Kristen is outed! (pics inside)

Not bad. But not worth a grand an hour.




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/n...html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Woman at the Center of Governor’s Downfall

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By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and IAN URBINA
Published: March 13, 2008

She left a broken home on the Jersey Shore at 17 and came to New York City to work the nightclubs as a rhythm and blues singer. Now, at 22, she is the unwitting, and as yet unseen, star of the seamy drama that is the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.

Kristen, described in a federal affidavit as having a Feb. 13 rendezvous with Mr. Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, has spent the last few days in her ninth-floor rental in an upscale apartment building in the Flatiron district. On Monday, she made a brief appearance in federal court as a witness in the case against four people charged with operating the prostitution ring, Emperor’s Club V.I.P. In a series of telephone interviews on Tuesday night, she said she had slept very little over the past week due to the stress from 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 Dupre, she spoke softly and with good humor as she added with significant understatement: “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.”

She has not been charged. The lawyer appointed to represent her, Don D. Buchwald, told a magistrate judge in court on Monday that she had been subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury investigation. Asked to swear that she had accurately filled out and signed a court financial affidavit, she responded affirmatively.

A person with knowledge of the Emperor’s Club operation confirmed that the woman interviewed by The New York Times was the woman identified as Kristen in the affidavit. Mr. Buchwald confirmed various details of Ms. Dupre’s background but would not discuss the contents of the affidavit.

Ms. Dupre said on the telephone Tuesday night that she was worried about how she would pay her rent since the man she was living with “walked out on me” after she discovered he had fathered two children. She said she was considering working at a friend’s restaurant or, once her apartment lease expires, moving back in with her family in New Jersey “to relax.”

She did not say when she had started working for Emperor’s Club, or how often she had liaisons arranged through the ring. Asked when she met Governor Spitzer and how many times they had seen each other, Ms. Dupre said she had no comment.

On her MySpace page, Ms. Dupre writes of her “odyssey to New York from New Jersey through North Carolina, Miami, D.C., Virginia and Austin, Texas;” public records show that she lived in Belmar, N.J., in 2001, and in North Carolina in 2003. She owns a company, created in 2005, called Pasche New York, which her lawyer said was an entertainment business designed to further her singing career.

Music is her first love, and on the MySpace page, Ms. Dupre mentions Patsy Cline, Frank Sinatra, Christina Aguilera and Lauryn Hill among a long list of influences, including her brother, Kyle. (She also lists Madonna, Mary J. Blige and Amy Winehouse as her top MySpace friends.) In the interview, she said she saw the Rolling Stones perform at Radio City Music Hall on their last tour after a friend gave her two of tickets. “They were amazing,” she said.

On MySpace, it says: “I am all about my music and my music is all about me. It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel.”

She left “a broken family” at age 17, having been abused, according to the MySpace page, and has used drugs, “been broke and homeless.”

“Learned what it was like to have everything and lose it, again and again,” she wrote. “Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone.

“But I made it,” she continues. “I’m still here and I love who I am. If I never went through the hard times, I would not be able to appreciate the good ones. Cliché, yes, but I know it’s true.”

Carolyn Capalbo, 46, Ms. Dupre’s mother, said that she attended Wall High School in Belmar until her sophomore year, when she moved to North Carolina. “She was a young kid with typical teenage rebellion issues, but we are extremely close now,” Ms. Capalbo said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

In 2006, Ms. Dupre changed her legal name, according to records in Monmouth County Superior Court, from Ashley R. Youmans to Ashley Rae Maika DiPietro, taking her step-father’s surname, since she regarded him as as “the only father I have known.” But in the interview, she referred to herself as Ashley Alexandra Dupre, which is how she is known on MySpace.

On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” an amateurish, hip-hop inflected rhythm and blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

“I know what you want, you got what I want,” she sings in the chorus. “I know what you need. Can you handle me?”

Her MySpace biography says that she started singing professionally after a musician she was living with heard her singing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” in the shower and burst into the bathroom with his lead guitarist. She says that she toured and recorded with them, then moved to Manhattan in 2004 and “spent the first two years getting to know the music scene, networking in clubs and connecting with the industry.

“Now it’s all about my music, it’s all about expressing me.”

In the affidavit, the woman known by the Emperors Club as Kristen is described as “an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds.” She apparently was booked at about $1,000-an-hour, placing her in the middle of the seven-diamond scale by which Emperors prostitutes commanded up to $4,300 an hour.

Ms. Capalbo said that she was “shell-shocked” when her daughter called mid-last week and told her she had been working as an escort and was now in trouble with the law. She said she was not sure Ms. Dupre realized who Mr. Spitzer was when he was her client.

“She is a very bright girl who can handle someone like the governor,” Ms. Capalbo said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “But she also is a 22-year-old not a 32-year-old or a 42-year-old and she obviously got involved in something much larger than her.”

Benjamin Weiser, Barbara Gray and Lisa Schwartz contributed reporting.