Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted

At the Peppermill, Forgie says when she pleaded with Rudy to let her go home, he said, “Oh, you think you can go home for free? I have an idea. You can fuck your way home.” Forgie thought he meant that she’d have to turn tricks, but realized he was talking about having sex with him. “That’s when he assaulted me,” she claims.

Rudy then brought Pellow and Jessica back to the Peppermill Resort, where Pellow was terrified to discover Forgie wasn’t inside the room. “I kicked that bitch to the curb,” Rudy told her. Then Rudy’s phone rang. Another john wanted a date with Pellow, but something wasn’t right. The phone number in the ad was Forgie’s. Why was this john calling Rudy’s phone? “Screw this,” Rudy said, hanging up. “We’re going back to Florida.”

When the elevator door opened onto the lobby, a swarm of cops tackled and cuffed Rudy. Forgie, who had escaped from the room earlier to get help, had been taken to the hospital after reporting the rape. At the station, where police suggested Pellow and Jessica hold hands to comfort each another, Jessica turned to Pellow and said, “Don’t say anything.”

Akporode “Rudy” Uwedjojevwe wears a brown t-shirt in his mugshot, and the tired gaze of a man at the end of his run. The 35-year-old, who is being held in a Nevada jail, has been charged with sexual assault, sex trafficking, battery, attempted pandering and felony counts stemming from a fight in jail. His trial is slated for January 19. Pellow and Forgie say they plan to testify against him. He could face life in prison. Though the accounts vary, everyone agrees that the man who manipulated them is rightfully behind bars. “It’s a real thing, and it happens all the time,” says Forgie, who has since struggled with depression to the point of threatening suicide. “People need to understand that.” (Rudy didn’t return requests to be interviewed for this story.)

Bradley Myles, CEO of the Polaris Project, a non-profit that fights human trafficking, calls Rudy’s enterprise a textbook example of how women get swept up in sex work. “We’re still not where we need to be yet as a country in terms of understanding how real sex trafficking is in our daily midst,” he says. Polaris receives an average of 100 calls a day to its helpline (888-373-7888) and text service, BeFree. “They were designed to help girls exactly like the ones in this case,” Myles says.

As to why the stories diverge, sometimes so fundamentally, it could be a variety of reasons: post-traumatic stress, the fog of time, covering up misdeeds. Pellow, Forgie and Zola each insist that Jessica was as culpable as Rudy in conning them. “She knows how to get in peoples’ heads,” Jarrett says. “She’s a deceiving girl. She knows how to say everything you want to hear.”