After two Democratic presidential debates in which Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren ripped into former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg over allegations of sexual harassment against his company, a former sex worker has gone public with her own account of how Bloomberg, as mayor, attacked her—and got her fired from her job as an elementary school teacher.
Writing for The Nation, Melissa Petro recounts how, in 2010, when she was 30 years old, “Bloomberg came for my job, a writer by education who had been working as a public-school teacher for a little over three years.”
The reason—a New York Post reporter had noticed an essay she has written online, recounting her experiences as a sex worker a decade earlier.
“Bloomberg yanked me from the classroom and called for the city to take legal action against me, as if my very existence was a crime,” Petro wrote in a separate essay for Rolling Stone.
“At 19, sex work presented itself as a solution—a way of paying for school and covering my living expenses when I saw no other options,” Petro wrote in her Nation essay, published this week. “Stripping and, later, prostitution, made education attainable, a goal Bloomberg claims he will champion if elected president.”
Petro went on to teach art in a Bronx school, but upon seeing the Post story about her, Bloomberg quickly announced that New York City was looking into its own “legal rights” to fire her.
"We're just not going to have this woman in front of a class," Bloomberg said, quoted by a 2010 New York Daily News account. “When I was informed that, of the situation of this teacher saying that she had been a sex worker—I think was the term she might have used —I said 'well, you know, call her, tell her that she is being removed from the classroom.’”
Though a “months long” investigation found nothing negative in her teaching record, according to Petro, the city’s Department of Education instead slapped her with a “Conduct Unbecoming a Professional” charge—for nothing more than her writings in which she described working in the sex industry.
“Unemployed and unemployable, I struggled for years,” Petro wrote—adding that her life is “better today.”
“I doubt I’ll ever fully recover from the trauma of being publicly shamed and ridiculed,” by Bloomberg, she wrote.
Photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
