Texas agency revokes massage therapist licenses over decades-old crimes, even as its leaders wince - Houston Chronicle

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By 1992, when an undercover McAllen police officer busted her during a prostitution sting, Linda Ferriulo had been living on the street for nearly four years. But hitting bottom meant she could start climbing back up. She pleaded guilty and a few months later moved to a halfway house.

“They took me in and started teaching me to live life again,” she said. A career counselor suggested she study massage. With financial help from the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services, she said, she took 300 hours of classes. In 1996, she was granted her state registration as a massage therapist.


For the next quarter-century, Ferriulo kneaded people’s backs, legs and feet in several Texas cities. She renewed her license every two years, a dozen times in all.

So she thought it was a strange joke when, in 2020, the letter from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation arrived. “Basically, it said, ‘You never should have gotten your license,’” she recalled.

It wasn’t. Twenty-five years after the state paid for and granted her permission to work as a massage therapist, Texas informed Ferriulo that it was now taking away her license because of the 1992 crime.

“I’m 62 years old,” she said. “If I was somebody who worked in a sleazy place and was a sleazy person, then, yeah, take away my license. But I’m not.”

Call it a triumph of bureaucracy over empathy. Over the past couple of years, the regulatory agency, which recently assumed responsibility for overseeing the profession, said it has had no choice but to revoke the licenses of dozens of active massage therapists because of their old sex-related crimes.

Many, if not most, are women. In some cases, they have been practicing for decades.

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After earning her license more than 20 years ago, Jennifer Hollenbeck said, she had worked hard to make a name for herself in the profession. “I’m not the strip mall center massage therapist,” she said.

“Respondent’s clients include members of President George W. Bush’s Cabinet, President Obama’s Cabinet, current members of President Biden’s Cabinet, players with the Dallas Cowboys, Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Stars as well as elite members and executives in the business community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” a legal filing stated.

But thanks to a public lewdness crime she had pleaded no contest to as a teenager working as a cocktail waitress in a Dallas men’s club in 2000, Texas regulators suddenly are seeking to revoke the license she needs to work.

Now 47, Hollenbeck said she would have to find another way to make a living without it. “It’s insane,” she said. “I tell people this story, and they don’t even believe it.”

Automatic bans


The state of Texas regulates physicians, engineers, plumbers and barbers — but also pawnshop employees, egg and cemetery plot brokers and weather modification planners. A 2020 Texas comptroller’s report counted 774 occupation-related licenses administered by 47 state agencies.

Because a primary objective of occupational licensing is protecting consumer safety, many professions whose licensees interact with the public have had strict rules that often excluded applicants with a criminal background. But over the past several years, that has started to change, said Nick Sibilla, a researcher with the Institute for Justice, which advocates for less burdensome occupational licensing. Left-leaning reformers promoting second chances have joined conservatives worried about the economic cost of overly restrictive licensing to erase rules that automatically banned ex-offenders from professional work.

Most Texas occupational licensing agencies today evaluate if an applicant’s rap sheet “directly relates” to the profession they are seeking to enter. Newer state rules also give regulators discretion to weigh mitigating factors, such as how long ago the crime occurred, how old the person was at the time and any rehabilitative steps taken since.

A handful of automatic bans nevertheless remain in pockets of state law. The secretary of state’s office summarily rejects notary public applicants for a variety of crimes, no matter how old. A recent legal change has resulted in the agency even taking back licenses from notaries who have worked without incident for years because of past offenses.

Texas’ massage therapist law is another holdover, summarily banning applicants with a history of sex-related criminal offenses, some of them minor. The statute prohibits regulators from exercising any discretion even for clearly rehabilitated applicants.

That makes it archaic in two ways, said state Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston. As a former Harris County assistant district attorney in charge of sex trafficking crimes, she said prosecutors have come to understand that women charged with prostitution often are more victims than perpetrators.

“We ended up sentencing a ton of women to prison without any analysis if they were victims of human trafficking,” she said. Automatically excluding them from a profession “is a rule that doesn’t make sense based on what we now know.”

After being contacted by several therapists threatened with de-licensing, last year Johnson introduced a bill that would have given massage regulators the same discretion as others to forgive an applicant’s past crimes. It was on the cusp of passing until it died in the 2021 session’s final hours as legislators wrangled over changes to state election law.

Johnson said she will refile the bill next year. “We’re trying to do what we can to right some wrongs,” she said.

‘We can’t do anything’


It’s unclear how some Texas applicants convicted of sex crimes received their massage therapist licenses in the first place. The profession was regulated by the Department of State Health Services until 2015, when the Legislature moved oversight to the Department of Licensing and Regulation; the handoff became official in late 2017.

A spokeswoman for the health department said all its records had been shipped to the new regulators, so it could not retrace how it had granted licenses to Hollenbeck, Ferriulo and others despite the law prohibiting it. Jason Danowsky, an Austin attorney who has researched the issue, said it appeared the agency had exercised some extralegal discretion for deserving candidates who had overcome their pasts.

Yet that has now placed the licensing department in an awkward position, said Gerald Callas, one of seven governor-appointed commissioners who oversee the agency. As those therapists seek their biennial license renewals, TDLR must apply an unforgiving law saying they don’t qualify — even if they’ve been doing the work without issue for decades.

“When I hear them talking about serving the community for 10, 15 years and now we’re taking their license away?” he said. “Yet we can’t do anything about it. This law is preventing the commission from making decisions. The process needs to be much less black and white.”

“There needs to be a change,” Helen Callier, another commissioner, added at a recent meeting during which the panel heard Hollenbeck’s case. “She has done outstanding work. Her clients are tops.”

Although Callas said that as a commissioner he can’t officially take a position on state law, as a private citizen he has lobbied the Legislature to change the lifetime massage license ban for some offenders. “The law was not thought through the whole way,” he said.

That does nothing to help those now seeing their licenses revoked. Hollenbeck’s and Ferriulo’s nearly half-century of experience as massage therapists is scheduled to be erased when TDLR meets Tuesday.

For Hollenbeck, a former high school mock-trial champ headed to medical school before diverting to a massage career, it means a forced midlife career shift. In the short term, she said, it will prevent her from a staff massage position at a luxury hotel in Jackson Hole, Wyo., this summer — “unfair and disgusting,” she said.

“A railroad job,” added Tom McElyea, her attorney.

Ferriulo said that at her age, she’ll probably just walk away from the profession. “I loved the work,” she said. “And I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong. I’m not ashamed of myself; I’m happy with who I am and what I’ve done.”

eric.dexheimer@chron.com