Woman Goes Viral for Using Her Sugar Daddy as an Excuse to Get out of Jury Duty

If you didn’t know how much sugar daddies pay, you might now that a clip from the Parkland shooter’s penalty phase trial has gone viral—a clip in which a woman said she’d lose out on money from her sugar daddy if she had to serve on the trial.

The clip has shed more light on sugar daddies, who are typically older men who give money or gifts to their “sugar babies” in exchange for sex or companionship. Women say sugaring gives them financial independence, but the headlines are rife with stories of sugar arrangements gone bad.

In fact, sugar dating websites like SeekingArrangement have come under fire from advocacy groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which said in 2019 that sugaring arrangements are “targeted toward—and often intentionally mislead—the younger, lower-income audience and puts them in situations where the natural end game is a variety of forms of manipulation and sexual exploitation.”

Here’s more about the juror’s story and the experiences of other sugar babies…

Jury selection is currently underway in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for the sentencing of Nikolas Cruz, who pleaded guilty in October to killing 17 people and injuring 17 more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018.

Earlier this month, a woman asked to be dismissed from the jury by telling Broward County Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer that she has a sugar daddy she sees every day.

The woman, identified as Mrs. Bristol, was eventually dismissed, and she explained her side of the story in a WPLG interview. “If I do this case for six months, I have a hardship that means my sugar daddy can’t support me,” she said, adding that she would lose $8,000 a month if chosen to serve on the jury.

According to SeekingArrangement data cited by Money in 2018, the average sugar daddy is 38 years old and earns an annual salary of $250,000. At the time, the site had witnessed a 33-percent increase in sugar daddy membership since 2015 and boasted 3 million users across the globe.

Bristol’s purported $8,000-per-month earnings from her sugar daddy seems to make her an outlier among sugar babies: The SeekingArrangement data from 2018 also revealed that the average sugar baby is 25 years old and earns $2,800 monthly from sugar daddies, or $33,600 per year.

A woman named Jessica told Money she became a sugar baby to avoid further student debt as she pursued an MBA degree. And she described her various arrangements with her sugar daddies: One paid her $1,500 a month for visits once or twice a month. Another, whom she was seeing anywhere from twice a month to multiple times a week, paid her $700 per visit. And a third paid her $2,000 as a “monthly allowance” for visits twice a week.

Jessica said that she planned on continuing her sugar baby career after graduating. “I really don’t want to work for anybody,” she said. “I think that’s one thing [SeekingArrangement] has taught me: I like controlling my own financial destiny.”

If you need support, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or visit RAINN.org​ to chat online one-on-one with a support specialist at any time.