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

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. 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.