The Woman the LAPD Couldn’t Silence: Norma Jean Almodovar In Her Own Words
Norma Jean Almodovar’s life is one of the most thoroughly documented and fiercely contested stories in the history of American sex‑worker rights. Born Norma Jean Wright in 1951 in Binghamton, New York, she grew up in a strict Baptist household and enrolled in Philadelphia College of the Bible with the intention of becoming a missionary — a trajectory she recounts in her memoir From Cop to Call Girl (1988), where she describes the religious pressures that shaped her adolescence and her eventual move to Los Angeles in the early 1970s .
She spent ten years with the Los Angeles Police Department as a civilian traffic officer, a role she has discussed extensively in interviews and in her memoir. Her accounts of witnessing misconduct within the LAPD align with reporting from the era, including investigations into departmental corruption and abuses of power in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
After a disabling on‑duty collision in 1982, she left the department and entered sex work, a transition she has repeatedly framed as both economic necessity and personal awakening.
Her decision to write Cop to Call Girl triggered a retaliatory pandering charge in 1984 — a case widely covered in California newspapers at the time and later analyzed by civil‑liberties scholars. The conviction resulted in prison time, probation, and parole, a sequence she has long argued was designed to suppress her First Amendment rights rather than address any genuine criminal conduct
Today, her papers — more than eighty cubic feet of correspondence, legal documents, media appearances, and activist materials — are housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections, where they serve as one of the foundational archives for sex‑worker‑rights scholarship in the United States .
What follows is Norma Jean Almodovar speaking for herself — drawn directly from our conversation.
I asked Norma Jean to start at the beginning, and she didn’t hesitate. “I always say my life didn’t begin with a calling,” she told me. “It began with a crash.” She was driving her LAPD black‑and‑white down Hollywood Boulevard when a drunk driver in a stolen car slammed into her.
“When he hit my car, I said, this is going to be the end of my career here. I’m not coming back.”
The impact left her with spinal lesions she still feels decades later. “It was like a sigh of relief, even though it was painful,” she said. “My career on the LAPD was over.”
She went on disability, and then the department gave her an ultimatum: return to duty or lose her benefits.
“I said, well, fine,” she told me. She walked away from the badge and toward a world she had only glimpsed at the margins — the world of Los Angeles call girls, madams, and clients whose desires were often less about sex than about identity.
Her LAPD years had already shown her the rot beneath the uniform.
“I was the only woman in the roll call at nighttime,” she said. “They didn’t try to hide it… they just did their criminal activity.” Supervisors were often involved. Boundaries dissolved. “As I got to know them, I’m going, ‘Whoa, man.’”
She had been raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church, enrolled in Philadelphia College of the Bible, preparing to be a missionary. She married because the elders demanded it after she admitted she had “petted” her future husband.
“You’re going to either have to get married or leave the church,” they told her. That was the world she came from. That was the morality she had been taught. But the LAPD nights cracked that worldview open, and the crash shattered it completely.
She knew a call girl. “I had met this call girl, and she introduced me to the madam she worked for,” she said.
She had already been having casual sex with cops for free. “Cops think making love is like using their gun,” she told me, laughing. “All they have to do is take aim and shoot. Insert, withdraw, repeat if necessary.”
So she thought, why not get paid for something she was already doing?
Sex work didn’t corrupt her — it revealed her. “It wasn’t until I became a call girl… then I discovered that, hey, I’m bisexual,” she said. Clients would request two women at a time, and suddenly she realized she liked women too. “This is cool,” she said. “This is me.”
One of her clients was a well‑known Hollywood producer, a cross‑dresser who paid her $10,000 for a single extended session.
“He fantasized that he was a lesbian call girl,” she said. “Being a call girl makes you very empathetic to people trying to explore their sexuality.” She dressed him, encouraged him, guided him.
“Obviously he was not beautiful,” she said, laughing. “But to be able to tell him with a straight face that he was beautiful and sexy — that was what you wanted to do. For that time, they were who I said they were.”
She connected this to the ancient lineage of the sacred prostitute. “The word ‘whore’ originally meant ‘beloved one,’” she told me. “People have such a hang‑up about their sexuality that they had to make that word ugly. But for most of us, we didn’t care what other people thought. The only thing that really matters is our clients and ourselves.”
The LAPD didn’t arrest her for sex work. They arrested her for speaking. Her friend Penny — “a very big, heavy, overweight, unattractive woman” — told her during lunch that she had always fantasized about being a call girl.
Norma Jean replied, “If I could find someone who would like your type, I’d be happy to let you know.” That single sentence became the pretext for a pandering charge.
What she didn’t know was that Penny had been flipped by the LAPD.
“She was involved in criminal activity that I didn’t know about,” Norma Jean said. “They threatened her that she would get arrested and go to jail if she didn’t help them get me.”
Penny wore a wire. Nothing happened — no sex, no arrangement, no money. Just a conversation.
On the stand, Penny admitted she did it because she wanted to stop Norma Jean from writing her book about the LAPD.
“She wanted to stop me from writing that book,” Norma Jean said. In any other context, that admission would have ended the case. Instead, it became the beginning of her prison sentence.
The first judge recommended probation. The district attorney appealed.
“I actually served three sentences,” she told me. “I served the one before I went to prison, then I was in prison, and then I was on parole.”
Most people facing prison withdraw from public view. Norma Jean did the opposite. “I was on everybody’s show — Geraldo, Donahue, Oprah Winfrey,” she said. Joan Rivers adored her. “She wrote to me in prison,” Norma Jean told me. Rod Stewart wrote to her too. 60 Minutes interviewed her.
This visibility wasn’t vanity. It was survival. “If anything happened to me, there were people outside watching,” she said. She was imprisoned with the Manson Family women — lifers with nothing to lose. “They wouldn’t get any more time in prison if anything happened to me,” she said.
Her husband feared she wouldn’t come out alive. “Those things saved my life,” she told me. “Having that spotlight on me saved my life.”
She ran for Lieutenant Governor of California on the Libertarian ticket. “I believe in individual freedom,” she said. “It’s your body, it’s your life. If you want to have sex for money or for free, who cares?”
She remembers telling students at UC Davis, “Don’t you want to know what it’s like to be a hooker?”
She has donated her archives — letters, documents, media appearances — to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her sequel, Pros and Cons: Postcards from Prison, is complete. A docuseries about her life is in development.
“I refused to be erased,” she told me. “And I still refuse.”
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