AUBURN — A judge on Friday ordered a Lewiston woman to serve 190 days in jail for sex-trafficking.
Tina Lagasse, 52, of 527 Main St. agreed to the sentence on the misdemeanor charge that carries a maximum punishment of 364 days in jail.
Lagasse was poised to go to trial on the charge when she changed her plea to guilty in February.
Her sentencing in Androscoggin County Superior Court came a week after she failed to show up in court. For that offense, she was ordered to spend 30 days in jail to be served at the same time.
The case stems from an internet advertisement for prostitution that was noticed by an Auburn police detective last summer. The image showed Lagasse with a young woman who was later identified as a former Auburn high school student.
According to a police affidavit, an officer posed as a customer and texted the phone number in the ad. Lagasse texted back that the young woman was 17 years old and that, “I don’t sell children.”
The officer called back and made an appointment with Lagasse for paid sex; she gave him her home address. Three officers arrived at her home and questioned her about the ad and the teen pictured with her.
Lagasse told them she encountered the teen near Poirier’s Market on Walnut Street early in the morning of July 29. The girl was selling herself on the street and Lagasse befriended her and told her there was “a better way to make money.”
She took the teen to her home, suspecting she was a minor, and told her to take a shower because the girl was dirty, Lagasse told police.
She said she gave the girl a dress to wear, in which the teen was pictured, but didn’t take the photo and didn’t post it online.
Lagasse told police she gave the teen $10 and told her to go home. The detective wrote that the bedroom in the home was the backdrop for the photo in the ad.
Lagasse later called one of the officers and admitted to having misled police about the victim, whom she had met on a different street and had told her she’d had sex for money.
An Auburn high school principal told police the girl had been a student.
Police said the ad had been posted after the girl’s 18th birthday.
During a follow-up interview with Lagasse, she said a different woman had taken the photo that appeared in the ad and she had proposed posting an ad on the website.
Police visited the girl’s home and talked to her. She said she had “bumped” into Lagasse near Poirier’s Market after leaving a friend’s house. Lagasse had come up to her and told her she looked familiar. She said Lagasse took her to her home. She said Lagasse’s son took the photo. She said she hadn’t known what the purpose of the photo had been.
Then she said they were supposed to do “sexual stuff” to earn money, specifically, oral sex. She said Lagasse had taken the “majority” of the proceeds. She said she’d never performed that act before and that the client was “really old.” She said she had earned $60 of the $200 that Lagasse had charged the man they had both serviced in Lagasse’s bedroom.
In his sentencing memorandum, Paul Corey, Lagasse’s attorney, wrote that the plea agreement wasn’t bound to a finding that she promoted the prostitution of the teen. According to pretrial rulings by the judge, a jury could have found Lagasse guilty “even if the jury did not find that Ms. Lagasse promoted the prostitution of (the teen) but rather promoted the prostitution of herself.”
For that reason, Lagasse reasoned a plea was preferable to a trial.
Had the case gone to trial, Corey wrote that there was “sufficient evidence to impeach the claim made by (the teen) that a sex act occurred at Ms. Lagasse’s home.”
He described a January stabbing investigation which cast doubt on the teen’s truthfulness in some statements to police.
Corey also wrote that the teen might have wanted to help police secure a conviction of Lagasse because the teen was facing possible criminal charges in a different criminal case.
The teen told police conflicting stories about her drug use the night she visited Lagasse’s home, Corey wrote.
At Lagasse’s sentencing, a letter written by the teen’s mother was read in court.
“Just because you are used up does not mean you can prey on the younger kids and sell their bodies and souls,” the mother wrote. “They do not need to get you money to feed your drug addiction.” Of her daughter, the mother wrote: “You have shown her the evil in this world, but she will be better than you.”
Lagasse apologized to Active-Retired Justice Robert Clifford for wasting the court’s time. She said, “I know that I’ve made some bad choices,” but said she planned to change when she’s released from jail.
Clifford told her: “It’s never too late to change your life for the better.”
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
Tina Lagasse of Lewiston appears in Androscoggin County Superior Court on Friday for sentencing on a sex-trafficking charge. (Chris Williams/Sun Journal)
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