THREE young prostitutes huddle at the top of a staircase in a brothel in Sydney’s Kings Cross, peering into the corridor below.

Their hushed exchanges are broken when one of the girls, sulkily curious beneath smudged eye make-up and tousled hair, speaks up.

“What’s going on?” she demands, as a camera flashes to capture the pose of a raven-haired woman against the parlour’s bright lights and mirrored walls.

“Who is she?”

“She” is Kim Hollingsworth, Wodonga schoolgirl turned stripper, prostitute, trainee cop and whistleblower.

Two decades ago, she stood where these girls stand, outside bedroom number one at the Love Machine in the heart of the city’s notorious Golden Mile.

It was once Hollings­worth’s room, sought after among the $800-an-hour working girls for its easy access as they teetered on stilettos to lead clients up a series of rickety staircases.

Tonight, “number one” is occupied.

Not that Love Machine owner Roger Christodoulou objects to Hollingsworth disrupting the establishment for a sneak peek at her past.

“You can go in whatever room you like,” he says.

“You’re an icon. They’ll say ‘I met Kim Hollingsworth’.”

Hollingsworth has hit new levels of infamy this year, with her sexploits and subterfuge forming a central narrative in the third season of WIN Television’s crime drama Underbelly.

It’s a world away from Castle Heights, Wodonga, where she spent her teenage years as the daughter of a city policeman.

“I wish people had seen Underbelly 10 years ago, because then they would have had more of an understanding of what I was going through instead of just thinking ‘prostitute/policewoman’ and that was it,” Hollingsworth, 44, says.

“Instead of having to explain things, Underbelly has done that for me.

“But it’s also generated a lot more questions ... (people) home in on a scene and say ‘did that really happen?’.”

One such moment appears in the first episode, when the rookie prostitute, then aged about 20, fails to understand a routine sexual request from a client.

“It’s 100 per cent real; I had no idea, mate,” Hollingsworth says of the scene, which sparked a flurry of online speculation about her naivety.

“Girls from Wodonga didn’t do that.”

Her innocence didn’t last.

Hollingsworth puts her sexual tally in the thousands and says an offer of $80,000 with another prostitute was her most lucrative proposition (being paid $25 for “the works” at Liverpool in Sydney’s west was rock bottom).

The $40,000 apiece was for a two-week recruitment, about which the client later changed his mind.

Hollingsworth has nothing to show for her ample earnings in eight years in the game.

“Of course we blew it. But I never blew it on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes or anything like that because I just didn’t do that shit,” she says.

“That was the difference.”

Instead, Hollingsworth indulged in horse-riding and dance lessons, as well as high-end clothes and books and magazines.

“I had a David Jones card,” she says.

“That was just the most amazing feeling, walking in there and knowing you could buy anything.”

BUT all that glittered was not golden.

Violent episodes Hollingsworth says she experienced as a sex worker included a policeman pressing a loaded gun between her legs.

Hollingsworth also speaks of other horrors that befell her prostitute colleagues, such as sodomy, torture and in some cases, death. “You can’t whitewash prostitution because it’s horrible,” she says.

“It can be one-on-one with a guy and you can end up with the short straw and dead.”

Threats came from other directions as well.

Hollingsworth says “the law of the Cross” caught up with those who acted out of line, recalling walking into the office of a brothel on one occasion to see blood splattered across its walls.

One of the girls had been busted charging $100 less than her colleagues in a bid to attract more clients; her fellow prostitutes had pulled her into the office for a lesson in fair play.

IT’S not hard to understand the public fascination with the seedy depths of Sydney’s red-light district in the Hollingsworth era.

The Wood royal commission into police corruption found Kings Cross in the late 1980s and early 1990s was overseen by bent cops and power-hungry crims who jostled for supremacy as drugs and violence escalated.

Hollingsworth — who says she became a sex worker to spite a “bad boyfriend” she caught with two prostitutes — was recruited as an informant for the royal commission after witnessing crooked cops at their worst on the streets, at strip shows, in brothels and later, at the NSW Police academy at Goulburn.

“Down the academy was just this cesspit of ‘don’t dog on your mates; it’s us against the crims’,” she says.

“They wanted the uniform, the power and the gun and off they’d go.”

Hollingsworth raised the alarm after being approached by an officer at the academy who was familiar with her past, seeking help in establishing a ring of brothels.

The former Wodonga West High School student claims she was motivated by a determination to do things “by the book”.

“That was always my goal when I went in there because I was so grateful to get out of prostitution — so grateful for that job — and I worked so hard to get to it,” Hollings­worth says.

“He made the approach on the Saturday and by the Monday afternoon I was there reporting it.

“You did what was right; how could you not?”

Hollingsworth’s turbulent relationship with NSW Police endured a decade of legal wrangling before coming to a bitter end in 2007.

The police recruit had been sacked at the academy, purportedly for failing to disclose her sex-industry past, but maintains she fell victim to corrupt cops exacting revenge for colluding with the royal commission.

“If I’d not reported corruption ... what would I be now? Inspector,” Hollingsworth says, adding she suspects there remain corrupt members in the force today.

“The ones who are corrupt are really corrupt — that’s the way they’ve operated their whole police life and no one can touch them.

“They’re smart; the royal commission got rid of the dumb ones.”

THE final episode of Underbelly: The Golden Mile airs tomorrow night.

Its accuracy has been criticised by some who lived through the period, on both sides of the law.

But Hollingsworth, who served as a “technical consultant” on the drama, maintains it provides a mostly truthful depiction of her experiences.

“They were very precise with things (in general), so that impressed me,” she says.

Hollingsworth says some identities, such as club kingpin John Ibrahim and policewoman and fellow royal commission informant Debbie Locke, are depicted fairly.

Others, including bent detective Eddie Gould, are “amalgamations” of several people from the time.

“He’s not just one guy but everything that he does is true: the insurance scam ... setting up the brothels, raping the girl,” Hollingsworth says.

“From my perspective, he just personifies evil; he almost represents the whole of the NSW Police (at the time).”

NOT far from Kings Cross police station, the camera stops flashing.

Her trip down memory lane has come to an end; it’s time for Hollingsworth to retreat to her rural property south of Campbelltown, far from Sin City.

But not without one last indecent proposal — a fan offers Hollingsworth $500 for sex after she signs a copy of her bikini-clad photo spread in a recent edition of a national men’s magazine (Hollingsworth carries with her copies of the magazines she appears in, as well as an autograph pen).

“I sent him to Love Machine to find a girl,” she later tells The Border Mail.

Room number one may be available.

PART TWO

ULTIMATELY, it was the animals she credits with saving her life that ended Kim Hollingsworth’s crusade to wear a police uniform.

On August 24, 2007, the day The Border Mail reported the former Wodonga schoolgirl had lost the last round in a decade-long battle to serve in the NSW Police, the state’s authorities confirmed an outbreak of equine influenza that would paralyse its horse industry and infect 47,000 animals.

For ex-Kings Cross stripper and prostitute Hollingsworth, it was all too much.

“The loves of my life were in danger and I was losing them both. I had to pick,” she says.

Hollingsworth had spent years rescuing ailing horses destined for the knackery; their lifelines were entwined with her own as she fought to escape a black pit of depression brought on by a life lived hard and on the edge.

“My father gave me a racehorse during my court case with the police -- that was at the height of my depression,” Hollingsworth says.

“I used to lie on the floor all day and just get up to go to the toilet and that was about it.

“This racehorse was on my acre block. She was just a nut, she’d run around; she made me laugh.

“In a sense, she saved my life because I had nothing to live for when she came into my world -- I had to get up to feed her and then I couldn’t wait to get up to feed her.”

Hollingsworth took on more animals and used them as a reason to stay alive through years of bitter legal disputes.

With the NSW Court of Appeal decision in 1997, her final effort to be reinstated as a trainee policewoman was foiled.

But Hollingsworth says there were other avenues of attack she would have pursued had it not been for the horse flu epidemic.

“I had all these rescue horses that gave me something to live for and now they were at risk of dying,” she says of the animals, stranded in the middle of a high-risk purple zone.

“A lot of them had been so weakened that if the flu had hit them, I would have had 20 horses on the ground.”

Hollingsworth, backed into a corner and forced to act, devoted days and nights to keeping the animals virus-free.

“If that hadn’t happened I would have kept going (with the quest to be reinstated),” Hollingsworth says.

“It was almost like God had said ‘f---, she isn’t going to stop’.

“I realised then ... life is more important than a job.”

Today, Hollingsworth cares for more than 40 horses -- about 90 per cent of them rescued -- as well as a menagerie of feral cats, rabbits and rats.

Farm-life accessories, including muddy boots and a filthy ute, are a far cry from the sky-high heels and $2000 dresses she donned during her days in Sydney’s red-light district.

Hollingsworth says her advice for that girl would be simple: “Go to university, use your brain and forget about men, money and everything else”.

The former Wodonga West High School student, who bedded thousands of clients in her eight years as a sex worker, has little need for men now.

“In my mind I went ‘I’m never relying on anyone again; I’m never trusting anyone again, because I always fall flat on my face’,” she says.

“I don’t get lonely, as such, but sometimes I have these fleeting thoughts of ‘oh, I wonder what it’d be like to have a husband; I wonder what it’d be like to have kids’.

“But the animals are enough.

“My horses -- I’ve never had love like that and I never will. I don’t think anything can get in the way of that.”

The peaceful way of life on Hollingsworth’s property south of Campbelltown was upended earlier this year when WIN Television’s Underbelly: The Golden Mile hit the screen.

The series, which ended last night, focused on police corruption in Kings Cross in the lead-up to the Wood royal commission and featured Hollingsworth as a central character.

Episodes canvassed her time in prostitution and stripping in the late 1980s and early 1990s, her short-lived stint at the NSW Police academy at Goulburn, and her turn as a whistleblower for the royal commission.

It is the final role that Hollingsworth believes got her sacked from the force, although official records blame her failure to disclose the nature of her past employment on the Golden Mile.

She hasn’t backed away from the renewed exposure Underbelly has provided, despite old safety fears resurfacing.

“I’ve got cameras all over my house ... and I think ‘is this all going to be on camera when they kill me?’,” she says.

“(What if) someone’s sitting there, drunk, having another scotch, watching Underbelly going ‘oh we never killed that bitch’?

“I’ve had so many phone calls on private numbers since it went to air -- my number’s still the same as when I was in the police -- and they’re ringing at 4am and they’re just hanging up and hanging up, and hanging up.”

Such unsettling episodes aren’t enough to discourage Hollingsworth from embracing her time in the spotlight; plans are afoot for a new television show and she hopes to embark on an Underbelly-themed talk circuit across Australia.

First stop: Albury-Wodonga, where her mother still lives in the house Hollingsworth grew up in.

“My high school days were the best days of my life, so I have really strong feelings for that -- memories of those days and what my English teachers taught me and the friendships that I had that were genuine; I never, ever got those back,” she says.

“That’s the real home to me.

“Sydney’s always been, I don’t know, there’s something cold about it, and businesslike.”

Hollingsworth hasn’t been back to the Border in 10 years but says it will be a special place for her.

“You know that warm feeling you got when you went to your grandmother’s house as a kid? That’s what I’ve got in Wodonga, and I’ve never found it here,” she says.

“You could leave your money lying around and it wouldn’t get stolen and if someone said ‘I’ll meet you there’, you’d know they were going to be there.

“I miss that simplicity; everyone’s got nice memories like that but when you’ve gone to the extreme like I have, you appreciate it more.”

Hollingsworth’s intention to ride the wave of Underbelly publicity to its end is clear.

But when pressed, the woman who has witnessed some of the worst of human behaviour seems to know where she has mattered most.

“If it was an egotistical thing I’d say ‘yeah, I want to be remembered for Underbelly’.

“But if it’s the real me, I’d want to be remembered for how kind I was to animals.

“I didn’t save them all, but the ones I did save? That’s worthwhile.

“I made a difference.”