Rachel Moran is a journalist, women’s rights campaigner and author of the bestselling ‘Paid For – My Journey Through Prostitution,’ which has been endorsed by Jane Fonda, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and many others.
Born into a troubled family, Rachel Moran left home at the age of fourteen. Being homeless, she was driven into prostitution to survive. With intelligence and empathy, she describes the exploitation she and others endured on the streets and in the brothels. Moran also speaks to the psychological damage inherent to prostitution and the inevitable estrangement from one’s body. At twenty-two, Moran escaped the sex trade. She has since become a writer and an abolitionist activist.
‘Paid For’ has been published in fourteen countries and numerous languages including German, Italian, Korean and French. Ms Moran was prostituted for seven years in Dublin and across Ireland, beginning when she was 15 years old. She later completed her education and received a degree in Journalism from Dublin City University and a Masters in Creative Writing from University College Dublin.
She first addressed the issue of prostitution publicly in February of 2011, when she spoke to a crowd gathered in Dublin to discuss implementing the Equality Model in Ireland. She has since spoken at the United Nations, the European Parliament, Westminster Parliament, Harvard, Columbia and many other global institutions and prominent places of learning.
Today she is completing her first work of fiction, which has already been agented, and she coaches people to write their memoirs at writeyourmemoir.com
“The best work by anyone on prostitution ever, Rachel Moran’s Paid For fuses the memoirist’s lived poignancy with the philosopher’s conceptual sophistication. The result is riveting, compelling, incontestable. Impossible to put down. This book provides all anyone needs to know about the reality of prostitution in moving, insightful prose that engages and disposes of every argument ever raised in its favor.” ―Catharine A. MacKinnon, law professor, University of Michigan and Harvard University.
