Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-brothel4-2008nov04,0,7844981.story

By Ashley Powers

November 4, 2008

Reporting from Wells, Nev. — The women at Donna’s Ranch are crowded around the kitchen table on a warm summer night, dining on stir fry, tugging at thigh-high dresses, griping about depleted bank accounts. At this northeastern Nevada bordello, which marks a gravel road’s end, they woo grizzled truckers and weary travelers for a single reason: money.

Lately, the women don’t go home with much.

Amy, 58, once bought a $32,000 Toyota Tacoma in cash; now her $1,200 mortgage saps her dwindling pay. Some weeks, she could make more flipping burgers than flirting under a made-up name. Marisol’s daughters think she works at a resort; she struggles to keep up the ruse. It now takes months, not weeks, to bring $5,000 back to Southern California.

“Marisol,” one of her regulars tells her, “it costs me in gas what it takes for me to spend a half-hour with you.”

Tonight, she tries lingering at the dimly lighted bar that’s decorated with red Christmas lights and smells of hot dogs and beans. Wearing a shimmering strapless top, Marisol sips cheap champagne and tries to seduce travelers, some with thick guts and most with thin wallets. After 20 minutes, she gives up.
Read the rest of this entry »

Source: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/dec/14/economy-affects-supply-demand-some-special-twists/

By Abigail Goldman
Sun, Dec 14, 2008 (2 a.m.)

The pleasure of Stacie’s company used to cost $450 an hour, but no longer. Her clients were capped at 35 and older; today she’s taking almost anyone. Sex acts once off the menu are suddenly back on — recession specials, served with a side of shrugging compromise.

If she doesn’t do more for less, Stacie says, another prostitute will. And her weekly income is still down by half.

The illegal prostitution economy in Clark County is a multimillion-dollar beast fed by a black market so diverse that it’s impossible to pin down. On one hand, midrange prostitutes like Stacie say they’re being crippled by the economy. On the other, high-end call girls claim they’re not feeling much pain. And the women charging the least reportedly are making the most these days — counterintuitive in an industry where bargains come with risks.

Consider the work of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, who surveyed hundreds of high-end prostitutes in New York and discovered that 40 percent of “trades” in the sex economy never went beyond light petting or kissing.

In Las Vegas, the economy’s effect on call girls is even more complicated: The bulk of clients — or johns — here are from out of town, tourists or businessmen who spend days in convention halls and nights in hotel rooms with to-your-door entertainment. These men are bread and butter for local prostitutes, provided the clients come to town. And anybody in the hospitality industry — here that illicitly includes call girls too — can agree that fewer men are flying in, with less money to spend.

Meanwhile, more women reportedly are getting into the business, which creates a classic supply and demand squeeze. An escort agency owner told the Sun he’s getting about 40 interested applicants every day, the majority of whom are women running from the wreckage of lost finance jobs.

Now fold another factor into that dynamic: When the economy is bad, when people feel their mortgages closing in, they seek comfort: alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, pornography and perhaps prostitution.

When all these elements collide in the nebulous economy of escorting, a trend emerges: The Clark County call girl economy has a tipping point — about $650. Read the rest of this entry »

PRAGUE — On a recent night at Big Sister, which calls itself the world’s biggest Internet brothel, a middle-aged man selected a prostitute by pressing an electronic menu on a flat-screen TV to review the age, hair color, weight and languages spoken by the women on offer.

Once he had chosen an 18-year-old brunette, he put on a mandatory terry-cloth robe and proceeded to one of the brothel’s luridly lighted theme rooms: an Alpine suite decorated with foam rubber mountains covered with fake snow.

Nearby, in the brothel’s cramped control room, two young technicians worked dozens of hidden cameras that would film the man’s performance and stream it, live, onto Big Sister’s Web site.

Customers can have sex free of charge at Big Sister, in return for signing a release form allowing the brothel to film their sexual exploits.

But even with this financial incentive, Carl Borowitz, 26, Big Sister’s marketing manager, a Moravian computer engineer, lamented that the global financial crisis had diminished the number of sex tourists coming to Prague.

“Sex is a steady demand, because everyone needs it, and it used to be taboo, which made a service like ours all the more attractive,” said Mr. Borowitz, who looks more like Harry Potter than Larry Flynt. “But the problem today is that there is too much competition and our clients don’t have as much disposable income as before.” Read the rest of this entry »

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081209/ap_on_re_us/craig_appeal

MINNEAPOLIS – Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has lost his latest attempt to withdraw his guilty plea in the Minneapolis airport men’s room sex sting that effectively ended his Senate career.

A three-judge panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals on Tuesday rejected the Republican’s bid to toss out his disorderly conduct conviction.

Craig still has the option of appealing to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and he said Tuesday he was considering future options.

Craig was arrested June 11, 2007, by an undercover police officer who was conducting a sting operation against men cruising for gay sex at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

He quietly pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor and paid a fine, but changed his mind after word of his arrest became public that August. Craig insisted he was innocent and said he was not gay. His attorney argued that the police officer misconstrued Craig’s foot-tapping, hand movements and other conduct.

But the case brought widespread ridicule and effectively ended his political career. Read the rest of this entry »

Source: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/sex-racket-was-raking-in-836450000-a-week-profit-1564541.html

By Tom Brady Security Editor
Friday December 05 2008

Source: http://media.www.maroon-news.com/media/storage/paper742/news/2008/12/05/Commentary/SexEnomics.The.in.Escort-3572266.shtml

Katie David
Issue date: 12/5/08 Section: Commentary

The world’s oldest profession seems to be very “in” right now. Between the Eliot Spitzer scandal, an NBC special on “The Business of High-End Prostitution,” a Showtime series about a London “escort” entitled The Secret Diary of a Call Girl and Ashley Dupré’s (Spitzer’s infamous call girl) media tour, the American public is very interested in prostitution. However, the media is not showing images of what many consider the typical victim of the sex trade, such as an impoverished and malnourished woman selling her body for crack. Clearly, that image is too disturbing for the middle-class American living room. Instead, the media focuses on “high-end” prostitution, where women are paid thousands for their services, which range from sex to compliments (seriously). While the data for this industry is difficult to track, the media is most likely not focusing on these “escort services” because they pose a deep societal problem. Instead the media probably sees what many young women today observe when examining the dynamics of high-end prostitution: how closely it resembles the dating situation for young women today.

Ashley Dupré and I have something in common. Neither of us has a degree in sociology or is really qualified to make sweeping statements about cultural movements. But we do it anyway. In Ashley’s recent interview with People magazine, she explains how the dynamics of prostitution have permeated the mainstream.
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27806282/

By Mark Dagostino
updated 8:04 a.m. ET, Thurs., Nov. 20, 2008

She was the tabloid sensation at the center of the sex scandal that brought down New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. But in her very first interview, Ashley Alexandra Dupré tells PEOPLE, “I am a normal girl.”

“Everyone knows me as ‘that girl,’ but I’m not just ‘that girl,’ ” the 23-year-old former escort says in the new issue of PEOPLE, on sale Friday. “I have a lot of depth, a lot of layers.”

Enduring a media spotlight that included seeing her MySpace photos splashed on front pages “has been really hard,” the New Jersey native explains. “But I’m a survivor.”

Spitzer was unknown to her
Her descent into tabloid mayhem began the night of Feb. 13, 2008, when Dupré — who had worked as a high-end escort to help pay the bills on and off since 2004 — met a client who turned out to be the Governor of New York.

Dupré claims she had no idea who the man was that night. What she does recall is that “Client 9,” as Spitzer was reportedly known at her escort service (which was shut down in March), “was polite.

“Some guys, they want to have conversations and really get to know each other. With him, it clearly was not like that. It was more of a transaction. Strictly business.”

Casually dressed and with no entourage in tow, Spitzer didn’t strike Dupré as someone important. Besides, “I was there for a purpose — not to wonder who [he] could be.”
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Source: http://www.sixshot.com/articles/13322/

Posted: 12/2/2008 12:31:54 PM by Jaymo

Reports surfaced last week via The New York Post that 50 Cent’s manager, Chris Lighty, would be handling the singing career of former hooker Ashley Dupre.

Dupre was the woman at the center of the prostitution scandal that lead to the resignation of former New York Mayor Eliot Spitzer. The mayor used to shell $1,000-an-hour to get serviced by Dupre and other girls.

Lighty and his Violator management released a statement today (December 2) denying the reports saying: “Despite media reports, Chris Lighty and Violator Management do not represent Ashley Dupre. Lighty helped negotiate an interview for Dupre with Diane Sawyer, and has no further involvement in Dupre’s career.”

Ashley Dupree, the escort or prostitute that bought down Elliot Spitzer was interviewed on 20/20 by Diane Sawyer on ABC News.

Its an interesting story about how an honour student, turns to the escort business to make money.  Its the usual hard luck story, father left at 3, brotherran away and arrested for dealing, fell in with the wrong crowd.  Ashley Dupree comes across very sympatheticly. If you ever wondered why how someone gets caught up as an escort she told it convincingly.

Diane Sawyer tried to make her say that she was a prostitute, but she would only say sh was an “escort”. W When asked what the difference was she said time spent.  Apparently she spent lots of time “talking”.  Uhuh. Smart girl though, the word prostitute never escaped her lips.

On legal advice she did not answer any detailed questions about the Spitzer affair, but she did say she didn’t know who he was when she met him.

Her reaction to the huge controversy which ended Governor Elliot Spitzer’s career mainly revolved around her feelings over Spitzer’s wife.   She says she feels nothing towards Spitzer either positive or negative and that she is not at fault for bringing Spitzer down. “if it wasn’t me it would have been somebody else,” she said. “Its not my fault”.

She also said she wants out of the life she had and has turned down both a reality TV series and a million dollar offer from Hustler - Spitzer and prostitution aside, maybe she does have some class.  It will be interesting to see how she pulls her life together, as this reputation is going to follow her around.

See the six minute highlight video below.

Source: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2008/11/18/pf-7454426.html

November 18, 2008
Call girl to Spitzer’s wife: ‘I’m sorry’
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

In this image released by ABC, former call girl Ashley Dupre, whose tryst with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, led to his resignation, is seen in New York. (AP/ABC, Heidi Gutman)

NEW YORK — The prostitute at the centre of the scandal that brought down former New York governor Eliot Spitzer has apologized to his wife.

Ashley Alexandra Dupre tells People magazine that the FBI informed her in early March that it was investigating one of her clients. A few days later, she found out which client when she recognized Spitzer on TV — resigning.

That was March 12, after revelations Spitzer had used Emperors Club VIP, where Dupre worked.

She says she was stricken by the pained expression on Silda Wall Spitzer’s face.

“I try not to revisit that place too often, but when I think about his speech, I think of her face, her eyes, the hurt,” Dupre said.

Her message to Silda Wall Spitzer: “I’m sorry for your pain.”

Dupre, 23, said Spitzer was polite and businesslike when they met. “Some guys, they want to have conversations and really get to know each other. With him, it clearly was not like that,” she said. “It was more of a transaction. Strictly business.”

Dupre, who was known then as Kristen, said she practiced safe sex with all her clients, including Spitzer. On her lawyer’s advice, she would not elaborate on their liaison, or say whether Spitzer visited her more than once. She did say that he dressed casually and she did not see his security detail. Read the rest of this entry »