What is the difference between sex and Pilates? When a blind lawyer and a young actress fought each other in a recent lawsuit in Pennsylvania it was evident that not everyone can easily differentiate the two types of conduct.

John Peoples, a property and negligence lawyer who is legally blind, started using the services of Ginger Dayle in 2007. He paid with his credit card in her apartment by allowing her to enter her fees on credit card payment forms and then signing them under her guidance.

Peoples later said that although he was told he was being charged at the rate of $275 an hour, the sum Dayle had actually written on the forms for two-hour sessions was often $1,100. Altogether, he said, he’d been defrauded of $8,650 over 11 sessions. He sued his credit card company for failing to remove the disputed sums from his bill or to charge Dayle for them. He asked for over $1m in damages including compensation for emotional injury.

Dayle, who advertises herself as an actor, fitness instructor, professional dancer, and “adjunct professor”, contended that the sessions with Peoples were Pilates lessons. Taken from the teaching of Joseph Pilates in the early twentieth-century, Pilates is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a system of exercises designed to improve physical strength, flexibility, and posture”. Peoples, though, was adamant that what he had received wasn’t a series of muscular exercises. “I paid her” he testified “and she had sex with me”. He stated that as he had arthritis and chronic fatigue syndrome, systematic exercises for all his postural muscles was not one of his pastimes.

Asked whether, as a lawyer, he saw any problem with using the services of a prostitute, Peoples replied that he was not worried because it did not affect the type of law he practised, and in any event prostitution was only a misdemeanour and would not trouble his professional disciplinary board. District Judge Edmund Ludwig dismissed Peoples' claim ruling that he could not recover the disputed charges because prostitution is illegal in Pennsylvania so the dealings were a "prohibited transaction" under the credit card company’s contract with him.

Even in countries where it is lawful, prostitution presents challenges to the legal system. In New Zealand, Logan Campbell, a taekwondo champion, has been running a brothel in order to help fund his bid to participate in the 2012 Olympics. The New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) has sent him a “letter before action” threatening litigation unless he stops linking the Olympic Games to his sex business. The NZOC says that prostitution is inconsistent with the Olympic values of “excellence, friendship, and respect”. It’s a moot point whether Campbell can be sued for doing something lawful. In any case, the ethics of the Games are usually derived from ancient Greece, and that was a society in which prostitution embraced hetairai, distinguished women held in high respect; higher perhaps than Olympic officials.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. English Law, by Slapper & Kelly, is published by Routledge-Cavendish

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