I can’t resist this story.
It’s too delicious.
From the conservative National Post of Canada:
UPDATE 12:37 p.m.: The Daily News reports some nice people were on the Today Show coming to Ms. Dupre’s (or is it DiPietro?) defence:
"She’s a sweet person," Logan, a Queens rapper told the Daily News. "She’s a good person. She’s friendly. She’s outgoing."
"One day we were out eating," he recalled. "And she saved the food just to give it to a homeless guy on the way home."
Logan appeared on the Today Show Thursday morning with another hip-hop pal, Mysterious. Both said they met Dupré through a music producer and collaborated with Dupré in the studio. The Queens men declined to give their full names.
Ah, that’s sweet. Ashley, meanwhile, is reportedly still holed up in her apartment.
UPDATE: 11:31 a.m.: What have we got? A governor saying sorry on the TV (see a breakdown of his speech here) and then quitting, a singing alleged prostitute who may or may not have been the girl who was ordered and delivered to a Washington D.C. hotel room, a timeline on how America’s paper of record discovered the whole deal, a legal system run amok (according to our own Terry Corcoran), a political wife who stands as a martyr for the suffering of all other political wives, newsmen who are shocked, SHOCKED, at the lucrative sex trade, and by the way a federal investigation that travelled from suspicious bank transactions and morphed into a prostitution ring bust.
We’re learning more about the little darling, Ms. Ashley Alexandra Dupré (link to her, still public, MySpace page) all the time. Gawker has a nice pile of links, including a high school picture from the New York Daily News (right), a modelling portfolio, and more pictures show up all the time. Also, her music has been upgraded in price, but you can still buy those two tracks for a low-low $1.96… which with each track running around three minutes, you’d have to download that song 505 times, worth 25 hours or so of singing, to make up the hourly rate she was alleged to have been paid as part of the Emperors Club VIP ring.
People says that when they reached her court appointed lawyer, Don D. Buchwald, he told them:
"We cannot and do not confirm that Ashley is Kristen."
"I promise when we are in the position to make a statement we’ll get that to everyone at the same time," he said.
But as the Daily News found at her old high school, the verdict has been read, and the story is told:
Former classmates at Wall High School in Wall Township, N.J., which Dupré attended until her sophomore year, said she had a "bad reputation."
"She was one of those girls," said Allison Scisco, 23, of Neptune, N.J. "You hear things, and it’s the way she carried herself."
Another ex-classmate, who asked not to be named, said, "She definitely got around. It wasn’t even boyfriends, she just got around."
But Chris Minardi, 23, of Wall, said he used to drink with Dupré. "I thought she always had a good personality, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl. She was definitely flirty," he said. "We all can’t believe it down here that someone from here brought down the governor of New York."
UPDATE 10:30 a.m.: This is one weird Internet-driven scandal, for one Ashley/Kristen? isn’t running from the web hordes, she seems to be running to them. Think of your favourite recent sex scandals, the Miss America’s, the American Idol contestant, most of them pull down their sites, unplug the phone and retreat.
Not this lady.
She claims on her website to be all about the music, and as our Ampersand colleague Mark Medley writes: "With almost two million individual plays on her MySpace page, What We Want by Ashley Alexandra Dupré (aka the alleged Miss Spitzer) is probably the most listened to song in North America right now … it’s no Umbrella, but — actually — it’s not horrible."
Clones of her profile have popped up on MySpace and Facebook, but the original keeps chugging along.
Leaving her site up opens her up to this kind of abuse from commenters galore:
Chris: March 13, 2008 7:41 AM — HA! You are f***ng smooooking. Repeat after me CHA CHING. Baby you are going to make a windfall of cash. You deserve it for f***ing an ugly rat like Spitzer. Remember what destroys you makes you stronger. I love you.Mark: March 13, 2008 7:29 AM — Bad decision by Spiyzer , but hell of a good choice in hookaz.
Lang: March 12, 2008 4:35 PM — What makes you worth $4000 a night?Ken: March 12, 2008 4:59 PM — No, you didn’t take down a sitting governor. He did that himself. What you and people of your craft do is remove the beauty, love, and sacredness from a God-sanctioned act and inject death. NEVER forget the brokeness of his wife and daughters!!!
Ms Rebecca: March 12, 2008 4:57 PM — I think it would b a good idea 4 u 2 set your profile 2 private 2 avoid nasty peeps if u know what I mean..Just looking out..
In reality, the best outcome might be something like what happened to Divine Brown (not the Canadian soul singer), the prostitute caught servicing Hugh Grant in the pre-Internet boom days of 1995. She recently spoke to the U.K.’s Daily Mail telling them she’s made her million, raised her kids and basically feels the best thing that ever happened to her was getting busted servicing the actor on the side of the road.
The Nation’s Lauren Berlant happens to think this is bad news for the nation’s real favourite past-time:
“I feel sorry for everyone in Spitzer’s nimbus, but I feel really sorry for sex. Once again it has appeared in public, as it usually does, as a bad thing that people do to people. Sometimes, too often, it is. But realism about sexuality, about what it could be, deserves better. It deserves comedy too–not romance, and not, so inevitably, more stories about tragedy and scandal.”
Update 8:14 p.m.: The New York Times is reporting that the woman at the centre of Spitzer hooker scandal is an aspiring singer who lives in Manhattan.
In a series of telephone interviews on Tuesday night, she said she had slept very little over the past week, with all the stress of the case.
“I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster,” the woman said as she told the tiniest tidbits of her story.
Born Ashley Youmans but now known as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, she spoke softly and with good humor as she added with significant understatement: “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.”
