‘I’m not selling girls’

JOHANNESBURG - After an “outing” that had the country glued to Twitter this week, Innocentia Morolong has denied pimping out women as young as 18 years old. The 26-year-old Welkom socialite’s business, Innovative Lifestyle, made headlines as an alleged prostitution front. She is not the only so-called slay queen facing allegations of organising young women to “entertain” wealthy men.

For the past two weeks, a thread on Twitter trended intermittently after screenshots of a conversation between slay queens and their clients emerged, in which young women negotiated prices between R4 500 and R25 000 a night for sex with men. The screenshots were claimed to expose a prostitution network under the guise of modelling, in which the madams hired out young women. One of the screenshots traced a conversation between a “client” and a contact saved as Morolong. However, she has pleaded innocence. No, my number and pictures are publicly available and someone is framing me. I don’t know, some people are crazy out there,” she said on Friday.

“There are bitter people after me and many other businesswomen. Faith Nketsi was also accused and I was dragged. I don’t even know her, but people are creating fake pages and some even open fake bank accounts. I have received over 200 direct messages from people asking for my services and offering to pay, and these are messages I don’t even read. There are people after me,” she insisted.

“I was home in Welkom nursing my injured leg when the news broke.” Morolong began Innovative Lifestyle in Welkom in 2006. She says she has 400 models from Welkom and Johannesburg on her books, who are hired to entertain businessmen, politicians and actors.

“We don’t just entertain, but we also do events and also promote events like the Welkom Homecoming. I can’t name any of the politicians and actors we entertain because it is usually private parties, but we have entertained a lot of those.”