New Jersey’s “Mansion Madam” tearfully accepted a plea bargain yesterday, telling a judge that running a $225-an-hour brothel was “unbelievably stupid.”
Judith Kelly Dempsey, 46, was sentenced in Morristown to three years’ probation; 250 hours of community service at From Our Streets with Dignity, a New York City shelter that helps rehabilitate prostitutes; and an undisclosed fine as “restitution.”
Dempsey, who faced up to five years in prison if convicted, pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution.
Superior Court Judge Theodore Bozonelis also gave her a suspended six-month prison sentence, saying he will decide later this year whether to reimpose it based on her compliance with probation.
Dempsey’s lavish operation at a 20-room Victorian mansion, Sunnymede, in Convent Station, Morris Township, came to light last August when authorities arrested 15 affluent clients and four prostitutes after a raid.
Prosecutors said Dempsey, a former Playboy Bunny, grossed $25,000 a week in the eight months the “Afternoon Delight” brothel was in operation. She pocketed $125 an hour of the $225 charge to clients, many of them businessmen who worked at nearby office parks.
“I don’t want you to think for one second that I don’t regret what I’ve done,” Dempsey told Bozonelis. “It was an unbelievably stupid and foolish decision to open that business.”
The plea bargain avoids a possibly nasty trial in which clients’ names would have been revealed. Dempsey and prosecutors had been negotiating over the money she would pay in restitution.
Initially, prosecutors wanted the sale price of the mansion – $1.2 million – but agreed to leave her money to buy a new home in Randolph and pay her legal expenses.
Bozonelis called Dempsey’s business immoral.
“There is no glamour in such exploitation. There is no intrigue in such degradation,” he said. “There is only the subtle coercion of a woman treated as an object of pleasure for the selfish purposes of making a monetary profit.”