Pasha Cowan calls them “gas-station moments.”
The man who stared at Cowan before tossing his hot coffee on her leg. The middle-age couple who got in their car, then got back out to throw their sodas at her. The young man who asked for her autograph and then mocked her to his friends, calling her “the fat hooker.”
It’s been a year since the former madam of an escort service stepped forward during the University of Colorado football recruiting scandal to say she had provided prostitutes for athletes.
Since then, she said, her life has changed in most every way.
She has moved twice. She has lost three jobs after bosses became aware of her history. Someone painted “whore” on her car and bashed in the sides. People she considered friends disappeared, and an elder at her Boulder church told her she was a distraction to other members, so she stayed away. She cut her thick, black, waist-length hair to just below her ears so people would not recognize her.
Cowan looks back over the past year with a mixture of emotions heavily tinged by regret.
“I don’t blame anybody else. I’m not a saint. I’m the one who chose to work in the business – high risk, high return,” said Cowan, 35 and the single mother of a 15-year-old son. “I chose to come forward, but I never dreamed I’d be the target of so much hostility.”
Cowan is unsure whether she would do it again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to stand up for these girls (the women who say they were sexually assaulted by CU athletes and recruits) because they represent all of the women out there, and girls, and myself.
“But now, knowing what my son and I have gone through … would I do it again? As a woman? Yes. As a mother? No.”
It was to support her son, Cowan says, that she started in the prostitution business.
She was 19 and studying psychology and pre-med at Oklahoma State University when she became pregnant.
After the father skipped out, she moved to Denver, where she began working as a domestic-violence counselor, she said.
In first grade, her son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Cowan said, and after a doctor recommended he be placed in a hospital, she quit her job to take care of him.
Shortly after that, she met a woman who owned an escort service. Cowan went to work for her, engaging in sex for hire.
“I was broke,” she said. “My first night I made $700, and I thought, yea! And that was that.”
In 1997, Cowan opened her own telephone lines for escort services. Most of her clients paid $250 for up to an hour. Her share of that was $100.
During the fall of 2002, Nathan Maxcey, then a CU recruiting aide, began to hire “girls,” she said, including Cowan. Soon, she says, Maxcey began calling for escorts to go to the Omni Interlocken Hotel in Broomfield, specifying which woman he wanted for a particular room.
All of the clients were young and athletic, Cowan said.
By Thanksgiving, she said, Maxcey was calling so often and becoming so insistent that she severed contact with him.
A little over a year later, around Christmas 2003, she closed her business when a stern-faced Boulder sheriff’s detective knocked on her door.
“He told me to shut everything down, and I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ In a way, it was very much a relief,” she recalled.
She began applying for jobs, including one as a receptionist in the music department at CU.
Then one night as she watched television, she saw CU football coach Gary Barnett talking about the scandal. Three women who claimed they were raped by CU football players had filed civil suits against the school, saying it provided an atmosphere of sex and alcohol that led to their assaults. Criminal sexual-assault charges were never filed, and Barnett staunchly defended his players.
“It seemed like such victim-blaming,” recalled Cowan, who said she has been raped and did not report it. She consulted friends, she said, who urged her not to say anything.
Still, she called David Hansburg, a CU football official, to tell him what she knew.
Her next call was to the Boulder sheriff’s office, and from there Cowan became a witness in the ensuing grand-jury investigation called by Gov. Bill Owens in February 2004.
Her name was released to the media, as were mug shots from previous arrests, although Cowan’s only conviction stems from a 1998 traffic charge.
“My parents didn’t know what I had been doing for a living,” she said. “It was a big shock.”
She was shunned by friends, other parents and teachers at her son’s school. She began breaking out in hives and having migraines and episodes of vomiting.
Her son had to hide from reporters, who would approach him while he was walking the dog, she said.
And she found herself an object of derision from many sides.
Neither Barnett nor Hansburg was available for comment. Maxcey, who previously told reporters he did not hire prostitutes for recruits, has pleaded not guilty to charges of embezzlement of public property and solicitation for prostitution, and is scheduled to stand trial in August.
Cowan, now a broker for Silver & Nash Mortgage, struggles to put her life back together.
She is behind on two car payments, and her home phone was turned off. On the upside, her employer knows her background.
“She had the courage to stand up to people,” said Alyssa Moist, 31, co-owner of Silver & Nash. “As far as Cowan’s history in the escort business, I don’t judge her. That’s her business, not mine.”
Cowan wishes there were more resources and less stigma and blaming for those who work as prostitutes.
“I’d like to expose the sex industry for what it is – it’s not some horrible criminal circle,” Cowan said. “They hate themselves. A lot of these women are doing what they can to survive, but the money is hard to turn down.”
Denver Post researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
Staff writer Amy Herdy can be reached at 303-820-1752 or aherdy@denverpost.com.
