Monday Jul 18 2011

Escort girl Helen Wood made the headlines when it was revealed she slept with Wayne Rooney. She tells Ciara Dwyer about how she fell into prostitution and how she has now given it up for the love of her boyfriend.

I'll always be looked at as a prostitute. I'm never going to escape that. It's always going to be there,” says Helen Wood. “I've got to get over it. I can't dwell on something that I've no control over. I've learnt my lesson. On Twitter, people write things like, ‘You don't deserve to be a mother,' or, ‘You need your tubes snipped.' And I think, ‘Jesus, have you never made a mistake?'”

Just one mistake, that's all it takes for a whole world to spiral downwards.

As Helen Wood sits opposite me in a white T-shirt, tracksuit jacket, jeans and flip-flops, I watch her as she tucks into a full Irish breakfast. She's a young slip of a thing. She is wearing a little eye-liner but there is something very natural and unscrubbed about her beauty. Youth, that's what it is. She is only 24. When you're that young, you don't have to try too hard. But listening to her talk, she is so far from a kid.

Helen is the mother of a seven-year-old son. She shows me a photo of a smiling blue-eyed boy on her phone. For almost two years, she slept with men for money. Her most famous client was Wayne Rooney.

She and an escort friend did a threesome with the footballer in July 2009. The newspapers got wind of it, but all three denied that the event happened. Helen didn't want it to ever come out because of her son. Suddenly her friend's phone went quiet. She was in hiding with the tabloids. The friend sold her story to the papers, revealing Helen's identity.

A week later, with her cover blown and her small town talking about her, Helen sold her tale too. At that stage, she decided that she had nothing to lose. She tells me that Wayne wasn't blessed with good looks but he was “nice and not an a***hole like some of them”.

An escort girl, a hooker or someone who works in the vice industry; call it what you want, she is not precious about the titles. “No matter what you call it, at the end of the day it all boils down to prostitution,” she says. “You're selling yourself for sex.”

This is the story of an ordinary girl who became a single mother at 16 and then got herself into debt. She had borrowed £500 from a loan shark for a holiday to Spain. When she was made redundant from her £260-a-week office job, she had no way of paying it back.

Worried one night, she phoned her friend who suggested that she join an escort agency.

Dressed in a blazer, skinny jeans and stilettos, Helen went for an interview at the agency. “How soon can you start?” they asked. A girl hadn't turned up for work and there was a man downstairs waiting in a room. Helen went in and slept with him.

“The first time was horrible. He was an Italian man and he didn't have much English. I didn't want him to know that it was my first time. I walked in, he pointed to the bed and I started taking off my clothes. It was all over and done with pretty quickly. I was totally blank,” she recalls. “You can't do this job if you don't switch off.”

Then she went out to two different hotels and slept with two more men. It was £80 for the half hour with the Italian and she got £60 of that. The outcalls in the hotel were £220 for an hour. “That first night I came home and because I'd not told anyone what I was doing, I just sat in the bath and scrubbed my skin and felt disgusting. I felt really bad.

“But then I got into bed and thought, ‘What am I complaining about? The £500 loan is gone.' That's how I started to look at things. It was a small sacrifice to get rid of all that s**t.”

And so began her life of sleeping with men for money. It lasted for almost two years.

“I had a choice. I could have left plenty of times but I didn't want to, because the money was so good. It was addictive. There were some really low points but you just got over them and picked yourself up again. There are regrets but at the same time, it's a business arrangement. It was a job and it's all about acting.

“Sometimes I enjoyed my job. I met a lot of people and, hopefully, with my advice and reassurance, I left a lot of them thinking that they could be happy. But I never fancied any of my clients. A lot of men knew that I didn't give a toss about them but then others would say things like, ‘It's just you and me. Come on, I've seen you lots of times. We could build something.' And in my head I'd be thinking, ‘What are you talking about? There's nothing to build.'

“If you ask me do I regret escorting, I'd say no, because I got myself into a rut. I never asked anybody to lend me money. To a degree I sold my soul but I'd rather sell my soul in that way and go home and be myself, than live a complete lie. I never told any of them that I loved them.”

Helen doesn't seem like the sort of girl who would end up as a prostitute. After all, she comes from a respectable middle-class home. She grew up in a nice area in Bolton, England. She has two older brothers. Her father is a music lecturer at a university and her mother is a teacher's assistant in a primary school.

“I had a horrible childhood and I think a lot of it was my fault,” she says. “My parents didn't know how to handle a daughter who had her own opinions. I wasn't happy at home so I saw going to school as a break. As soon as I'd come home from school I'd take off my uniform and go out. I don't blame my parents. I was hard to deal with and they found it upsetting and people don't like to be upset.”

She confesses that she wasn't as academically bright as her brothers and by the time

she got to secondary school — a Catholic one with nuns and priests — she was hanging around with a wild crowd. Forever smoking in school, she and her friends were suspended for eight weeks. They were caught with Class A drugs — ecstasy. After one row too many at home, she ran away to her boyfriend's house and then stayed with a friend.

The friend's mum phoned the social services and Helen was then put into a foster home with a vicar and his wife. “I was terrified going to live with the vicar and his wife,” she says. “I thought he was going to have me saying prayers all the time, but they were very loving and supportive. I respected them. I was there for 14 weeks.”

Everything changed when she discovered that she was pregnant. The social services then took her out of the vicar's house and put her into a flat on her own.

“That was the worst thing that's ever been done. That was my downfall,” she says. “At first I thought it was great to have my own flat but I had no money, no food and I couldn't afford to pay my electricity. I had to go to the laundry with my school uniform. When I was in the flat it was so depressing. I thought, ‘Is this what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, just sitting at home being pregnant?’”

The father of her child wanted her to have an abortion but Helen disagreed.

“That's when everything went wrong,” she says. “I didn't want an abortion and the relationship grew increasingly sour. I don't believe in abortion. I think if you're old enough to be having sex, you're old enough to be a parent. I was so old for my age. You wouldn't have thought I was 16.”

Helen finished her O-Levels while pregnant and then her mother was with her for the birth of her son in November 2003. Her whole perspective changed.

“I remember looking at him thinking, ‘Oh my God, he's mine. No one can take him away from me. And I've got to look after him,” she says. “That's when I got my head down and went to sixth-form college. He was only eight weeks old. The plan was to study to be a social worker.”

The father of her child stopped seeing her when their son was six months. But Helen got on with her life. After sixth-form college, she worked in several clothes shops before eventually getting a job in an office, as an accountant's assistant. All was going well until she was made redundant and the loan shark was looking for his money.

“People make it out to be seedy but a lot of the clients were really nice. They were just on business trips. A lot of them say that their wives refuse to have sex with them. They're just normal men who basically wanted sex,” Helen says. “A lot of men don't even have sex with you. They just want to have a woman sitting down listening to them and not making them feel like s**t.”

She always practises safe sex. For an all-night job, she would get anything between £1,200 to £1,400, but a lot of the time for that they'd bring her out for a meal and drinks. “If they have a drink, they'll fall asleep so you wouldn't have to do anything. That's a bonus,” says Helen.

Helen believes that eight out of 10 men have sex with escorts because they are being bullied by their wives and they're not having sex at home. The others who come to her have a happy sex life but they're just greedy.

Working with the agency, there were some scary situations. One man pushed her into a bedroom and she heard him phoning his friends to say that she had arrived. She broke free and ran like hell. Another man bit her cheek. And on one occasion she and her friend arrived for a job and there were 10 Russian men there.

She tells me that it is safer to branch out on your own than work for an agency, because you can pick and choose your clients. Also, you earn better money. Helen and her friend got a portfolio done and advertised themselves on a website called Escort Ireland.

“We came over to Ireland and went around different hotels. Belfast, Dublin, Galway and Cork. We worked a lot in Cork. I hated Cork. They're a different breed. They're like the rednecks of Ireland. They're totally not with it when it comes to sex and women. A massive bunch of them would request the strangest of things.

“I loved Dublin. It was full of loads of different people. I saw a politician in Dublin. He told me, ‘I shouldn't be here. I'm actually a politician'. When he was in the shower, I looked out the window and there was a car parked outside with a chauffeur. He had a massage and we talked about things in general. I was sat there in my bra and knickers.

“He had a bottle of champagne with him. We were just having a friendly chat and he said, ‘I've got a proposition for you. I don't know how open-minded you are. Can I put something to you?'

He said, ‘I see ladyboys on occasion. How would you feel if I brought one along with us? He's just a phone call away. I told him that he could possibly be invited to an appointment but obviously if you don't want him to come, then that's fine'. I kind of freaked a bit and said no. He paid to stay with me for two hours but I didn't have sex with him because I wouldn't have sex with the ladyboy. He was really nice though.”

But why do successful young men go with escorts when surely they can get it for free, with hordes of women clamouring for them?

“I understand why they do it,” says Helen. “So many women are willing to blackmail. Women will sleep with a footballer or an actor and then they go and sell their story but if they see an escort it won't happen as much. I know I sold my story about Wayne Rooney, but I did that for a reason and by that stage, it was already in the papers.”

But back to Dublin. Like Cork, it had its share of oddballs too. “I used to see a judge in Dublin,” she says. “He wanted me to batter him from the chest down so that no one would see it. He never once asked for sex. He was a weirdo.”

A lot of Helen's clients were married. Does that make her look at marriage in a different way? “My boyfriend Louis wants to get married but I'm still weird about getting married. As much as I love him to pieces, marriage to me is final. I have to be 100 per cent sure when I look in his eyes. I do think a lot of men are incapable of remaining faithful,” she says.

But Helen packed in her work as an escort girl last year. Now she has plans to set up a dress-hire agency, where girls can hire dresses for a few days and appear like Wags, just like she used to do.

With all her first-hand experience, she thinks that she would be good at counselling couples and giving them sex tips, or perhaps writing a column about it. “I'd love to write a book as well,” she says. “Not a kiss-and-tell but an autobiography. I've had a few meetings with publishers about it.”

One day, she will tell her son that she worked as an escort. “I don't expect him to understand at any age, but people do things for certain reasons.” she explains. “The only thing I regret is becoming known for it, but I don't regret doing it because we'd probably be still living in a council house and he'd be in a shit school. He's in a fantastic school now and I live in a really nice area. None of the teachers in my son's school have been judgmental and they all say he's doing great.”

Louis is the reason she packed in prostitution. “People have offered me thousands to do it but I'm never, ever going back,” she says. “I don't believe in going back. If you've made a decision, you've made it for a reason.”

There's one small snag though. Her boyfriend, whom she claims is the best thing that's ever happened to her, has been in prison for the past year. He was caught buying firearms with her credit card, unbeknown to her until the police knocked at their door one day and arrested them both. After much questioning, they released her. But she still loves him.

“I know he doesn't sound it because he's in prison, but he's fantastic,” she tells me. “I'd never had a boyfriend before. I don’t count my son’s father as a boyfriend.”

He brought her out for dinner in the Lake District. “We ended up staying over and we stayed for another two nights,” she says. “Then we came back and I've never looked back. When I first got with him, I was still escorting but after nine weeks I thought, 'I'm going to have to tell him the truth.' I broke down when I told him and I got really upset. I said, ‘You won't want to see me after I've told you this. I'm an escort.' He gave me a hug and said, ‘I don't care what you do. I like you for you and it's a job at the end of the day. I'm not narrow-minded. Who am I to walk into your life and expect you to turn things around?' He was really understanding.”

She visits her boyfriend in prison every week and is looking forward to October, when he will be out on day release. “Here's the really ironic thing,” she says. “I'm perceived to be the biggest slut going, but I've not had sex with anybody for a whole year.”