Last year, the Los Angeles Times published an article on Greg Reese, a cop-turned-pastor who “rescues” escorts, and not by making prostitution legal. He sounds like a swell guy.
For 20 years, Reese, 43, patrolled the streets of Huntington Beach. As a police officer, he ran into his share of prostitutes. In his mind, the women were lowlifes who were selling their bodies. He remembered one who had been beaten up by a customer.
“I took the report,” he said. “But I didn’t have any compassion for her.” (Via)
That happy story is the inspiration for 8 Minutes, a new reality series “featuring cop-turned-pastor Kevin Brown surprising escorts in hotel rooms and offering to rescue them from a life of trading sex for cash.” Brown only has eight minutes to make his case.
The show, which A&E picked up, is produced by Tom Forman, who told EW:
Kevin has got a lot of safety protocols. He’s a cop and knows just how dangerous these rescues can be. Before he goes in and does one of these operations, he surveys the scene, he puts his church members in prime locations so they can observe, they have cops on speed dial. And one of his other rules is they would only have eight minutes to talk to any individual girl. In his experience, she’s got eight minutes in which she could return to her pimp and say, “I got a bad feeling about that guy, he backed out, I thought he was a cop,” without having the pimp come looking for her, which could create a dangerous situation for Kevin and his team. So for her safety and theirs, it’s a self-imposed hard deadline.
They’ve got eight minutes to talk her out of prostitution. If she says yes, that’s great. If after eight minutes she hasn’t, they give her a phone number and tell her they’ll always be there, but they cut off the intervention. (Via)
Forman also worked on Sex Box, so you know 8 Minutes will be a classy, tasteful expose of a man tricking a woman to bring her closer to Jesus.
