This has been a trying week for people with the initials L.T. The former acting giant Liz Taylor is dead, but at least she’s gone to a better place (as a friend of Michael Jackson, she’s guaranteed immediate admission to that big Neverland Ranch in the sky). The former New York Giant Lawrence Taylor is alive, but he has to cope with being a registered sex offender, and all because he made sweet love to a prostitute who happened to be underage.

You’re doubtlessly already filling with sympathy for the married father — surely our statutory rape laws were only intended for people who have sex with minors for free — but prepare for the tear ducts to runneth over when you read his touching plea for understanding. Tell ’em, Lawrence.

“I’m not the cause of prostitution. And sometimes I make mistakes and I may go out there, but I didn’t pick her up at no dag-on playground. She wasn’t hiding behind the school bus or getting off a school bus. This is a working girl that came to my room. And I don’t know what her age was. I asked her age. She told me she was 19. It is what it is.”

Persuasive stuff, particularly the thing about the school bus. But wait, it gets persuasiver for it seems this is not the first time that Lawrence has been victimized by ladies of easy virtue.

“It’s the world of prostitution. You never know what you’re gonna get. Is it gonna be a pretty girl, an ugly girl or whatever it’s gonna be.”

Which is of course the greatest fear of every married father: being arrested during a police raid with an underage hooker who’s unattractive. So Lawrence dodged a bullet there, but he couldn’t avoid a bit of shrapnel: it seems Nutrisystem doesn’t feel sex offenders are great endorsers, no matter how much weight they lose on the plan, and they cut Lawrence loose, not even allowing for the fact that at the time of the romantic interlude Taylor had already been on the road for “about 10, 11 days”, surely longer than any man can be expected to go without paying for some strange. (Taylor’s agent has noted that in general, “Business has not been booming.”)

Will Lawrence be able to bounce back? In a world where people can name more Kardashians than they can Supreme Court Justices and Nobel Prize winners combined, it seems possible. Yet the damage has already been done to him while doing nothing to stop the real problem — prostitutes who come to your room despite being underage and not all that hot — as Lawrence already so eloquently noted when he mused:

“I mean if you want to stop prostitution, what are you going to do? Close down every local bar in America…open up the phone book. I mean you can start. Just open up the phone book. There is a thousand of them in there. I have used the services before, you know. And I guess it is one of those crimes and you never think you’re gonna get busted with, because everybody does it until you get busted for it.

“And then it’s just more embarrassing than anything else.”

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