol Hill.   That’s all we learned in school.  And I didn’t go to high school, I took my GED.  But I think about even high school debate teams.  They don’t even understand how our government is run or why we’ve had all these wars.  So what are they really debating? And the fact that you’re not allowed to have a different opinion until you’re in college, or learn to think for yourself, or let me study some things and get different perspectives and come up with my own opinion.  We’re not taught to do that.  So I think some of the next steps is insisting that public schools not only teach critical race theory, but they teach how we’ve whitewashed history for the last several decades.  And I’ll give you an example.  So I was born in 1964.  Obviously, I missed the civil rights movement.  But I lived in a little town called Gulfport in St. Petersburg, Florida, and didn’t realize I lived on the edge of segregation, in a sundown town.  Black kids were shipped into schools.  In sixth grade we watched Roots and as horrific as it was, I needed to remember that Roots was really like the romance part of the story.  It wasn’t that much different than going to the museums.  I didn’t understand why people were so upset. While this was horrific, it happened so long ago, because we spent months on the Civil War and memorizing all that.  But we spent five minutes on segregation, and they told us it was over.  They didn’t tell us about redlining; they didn’t tell us that we kidnapped 100,000 Native American kids and institutionalized and threw them out when they were 18, so they wouldn’t know their people or their language.  So we were lied to about so much.  But you know, we had to get up and sing America, the beautiful.  We still have parades for Columbus.

This is the next thing replacing the war on drugs, and they’re casting bigger and bigger nets.  So while prostitution is a misdemeanor, (in) most places other than Texas, if I have an adult child that lives with me, they can be charged with living off the proceeds; that’s a felony.  Some states now want to create laws that if you give or sell a sex worker drugs, that you will be a trafficker.  So again, we’re doing like we did in the 90s.  With the drugs where we made all these laws that you got more time for crack than cocaine. It’s the same thing.  I got caught up in that law.  We’re going to start to dehumanize certain groups of people; shame the women; shame the clients–and meanwhile, the government’s not going to throw anyone a bone or do anything about poverty– or you create jobs, provide resources.

00:12:46

Patsy Lewis

You mentioned that there’s a lot of intersectionality with the work you do and the kinds of issues facing the groups of women that you work with.  Can you say something about the relationships you might have with other organizations to mobilize around some of these issues?

00:13:07

Bella Robinson

Well, I’ll give you an example of stats. We surveyed 1500 people involved in the sex trade in 2017, and only 36% of them were heterosexual. So we have a huge amount of LGBT and trans women involved in sex work.  It’s been really hard because of the stigma attached to sex work and the trafficking narrative, a lot of organizations or like, for instance, LGBT, they do great work. They’re trying to protect their people.  But maybe people won’t give them money, or donations if they stand up for sex workers.  Politicians, until 2016, if you spoke on behalf of sex work, it was like political assassination to a campaign.  And finally, in 2016, we became a topic entering the political arena.  So it’s been really hard.  I’ve seen some organizations that claim they’re working on undocumented people.  But when they raided the spas,11 they didn’t want to help.  There are some people that want to shut ICE detention centers down, but they don’t care about the prisons, because they say, well, they’re criminals.  So we’re still dividing ourselves into all these boxes.  And I’ve always said, Wow, what if all oppressed people just got together and stood up?12 13

So the difference with the National Council is, that’s what they’re doing.  They’re looking at what we have in common with people.  Their main goal is no woman, or girl should be in a cage.  And we start there.  And if we have differences, as we move out, that’s fine.  But they recognize that the criminalization of prostitution puts women and kids in cages.  It takes away our children, and also allows predators to walk amongst us because they get away and they do it over and over again.  Because no one really cares in this system we have, who the bad people are; it’s about– and it’s not even a realistic goal to get rid of prostitution.  I mean, think about it.  You’re never going to get rid of it.  I see it a lot like abortion. It’s still going to continue.  It’s under what conditions is it going to continue. 

But they also have strategies.  So I’ve learned that you have tools, and you have strategies.14  So a rally is a tool, a  petition is a tool, (a) piece of legislation is a tool.  But when you start to put all these things together, you start to have strategies.  I also realized this is a generational fight.  We’re not going to solve it in our lifetime.  But if we don’t start the fight now, the next generation, you know– I’m doing this for the next generation to create these changes amongst us.  But movement building with the National Council seems to be a lot easier. They have connections all over the state, country.  We heard from a panel and I can’t tell you the secrets of how they dedicated their strategy.  But we heard from the five people that basically were responsible for stopping them from building a $500 million mega prison in Alabama.  And none of us ever thought that once they had the plans drawn up, and they had got the money, that these things could be stopped.  And they did stop it.  And now they want to use COVID money to do it again.  So now their whole campaign to their fight has to start all over.  

00:16:27

Patsy Lewis

I like that you made a distinction between tools and strategy.  And I wanted to ask you to just speak a little about the Black Lives (Matter) Movement protests,15 especially in Rhode Island, and whether you think that a lot of the issues there resonated with your group.  And I think you probably already partially addressed that, but also, do you think that’s an effective tool, that kind of mass demonstrations, and how do you move from there to strategy?  What kinds of strategies do you think?   

00:17:09

Bella Robinson

But that’s a great point, because first of all, we started a global movement.  See, globally, people came out even in other countries, right?  So George Floyd, you know, and we know this has been going on for decades.  But now that we have cameras, we can see it and even though we see it, they still get away with it.  Right?  Very rarely are they held accountable.  I personally didn’t go to the Providence rally because we had COVID. But I remember the governor, and it was the biggest rally Rhode Island’s ever had.  10,000 People came up and she (Gina Raimondo) stood up and said she was proud that people wore masks.  People were respectful, and I remember the next day they were supposed to reopen the mall after shelter in place.

 So you have one person– I believe, bad actors that are white supremacy– throw a rock or create a scene and then we’re gonna blame all the Black Lives Matter for this.  I compare this to January 6.  Look at how long it has taken Trump– or no one’s going to be in trouble.  But even the people that did this, look how long they’re getting, 30 days and 45.  We know if this was people of color doing this they would have  been in cages within 24 hours doing 20 years to life. Immediately, SWAT teams would have been deployed across the country, right?  So I noticed that as a difference. 

And again, I understand that we need the masses to come together to have enough power to shift the political laws and scenery (political landscape).  But they have to be organized and they need a strategy.  I’m going to give you an example.  When I first started activism, 10/12 years ago, my mentor said “you need to go to labor school and learn to organize”.  And I thought, “organize, it’s just me, what is she talking about organize?”  Well, now I get it.  And one of the whitewash things we hear– like we spent five minutes on Rosa Park, and we were told she was just tired one day and decided, she wasn’t– you know, they had been organizing; they might have not, you know– they didn’t just decide this.  These people did not take the bus for over a year, okay.  So you have to organize, you have to come up with things that you think are effective.  Rallies are fun.  They’re great for morale.  But if that’s all you do– you know, I think there were rallies almost every Friday at the ACI [Rhode Island Department of Corrections], our prison here in Rhode Island, and very rarely are the media there.  Even in Alabama, I only saw one news camera.  I didn’t see any news trucks.  So we know the media likes to ignore us.  Strategies have to be bigger.  But I think the more people we bring into the movement and provide training for, to teach them how to organize and pitch ideas, the better we’re gonna get.  And that’s what I see the National Council doing.  So they’re providing 30 of us in New England with six months of training.  So we’re going to be  little good foot soldiers when we get done.  And we’re going to take that [and] we’re gonna go train 30 more people.  And again, I don’t have the solutions to what each strategy will be, or each component.  But I know we need the tools.  And when they asked me why I wanted to join, they’re like, “Bellabeat, you’re already a leader.”  And I was like, “But you people got skills I need. I need to learn from you.”  I haven’t figured this all out.  So I think a combination of those things.

00:20:36

Patsy Lewis

Do you feel more hopeful after seeing, you know, the biggest rally in Rhode Island on social justice issues? Do you feel that this is a more hopeful moment for making change?16

00:20:51

Bella Robinson

And I think that’s what it did.  Even if we don’t know what we’re doing quite yet.  It’s bringing us hope that there can be change.  There are people that care; that they’re willing to invest their time, their money, their labor, into creating change.  And I think before– maybe some of it’s because I was incarcerated or have done sex work– that I just kind of assumed this is the way it was, and maybe I deserved this.  Do you think about how horrible that is just even for your spirit?  Or how do you flourish?  When we look at children, the term “thriving child”, you know– the doctors have all these things, whether this child’s thriving– well, who in society is thriving other than the elite, or maybe the middle class that’s disappearing?  I want us all to thrive.  And again, I don’t have the exact solution that I can’t say do A, B and Z and you’re gonna win.  But I know this, we’re not going away.  This generation is not going away.  We’re not going to give up the fight.  I feel really bad that I was so naive that civil rights stopped in the 60s.  And it took this to bring it back to people’s attention.

00:22:05

Patsy Lewis

On this line, nothing has changed. Do you think that, do you see any difference in how the police and the state relate to, you know, with sex workers?

00:22:21

Bella Robinson

But I’m going to give you another example of that.  If I sit there make a statement that a bunch of men are pedophiles or beat their wives, no one assumes I’m saying all men are bad, right?  I’m talking about certain people.  But for some reason, when you call out the bad apples in the police, they get so defensive.  And we’re not saying they’re all bad, but because of the system that won’t allow them to tell on each other.  They are just as equally guilty, right?  I don’t see the government giving that up; even Biden is like we need to give the police more money.  The police also get to decide what they’re going to police. The mayor has a lot to do with this.17  In cities, when people call and complain about prostitution on the street they gotta go clean it up. Oh, you know, it’s crazy because when they call about police abuse or complain about anything else, they don’t care about it then.  So they’ve got to pick and choose. And then how do we know people are really even calling and they’re not just making this up?  I also understand while they want to totally get rid of the police I understand we need them for certain things for violent crimes. Okay? If someone’s tried to break into your house and murder you, we can’t go back to the wild west.  But we can’t keep policing poverty and petty ass shit.  Okay, and this is probably why they solve so few of the violent crimes, but we got a million people like, do you know it’s illegal to feed empty parking meters so people don’t get tickets?  You could be arrested for it.  Because they want to give people tickets so they can make more money.  And even when I look at legislation every year, there are hundreds and hundreds of laws being introduced.  And the ACL did a thing a couple of years ago, that they’ve only repealed a handful of laws in Rhode Island and one of them went back to when we had horse and buggies, and horses pooped in the street.  But why are we adding more things on the books, rather than getting rid of some of these things?  And many of these laws are created in hysteria, or as a reaction to something that happened.  So we had a good Samaritan Law for harm reduction for drugs so that if I call an ambulance, I’m not going to be charged.   And now if you give or sell someone drugs, who dies, you’re going to be charged with first degree murder, not even man [manslaughter].  But [if] I get in my car and kill three people drunk, and that’s only manslaughter.  And who’s going to call to save a life if there’s a chance they might go down for it? So we go backwards? 

And, you know, a lot of it is because of politicians and fundraising.  When I’m allowed to give a politician– Big Oil gives you money.  And then you say, Oh, I’m all about climate change. Well when you take that oil money we know exactly which way you’re going to vote.  And it was that one case– I can’t remember the name Citizens [United] versus [Fec – that was another one that basically made it totally legal for you to give any politician as much money as you want.  And they claimed it was freedom of speech.  And I don’t even know how to undo all of this.  I also realized, while I want to see women in office, and I want to see black and brown people in office, that they have to be the right people. 

One thing I do like about Bernie [Sanders]– I know he’s a white man.  But he’s had the same message for 30 years.  He doesn’t change.  Even when he knows he’s gonna lose, he still keeps true.  And if you remember, some really big things happened subtly that I picked up on.  Congress didn’t want to give us unemployment and stimulus checks.  Bernie wanted $15 an hour, and now we know we need $25 now, but Bernie has been at this for years, Bernie was the only one that said I’m not voting on the defense budget.   

And one thing that we’re getting ready to fight in Rhode Island, which is really relevant is that they were allowing us to testify, about bills on the phone because of COVID . Well, they just announced that it’s going to stop and we said you know what?  “We don’t like that.”  When they only give you 48-hour notice of the hearing?  What if you need a babysitter?  What if you don’t have transportation?  The phone system allowed more people to participate in the process.  So we’re actually having a meeting tomorrow night about how are we going to shut this down.  Do we need a new law?  It’s not taking them any more time or energy to allow this.  So what they’re doing, it’s like the voting that we’re going to lock out as many people and this will make the process of not passing these laws easier.  So it’s a lot, isn’t it?

00:27:02

Patsy Lewis

Thank you so much.

  1. They still had to pay Margo’s attorney fees as the courts recognized it changed the law
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  2. Rhode Island re-criminalized prostitution in 2009
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  3. National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls
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  4. From Bella Robinson: “The government says they are raising awareness about sex trafficking, but they are really promoting stigma and violence. Polaris Project has advocated for spa raids for years and here is a good example of the violence it creates.”
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  5. The Effects of Polaris Project in Rhode Island  
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  6. A recent local example can be found here ↩︎
  7. Coyote Closet does street outreach one a week, providing hygiene kits and harm reduction supplies. They have a re-entry program and facilitate an empowerment class for women in RI DOC, as well as having two weekly online support groups. More information can be found here. ↩︎
  8. You can read more about COYOTE’s research, policy and legislation work here. ↩︎
  9. https://sextraffickingalaska.com/ ↩︎
  10. This bill was H6337 in 2023; in 2024 it is now H7833 and S2651. Bella Robinson adds, “Nobody opposes it, we have 10 house sponsors and 10 senate sponsors and it still hasn’t gotten out of committee.”
    ↩︎
  11.  This report reveals that the majority of the arrests from 2000 to the present are Asian spa workers. ↩︎
  12. In 2024, COYOTE fought back against an out-of-state interest group that introduced H7165 which excluded Asian spa workers from immunity and introduced an improved immunity bill, H7307. The June 2024 press release explains the backstory https://coyoteri.substack.com/p/press-release-open-letter-to-the ↩︎
  13. From Bella: “We created an immunity tool kit for legislators and to help sex workers pass good immunity laws in their sates. We had a flyer with a QR code that went to it and legislators didn’t read it. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MrS7335RR1dVv9ZEUitPGis3bImUEjUhh7ceHpV_QwE/edit. We also have an ongoing survey- story bank. Surveys are a way that we can bring the voices of criminalized people who would rather remain anonymous to lawmakers. “Have you ever been the victim or witness of a work-related violent crime? Add your story to the story bank at the link below!”
    https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3Q8Z9GS ↩︎
  14. Bella adds, “Rather than standing outside the RI ACI screaming ‘fuck the police’ we talked to RI DOC and said, ‘Hey it’s not your fault women are going to jail and we just want to help the women.’ While even Senator Mack couldn’t get inside the ACI, we are now facilitating an ‘empowerment class’ to the women inside the RI ACI, and we launched a re-entry program to help them upon release and weekly support groups.” ↩︎
  15. Bella adds, “We have been working with BLM RI PAC. I went door-knocking with Harrison Tuttle (Executive Director of BLM RI PAC) a few years ago when he was a candidate for District 21. In 2024 there were many LEBOOR bills, feel-good bills and some that could create real change and they passed this one. They also helped Women Project and COYOTE pass the ECA in 2023 which allowed people on Medicaid and state workers to access abortions using their health care coverage. Harrison is an amazing young man.” ↩︎
  16. Bella notes that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 she feels more worried about the future, as the decision “set back sex workers’ rights 100 years” ↩︎
  17. Bella Robinson explains that Providence Mayor Smiley has “a campaign against homeless people,” and adds that more information about this can be found following local journalist Steve Ahlquist’s Substack. ↩︎