Dennis Hof and the Bunny Ranch

The self-styled "American pimp" who ran Nevada's legal brothels on television, faced assault allegations, and won an election dead.

Dennis Hof bought the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a licensed brothel outside Carson City in Lyon County, Nevada, in 1992, reportedly for about $1 million, and spent the next quarter-century making it the most famous legal brothel in the United States. Born in Phoenix in 1946, he had owned gas stations before he owned brothels; by 2015 he told CNN he held seven of Nevada's roughly eighteen licensed houses, including all four in Lyon County and the Love Ranch near Pahrump. Prostitution is legal only in licensed brothels in certain rural Nevada counties, and Hof's business model, as he described it, was to let the women set their own prices and split the take with the house.

Television made him. HBO's Cathouse, a documentary that became a series and specials running for more than a decade, filmed the Bunny Ranch's negotiations, parties and staff meetings, and made Hof and workers such as Air Force Amy national figures. He wrote a memoir, The Art of the Pimp (2015), titled after Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, called himself "the P.T. Barnum of booty," and ran "Hookers for Hillary" and later pro-Trump publicity campaigns. When Lamar Odom was found unconscious at the Love Ranch in October 2015, Hof handled the press himself.

The allegations were serious and unresolved. Three former workers at the Bunny Ranch and the Love Ranch accused Hof of sexual assault in incidents from 2005, 2009 and 2011; prosecutors declined to charge, citing expired limitation periods. In September 2018, during his campaign, a woman reported to a Carson City hospital that Hof had raped her, and the Nevada Department of Public Safety opened an investigation at the sheriff's request. Hof "completely and totally" denied it through his lawyer. He died before the inquiry concluded, and no charge was ever filed; he is presumed innocent of all of it.

In June 2018 Hof won the Republican primary for Nevada Assembly District 36, unseating the incumbent James Oscarson. On 15 October he celebrated his seventy-second birthday at the Bunny Ranch and then at a campaign rally in Pahrump attended by Joe Arpaio, Roger Stone, Grover Norquist, Heidi Fleiss and Ron Jeremy; Jeremy found him unresponsive at the Love Ranch the next morning. The coroner later ruled acute myocardial infarction, with diabetes and obesity as contributing conditions. Under Nevada law his name stayed on the ballot, and on 6 November he won the seat over Democrat Lesia Romanov; county commissioners appointed Gregory Hafen II to fill it. The same day Lyon County voters rejected an advisory question to abolish the county's brothels by roughly 80 to 20 percent, three weeks after the sheriff had published a compliance report citing possible indicators of trafficking at the four houses.

Hof matters to this archive because he was the loudest advocate of the argument that the legal brothel is the answer to the pimp: that licensing, health checks and a woman's own price sheet remove the coercion the street runs on. His critics, including the Lyon County sheriff whose 2018 compliance report flagged possible trafficking indicators, argued the arrangement simply put the pimp on the licence. Both cases were made in public, in Nevada, on the record, and neither has been settled.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Dennis Allan Hof

BORN
Phoenix, Arizona, 1946

STATUS
Died 16 October 2018, Crystal, Nevada, aged 72

ERA
1992–2018

ASSOCIATED WITH
Mound House, Lyon County, Nevada; Carson City; Pahrump; HBO's Cathouse; Nevada Assembly District 36

STANDING
Documented