A Village for One’s Annual Auction & Benefit
Saturday, October 15, 2016
Hilton Portland & Executive Tower
It is an honor and a privilege to have been invited to be the guest speaker at this year’s event.
My opening remarks:
Good evening, my name is Kristin Tierney. From September 2005 to October 2009, I was a frequent guest of Downtown hotels; my stays had nothing to do with leisure and everything to do with business – I was an escort. And, honestly, in my mind, turning dates in upscale hotels was a significant upgrade from trading sex for money in cars off of 82nd Avenue – which is where my life of prostitution began in 2003. Regardless of where I transacted business or what it might have entailed, I could never escape the one question that tortured me: “How the hell did I ever end up here?”
I intend to make this evening all about shining a light on what is happening to children in our backyard . . . things I have firsthand knowledge of thanks to incredibly devastating choices I made while enslaved by a life-destroying addiction to crack. Most of the women I encountered on the streets had been out there for years – so I can’t tell you about who they were before their innocence was taken from them. But after hearing their stories, I began to understand a little more about what turned them into the broken women they had become by their late teens, twenties, thirties and forties. Their lives were measured in human cruelty too disgusting for me to comprehend, and certainly contrary to everything I had been raised to believe possible about human relationships. Those women taught me how very, very little I truly knew about life.
Tickets are still available . . . Make your reservation today!