It was a big deal for Rachel Worcel when she was hired by the Simon Law Firm in St. Louis last month.
Worcel, 48, has been a paralegal since 1999, but joining the civil litigation firm felt like a significant step up. For the first time in her career she had her own office, in the firm’s headquarters right next to Busch Stadium. The sort of cases the firm worked on were bigger than at her previous employer (just last week the Simon Law Firm won a $745 million judgment stemming from a fatal automobile crash). The new job also came with a substantial raise.
"I was really excited," Worcel tells the RFT.
Her first day went smoothly enough. But Worcel says she knew something was amiss by her second day there. She felt like she was being avoided.
That morning, an HR rep came into her office, sat down and said that they had to have a difficult conversation.
"She said that somebody sent us some disturbing images of you online," Worcel recalls. "I stopped her and I'm like, ‘So I can't work here?’"
In short order, the HR rep escorted Worcel out to her car and asked her to hand over her parking pass. Worcel says she felt "like a criminal."
The Simon Law Firm told the RFT in a statement that they can't comment on private personnel matters.
Worcel had done nothing illegal. In fact, she's had a long second career moonlighting as a model, including in the pages of Hustler magazine as well as (twice) on the cover of the RFT. She's also active on TikTok and Instagram.
Worcel was part of a Hustler “MILF mania" issue in April 2010. "I was the first official 'MILF' of Hustler magazine," she says. "So that was kind of exciting."
She appeared on the cover of the RFT in 2008 and 2013, the later for a feature about area water parks ejecting women whose swimsuits were too revealing. (Worcel has never been ejected from a water park; she just helped illustrate the problem on our cover.)
"I did make some money, but not that much, honestly, with modeling. It was more just to create art," she says. "I just kind of liked creating things."
It was the desire to be engaged in the arts that drove Worcel to take up modeling relatively later than many others. She first posed for the camera in 2006 when she was 31, many years after she’d started working as a paralegal.
"It gave me life," she says of her modeling. "I felt so alive doing it."
Much of the content is racy, but in general Worcel's body of work is much closer to being rated PG-13 than triple-X or even R.
She says she always took pains to keep the two aspects of her life separate.
"I didn't tell anybody, because I don't go around the office saying that stuff," she says. "Like, I'm kind of embarrassed, honestly, in that environment."
Stories similar to Worcel's have made headlines in recent years, with women in a wide variety of jobs — from auto mechanics to healthcare workers, Taco Bell employees to teachers — being fired for moonlighting in adult entertainment. Worcel says she feels like it's hypocritical for an employer to fire an employee for no other reason than their adult content. "Do they look at pornography? Do they go to strip clubs?" she says of the people who fired her.
Worcel's story is unique in that it's also something of a mystery as to how the law firm that was briefly her employer became aware of her nude modeling.
Because, for decades, as part of Worcel's efforts to keep her legal and her modeling lives separate, she has only modeled under the name Rachel Gunn. She has no idea who disclosed her modeling to the law firm, or how or why anyone went out of their way to sabotage her.
"I'm not sure who would recognize me," she says. "I'm not sure how they made the connection of ‘Worcel’ to ‘Gunn.’"
Worcel says the law firm's HR person told her that she had to be fired because there is an attorney on staff whose name is Gunn. Worcel says she couldn't get much more of an explanation as to why that mattered, beyond being told the attorneys were worried about their reputations.
Worcel says the Simon Law Firm did give her two week's pay as severance, and she was able to go back to the smaller firm where she's been a paralegal since 2016. The salary isn't as high, but she says she's grateful to be there and likes her coworkers.
But the thought of not being able to advance in her career still stings. The past few weeks have been difficult. She hasn't totally come to terms with what happened.
"I was computing how much I was able to save a month,” she says of her anticipation of the Simon Law Firm job. "I was really excited to finally have a little financial freedom, instead of living from paycheck to paycheck. I'm not allowed to do that now. I have to keep struggling."
Worcel adds, "It feels like I'm wearing a scarlet letter."
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