What Makes a Woman Become an Escort?

Monet says that she could make over $5,000 a day and that one wealthy client once flew her out first-class to New York, put her up in an expensive hotel and wrote her a check for $16,000.

Monet's experience is a cut above the typical rank-and-file prostitutes who work the streets, many of whom are mentally ill and prone to suicide, experts say.

When she was arrested a few years ago and spent time in jail in San Francisco, she listened to street walkers tell their stories.

"Their lives conformed to the stereotype. Their pimps beat them … As long as we have haves and have-nots, some will live violent and desperate lives. It's more about racism and poverty than about the practice itself."

Monet's suggestions for women who are getting into the escort business: get an education. "Do a 'My Fair Lady.' You won't get the high-end escorting gigs unless you're able to use the right fork, know how to cross your legs. You have to have a wardrobe."

Other prostitutes have had a much more difficult time. One escort, who declined to be named, says that she had to psychologically prepare herself for her clients by adopting protective denial of her prostitution.

"I worked the streets. I worked massage, I worked to escort myself, and I also worked hotels and I drove in my car," she told ABC News. "And when people try to say working escort services is safer than working the street, I have to tell them that is not true."

"Even on the escort service, I saw women who were stabbed multiple times trying to escape. I saw women walking into hotel rooms to be raped, to be beaten, to be robbed and they justified all of this by the amount of money they were getting."

Such experiences mirror those of many of the estimated 100,000 prostitutes around the country, according to health researcher John Potterat, who looked at street walkers in Colorado Springs over a 30-year period.

Prostitutes are 18 times more likely to be murdered on the job as other women of the same age, race, socioeconomic status, Potterat found.