Ben Hills reports

Kim Hollingsworth always wanted to be a police officer like her father. But along the way her career took a number of interesting turns – shop assistant, waitress in a Chinese restaurant, flower-seller, university student, model.

None of the jobs paid much, and by the time she was 21, Kim was supplementing her income by working as a prostitute. A tall, willowy brunette she enhanced her popularity by having her teeth straightened, her nose bobbed and her breasts enlarged.

Her clients came from agencies like A Touch of Class in Surry Hills, and other not quite so classy establishments – the Golden Apple in Kings Cross, the Black Garter in Rockdale. Kim found she could earn up to $400 an hour – but she still hankered after a job with the police.

Until last year, the closest she had come to fulfilling her real ambition was stripping for 300 raucous policemen at a club function to raise money to send an Australian team to the Police Olympics.

She was such a hit she became a regular performer on the police circuit, stripping at 30 other fund-raisers and bucks’ nights which often involved paid sex.

In 1994 she applied to join the NSW Police Service, but – surprisingly, for someone in her line of work, a vegetarian who who neither drinks, smokes nor uses drugs – failed the physical agility test.

Finally, last year she passed a re-test, was issued with a uniform, and sent to study at the Police Academy in Goulburn at a weekly salary of $445, a sum she could once have earned in an hour.

Kim Hollingsworth thought it would be the start of her real life. Instead, it was the beginning of a nightmare in which she would be recruited as an undercover agent, called on to entrap and inform against 20 of her fellow officers, sacked and sent into exile, and wind up scared to even name the suburb in which she now lives for fear of reprisals from corrupt police and vice figures.

“I was torn about it because I love the police and I knew this would hurt them,” she says now. “But I had to do something. They were just criminals masquerading as police, and we had been given this lecture on how corruption would not be allowed.”

Now older (she turned 30 this year) and wiser, Kim has given up paid sex and stripping and decided to go public with her story because she feels she got a raw deal.

Her case went before the NSW Industrial Commission this week where she is claiming unfair dismissal from the police and asking for reinstatement.

Kim’s troubles, according to affidavits and evidence given to the commission, began a month or so after she began her police training when she was approached by a serving police officer doing a detective course at the academy who recognised her.

He later drove her to premises in a western Sydney suburb where he said he was planning to start a brothel – he asked Kim to become the book-keeper and “madam”.

After agonising about it for several days, Kim complained to her superiors about the incident and a secret meeting was arranged at a Goulburn motel with two investigators from the Wood Royal Commission into Police Corruption which had then been running for about a year.

In extensive debriefings, she named another 20 police she knew had frequented brothels or organised strip shows, and in an affidavit refers to “a rumour some years ago (that) the Commissioner of Police had attended a brothel”.

Kim agreed to be wired up with a tape-recorder, and to have a video camera installed in her Bondi apartment in a sting operation designed to catch the crooked police officer taking money.

“They told me it would be dangerous,” she says. “Dangerous? When I was working as a prostitute I had a gun pointed at my head – that’s what I call dangerous.”

It was while she was working undercover for the royal commission that Kim was fired, just two months after she began her police training, having received good marks in a class report which notes that she was a “quiet student. Serious minded. Very diligent. Great at research. High standard of presentation”.

The official reason is that she failed to disclose her background as a prostitute and stripper in her application to join the police.

Her counsel, Mr Geoffrey Nicholson, QC, told Commissioner Peter Connor that the police knew her history, and that the real reason she was fired was for trying to expose corruption.

She also feels let down by the royal commission, which she says consented to the police sacking her, and encouraged her to go back to prostitution as part of the sting operation.

After the job was done, she was relocated in Adelaide, but promises of protection and a new identity never eventuated, and Kim received no financial help – not even for the electricity to run the recording equipment, or the mobile telephone bills she ran up talking to investigators.

Miserable in Adelaide, she returned to Sydney last March and began proceedings to get her job back. In the meantime, she is living in hiding, trying to make a living modelling and coaching school children.

“I don’t want their money,” she told the Herald. “I don’t want a cent – I just want to be reinstated into the police. If I win, I don’t ever want to be a prostitute again. If I lose … well, the bills have to be paid and I’ll have to reconsider my options.”

Publishing Info

Pub date: Thursday 21 November 1996
Edition: Late
Section: News And Features
Sub section:
Page: 1
Word count: 790
Classification: People/Name/Hollingsworth/Kim/Policewoman
Caption:
1. Undercover nightmare … ex-prostitute Kim Hollingsworth. “I just want to be reinstated” …
2. Kim Hollingsworth in her prized police uniform