Magdalene House Mom : Minister Takes In Prostitutes and Steers Their Lives Back on Track

Ana Espinoza became a prostitute before she was old enough to drive. She started at 14, after she ran away from home or her mother kicked her out; she’s not sure anymore.

Espinoza is now 22 and in jail, desperate to leave, desperate to find another way of living. At least that’s what she is telling Linda Culbertson. Culbertson is sitting on a hard wooden stool in the Sybil Brand women’s jail near downtown Los Angeles, listening, staring intently.

Culbertson, a Presbyterian minister, runs one of the only programs in the nation that attempts to do the near-impossible: Help prostitutes trade the streets for a normal life. For five years, Culbertson has been director of the Mary Magdalene project in Santa Ana, patterned after a similar prostitute-rehabilitation program that she helped found in Reseda 10 years ago.

She is very particular about whom she accepts. She refuses to take mentally ill or drug-addicted women and does little recruiting. Instead, she asks court officers, attorneys and social-service workers to distribute literature about the program.

Then she waits for the calls.

As Culbertson briefly explains how she can help, Espinoza hunches forward. Eyes wide, face frozen, like a doe caught in headlights, she picks nervously at her nails. A tiny, permanent tattoo of a tear etched underneath her left eye stands as a reminder of a son who died.

“Maybe Mary Magdalene’s the answer, maybe not,” Culbertson says. “We’ll find what’s right for you. But first tell me why you left home.”

The story tumbles forth in fits and starts, between snorts of laughter and long, little girl sniffs. She has met her real father only once, been raped by her stepfather, hustled in exchange for food and a motel room, tried to commit suicide twice and hawked herself on street corners to pay for the drugs she used to forget that she has never really been a child.

Culbertson takes a package of Kleenex from her purse and hands it to Espinoza, who mops up the tears and continues.

“It started when I was 9. I couldn’t take it anymore; my stepfather, he would touch me, worse, he would, you know, all the time. I had to leave,” she says, shredding the Kleenex, her watery eyes avoiding contact.

“My mother, she caught him once, and it stopped for a while, but I couldn’t be around him anymore. So I guess I ran away. The last time I tried to talk to my mom about what he did, she said: ‘That’s been so many years ago; why are you still thinking about it?’ I told her, ‘Because it’s still there.’ She said, ‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’ ”

Culbertson isn’t shocked. She knows the pattern that leads girls to prostitution so well that she often surprises the inmates by correctly predicting their stories before they’ve told them to her.

Every once in a while, though, “the horror of their childhood will knock my socks off,” she says.

One woman told her that she had a child at age 12, the product of a group rape her father had arranged. Another grew up in a cult whose members raped her. Another had horribly deformed hands--her father had pounded them with hammers and burned them with irons. Another watched her drug-addicted mother shoot her abusive father to death.

The path to prostitution starts with a dysfunctional family and usually includes incest, rape, neglecting parents and abandonment, Culbertson says. That leads to a lack of education and skills, an inability to cope with the pressures of a daily job, drug addiction, alcoholism, abusive relationships--these are the symptoms of the illness Culbertson calls “post-traumatic childhood syndrome.”

“My job has very little relationship to prostitution. Drugs and alcohol are the masks that hide the real problem, which is always rooted in their childhood,” she says. “My role is to somehow help free them from this horrendous pain that destroys their lives, to show them they’re not to blame.”

Linda Culbertson grew up in Wilmington, the oldest of three children. Her father was a carpenter, her mother a homemaker. They were churchgoers who helped friends in need. Her parents were Scout leaders, joined the Chamber of Commerce and registered to vote in opposing political parties. Dinner-time conversations were heated.

“My parents gave me a lot of freedom to be who I was. They allowed me to be different and think differently. I was always very radical, always thinking about the world, always opinionated. I grew up in a time when it was OK to do a lot of questioning.”

In the ‘70s, she became a teacher in a gang-plagued neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles, fought for desegregation, did graduate work in counseling and volunteered for the board of the Presbyterian church’s synod on women and justice.

It was there that she discovered prostitutes. Hundreds of teen-age girls from across the country were running away from abusive families and heading for Hollywood with dreams of becoming the next Farah Fawcett or Suzanne Somers. Most of them landed on the street--homeless, hungry, without jobs or skills. They sold themselves.

The minister of the Presbyterian church on Sunset Boulevard noticed the teen-agers working the streets and called Culbertson’s synod for help. The church provided enough money to rent a house in Reseda and hire Ann Hayman, a Presbyterian minister, to run the program. The house opened in 1980.

They called it the Mary Magdalene project, named after the prostitute Jesus Christ was said to have rescued. Culbertson served two years on the board of directors and then went to seminary in Chicago to become a minister.

Meanwhile, Southern California was becoming the teen-age prostitution capital of the nation. Police began an aggressive campaign to arrest prostitutes in Hollywood, prompting the majority to move to the San Fernando Valley and various cities in Orange County. In the early to mid-80s, hundreds of prostitutes began appearing in force on the streets of Garden Grove, Westminster and Santa Ana, in places where they had been rarely seen.

The Mary Magdalene board of directors decided to open an Orange County house in Santa Ana in 1985. They asked Culbertson to be the director, but she refused. After an 18-month search, the board still had no one to run the house so Culbertson agreed to do it on a temporary basis.

Five years later, she is still there. “She is their mom,” said board of directors president William Barstow. “She’s tough, but extremely sensitive, too.”

The neighbors have no idea that up to half a dozen former prostitutes live on the corner in the large, comfortable, middle-class home with trimmed lawns and fruit trees that looks like the others in the Santa Ana neighborhood.

Culbertson refuses to allow the women or the house to be identified for fear of provoking the neighbors’ wrath.

At home, she forces structure and discipline on her charges, showing them for the first time how to live typical, middle-class American lives.

A pillow is never out of place, the counters are always clean and a pot of coffee stays warm on the stove from morning till evening. Culbertson shares in the cooking and cleaning and drives the women where they need to go--work, therapy sessions, school, the store.

On the refrigerator is a schedule of who does which chores, so detailed that the living room is divided into 10 assignments, from vacuuming to tidying the newspapers. They exercise, eat three, balanced meals a day, and learn the basics of hygiene and health that they either forgot or never learned.

The change is substantial. On the street, they survived on fast food and drugs, often with no place to shower or change clothes. They arrive with black teeth, greasy hair and no idea how to open a bank account or even select tomatoes in a supermarket.

Although many women drop out before the yearlong program ends, of the 120 who have stayed in the last decade, only two have returned to the streets.

“Getting these women to change is very difficult,” says Ernest Proud, a therapist with the Orange County’s Health Care Agency who works with women in the Magdalene project. “I’ve worked with a lot of programs, and this is probably the most well-rounded, best opportunity for women to get off the street and change their lifestyle.”

Culbertson runs the house on little more than $100,000 a year, depending on churches, foundations and wealthy individuals for donations. The program accepts no government money.

Most of the prostitutes she works with are white and poor, though a few come from the middle and wealthy classes. Typically, they run away in their teens, hook up with an abusive man, run away again, become addicted to drugs and use prostitution to support that expensive habit.

As the numbers of drug-addicted women have increased, the funds for programs have dwindled, despite the cost-effectiveness of treatment. Each drug-addicted prostitute costs taxpayers an average of $145,000 in law enforcement over a decade, their typical career span, not including welfare payments. The average cost per resident who completes the Mary Magdalene project is $25,000, according to a cost-effectiveness study.

But little other treatment is available--no programs for prostitution exist besides the Magdalene project. Drug treatment is extremely limited for women without money or insurance. Orange County jails have no drug-rehabilitation programs and fewer than 70 beds in county residential treatment homes--which are nearly always full, according to government officials. In Orange and Los Angeles counties, with a combined population of 10 million, there are fewer than 150 beds for such women. Very few allow children.

Recovering drug addicts are always emotionally impaired, leaving Culbertson with a house full of adult women who behave like pre-adolescents. “It’s incredibly difficult,” Culbertson says. “They have kids of their own now tugging at them to be mature mothers and yet they never had that themselves from their own mothers.”

It is also difficult for Culbertson. “They hang around my skirt like a 7- or 8-year-old, craving hugs. One regressed to a toddler. She was constantly in my shadow. She’d only communicate with happy-face pictures.”

Others become rebellious teen-agers, reverting to drugs and abusive relationships, fighting fiercely with the other women in the house over imagined slights, she says. “I have to wait for them to grow out of it.”

Culbertson is often discouraged, especially because she often wants more for them than they want for themselves. Ideally, the women would become independent and equal partners in relationships with men. But in reality, they take traditional female jobs as clerical workers and secretaries and struggle in their relationships.

When a county psychologist said the best that Culbertson could hope for regarding one woman was to “marry her off, I almost killed him!” Culbertson says. But when the woman did marry, Culbertson discovered it was for the best.

“I’ve learned that they can still be successful, even though they haven’t come as far as I’d like. No matter what the outcome, something has really changed. They’ve learned that you’ve valued them. You’ve loved them differently. In that way, no one’s been a failure to me. They may not end up where I want them, but I’ve made a difference.”

She pauses. “But they certainly don’t turn out to be radical feminists.”

Kimmie is a Culbertson success story with a familiar beginning. She was abused as a child and married an abusive husband while still in her teens. She left him, lost her job, her apartment, her daughter and her will. She became addicted to drugs and alcohol, nearly dying on the streets after a particularly severe beating from her pimp.

The shock compelled her to find a drug-treatment program and the Magdalene house. In the last year, she has had therapists, job training, courses in finance, and nutrition and feminist studies. She found work as an executive secretary and saved $10,000. Most important to her success, she says, was Culbertson. “She unconditionally loves you until you learn to love yourself,” says Kimmie, who asked that her real name not be used.

A month ago, Culbertson asked her to leave. Kimmie pleaded to stay.

“It’s hard for me to say, ‘It’s time for you to go.’ It makes me feel, You hard bitch. I wonder, am I doing the right thing?” Culbertson asks. “But I don’t want them to depend on me anymore. The whole purpose of this program is to teach them that they can take care of themselves, that they’re strong, capable women and they can survive no matter what. At that point, I tell them, ‘I’ve given you all the tools you need. You just have to use them.’ ”

Kimmie, along with dozens of others, found that she could make it alone. “The first couple of nights, I called just to hear Linda’s voice on the answer machine,” she says. “But every day that goes by, I’m a little more comfortable with myself. I worry less and less because I know, no matter what happens, Linda will always be there.”

Even the dozens of women who drop out and return to the streets keep in contact.

“I’ll get calls from them on, on their birthday, during the holidays,” Culbertson says. “They ask, ‘Do you remember me?’ I represent hope to them. A lot come and they’re not ready to reach out and grab it. But they always call me back to make sure that it’s still here.”