Veronica Monet is an American author and activist for sex worker rights. Her early activism focused on debunking stereotypes about sex workers and advocating for the decriminalization of all sex work. From 1989 to 2004, she was a high-end escort and courtesan, Monet's later work focuses on anger management, healing shame, and helping couples integrate their sexuality with their spirituality.
Early life and education
Veronica Monet was born to working-class parents in the rural town of Prairie City, Oregon. She was homeschooled and did not participate in public education until entering college in 1978, when she was granted Honors at Entrance at Oregon State University. In 1979, Monet left the denomination she was raised in, and in 1982 she graduated from Oregon State University with honors with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a minor in Business Administration. The first seven years after college, Monet was employed as an office manager, department manager, and marketing representative. She experienced on-the-job sexual harassment, as well as gender pay discrimination, and these negative experiences would influence her subsequent work trajectory. Monet's early adult life was complicated by a severe addiction to drugs and alcohol that led her to a twelve-step program in 1985. She has remained clean and sober ever since, and attributes her long-term sobriety to the twelve-step programs and ongoing therapy.
Career
Monet became a high-end escort in 1989, after four years of sobriety, and worked as a clean and sober high-end escort for fifteen years, as she described when she was profiled as a 'modern day courtesan' on A&E's Love Chronicles in the year 2000. Throughout her escorting career, Monet was married and helped to raise her husband's two young children. In 2004, Monet divorced her husband of fourteen years due to his relapse around pain pills. That same year, she transitioned from escorting to relationship coaching and moved from the California Bay Area to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. She spent the next eight years living in a mountain cabin while touring major American cities to promote her first book, Sex Secrets of Escorts, published by Penguin in 2005. In the Fall of 2000, the Kinsey Institute established The Veronica Monet Collection. Academics in the field of psychology have referenced Monet's expertise on the dynamics of sexual shame and porn addiction. She is cited in the late Christopher Kennedy Lawford's Recover to Live: Kick Any Habit Manage Any Addiction, and Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo's Man Connected. Monet became a Certified Sexologist through the American College of Sexologists in 2007 and an Anger Management Specialist through Century Anger Management and is also a graduate of San Francisco Sex Information and now works as a relationship therapist helping people heal trauma and shame.
