Rachel Moran grew up in North Dublin city. From a troubled family background, she was fourteen when she was taken into state care. She became homeless and got involved in prostitution at aged fifteen, working in Dublin and other Irish cities for the following seven years.

In 1998 at the age of 22, she liberated herself from that life. At 24 she got on the path to further education, gaining a degree in journalism from Dublin City University, where she won the Hybrid Award for excellence in journalism.

She speaks internationally on prostitution and sex-trafficking and volunteers to talk to young girls in residential care about the harms and dangers of prostitution. She lives in North Dublin.

Paid For fuses the memoirist's lived poignancy with the philosopher's conceptual sophistication. The result is riveting, compelling, incontestable. Impossible to put down.--Catharine A. MacKinnon, law professor, University of Michigan and Harvard University

People who are working to end sexual exploitation will take heart from her example of transformation and an insistence on basic human dignity.--President Jimmy Carter

This is surely the best, most personal, profound, eye-opening book ever written about prostitution--irrefutable proof of why it should NEVER be legalized.--Jane Fonda

Rachel Moran demolishes the "Pretty Woman" myth with the stark reality of the lived experience of her young years in prostitution. This memoir makes a strong case for the Nordic model law that criminalizes the buyers whose money drives the trade that treats women as objects for sale.--Terry O'Neill, President, National Organization for Women

Rachel Moran takes us where no readers have ever gone: into the deep hell of being prostituted... Anyone who believes "sex work" is chosen or a job like any other should read Paid For for its exposure of misinformation and myths alone. But the book is more: Moran writes so well that her story will scorch your heart....--Robin Morgan

No amount of theory from those who have never been prostituted can replace the truth and power of experience. Rachel Moran's Paid For should be required reading in courses on human rights, in police training and law schools, and in sex education courses that separate welcome sex from body invasion.--Gloria Steinem

As a survivor, I can say Paid For got to the heart of what sex-trafficked and prostituted women face on a daily basis. Rachel speaks for those survivors who can't speak for themselves, and for those who have been lost to the life.--Vednita Carter, Founder and Executive Director, Breaking Free

Paid For is the political sword we desperately need to slay once and for all the myths and fairytales surrounding the sex trade. Sojourner Truth once said that truth is powerful and it prevails. Rachel Moran's earth-shaking book embodies just that.--Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2015-09-08

Length: 320 pages