According to prosecutors, she required that women she hired be at least 22 years old and have some college education. During the course of ABC’s investigations, the senior State Department official in charge of U.S. foreign aid—including programs urging sexual abstinence—resigned, and ABC tracked down other government employees and other middle- to upper-class Washingtonians who either patronized or worked for Palfrey’s escort agency. But after weeks of analyzing and debating the results of their investigation, ABC concluded that a lot of the information was “dull,” according to Brian Ross, the network’s chief investigative correspondent. No elected officials were implicated, and ABC decided to be restrained about naming Palfrey’s escorts or customers. “We decided our standard would be: what is newsworthy?” says Ross. “My judgment was that for the most part, the names were not.”
