Born into a very unassuming family in Charleroi, a suburb of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1956, Deborah and her younger sister were the daughters of an immigrant Hungarian grocer Frank and homemaker mother Blanche. In her senior year of high school her family moved to Orlando, Florida where she graduated from Rollins College with a degree in criminal justice and went on to attend Thomas Jefferson School of Law, she did not graduate but continued to work in the field of law as a paralegal secretary in San Diego, California. 

It was during her time in San Diego that she was enticed into the escort business when she realized how badly most escorts agencies were run with widespread drug abuse and an indifference to women. She believed she could run an escort business much more efficiently and started her own company. Even before her recent legal problems Deborah was not a stranger to prison and federal agents investigating her operations when in 1989 a former boyfriend, Thomas Czech, took out a restraining order against her and then in 1990 she was arrested for prostitution. Before facing a court appearance she fled to Montana but was brought back for trial and spent eighteen months in prison. After she was released from prison she agreed not to re-enter her former business and to follow another line of work but it wasn’t long before she founded Pamela Martin and Associates in Washington D.C. in 1993. 

Using Washington newspapers such as The Diamondback and the Washington City Paper Deborah’s agency openly recruited both girls and clients. Many of her employees also held down respectable professional jobs and charged up to $300 an hour for their escort services. During the time that Pamela Martin and Associates was administrating services to the men of Washington, Deborah remained in Vallejo, northern California running the business by phone. 

After a two year investigation by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Palfrey’s home was raided and her bank accounts were later frozen and she was placed on charges of money laundering, racketeering and prostitution.  Prior to federal agents raiding Deborah’s homes in Vallejo and Escondido northern California in October 2006, it is believed that her thirteen year escort business, which had run from 1993 through 2006 and had been operated through phone calls, had yielded somewhere in the region of $2 million dollars.

Since her arrest Deborah has remained tight lipped about her business, her clients and employees. Although after several requests to do interviews it wasn’t until April 2007,after she had rejected them all that she spoke to wsRadio in an interview with Lee Mirabel during which time she discussed her theory as to why the government was targeting her business. 

Deborah has described her business as being an erotic service of adult sexual behaviour. During the thirteen years of her business she maintained a record of clients, employees, times, cell phone records and costs, which, since her arrest Deborah decided to utilize for her defense. Even though the Court’s order prohibiting her the right to sell the 45 pound records was implemented, Deborah herself had already decided to keep them private. 

Deborah has been standing up to federal prosecutors who accused her of running a prostitution ring servicing hundreds of men in the nation's capital and argued her defense is that if she was being tried for money laundering and racketeering, the Government should also charge each and every individual with the crimes of money laundering, racketeering and/or conspiracy, as well, because,  racketeering and conspiracy offenses in particular require two or more parties and a key part of her battle plan is to go public with her customers' names.

Some of the phone records could be tracked to prominent business executives such as NASA officials, at least five military officers and exclusive neighborhood mansions, however there were no members of Congress or White House officials traced through Palfrey's records.

Palfrey did identify one of her escorts, a former university professor who committed suicide after being charged with prostitution. By April 2007 Deborah had named Dick Morris as a client. Morris is perhaps best remembered for managing Bill Clinton's successful 1996 bid for re-election to the office of President of the United States, for allegedly writing both Hillary Clinton's and Al Gore's 1996 convention speeches and for his 1996 resignation from Bill Clinton’s campaign after reports surfaced that he had been involved in an extramarital affair with a prostitute named Sherry Rowlands.

A tabloid newspaper had obtained and published a set of photographs of Morris and Rowlands on a Washington, D.C., hotel balcony. It is widely believed that the sudden retirements of Randall Tobias, the former Eli Lilly executive and chief of the George W Bush Administration's global AIDS programs, and Pentagon "Shock and Awe" originator Harlan K Ullman is a result of their involvement with girls from Deborah’s agency. 

On May 1st 2008 Deborah Palfrey was found dead of an apparent suicide in a Florida Gulf Coast town. Tarpon Springs police said the body of  52-year-old Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found in a shed near her mother's mobile home on the morning of Thursday May 1st. She left a suicide note, but police did not disclose its contents. At the time foul play was ruled out.

Palfrey's death follows her conviction on April 15th 2008 of running a prostitution operation in Washington D.C.