New details emerged Wednesday about the call girl at the center of the prostitution scandal engulfing New York's governor, with a newspaper report identifying her as a 22-year-old aspiring musician from Manhattan.
The New York Times reported that the real name of the prostitute — identified as "Kristen" in court papers alleging that Gov. Eliot Spitzer paid more than $4,000 for her services — is Ashley Alexandra Dupre.
Don D. Buchwald, a New York lawyer, confirmed that he represents Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the same woman in the Times story. "That's as far as I can go," he said.
A man who answered the phone at the home of the woman's mother in New Jersey and identified himself as Dupre's brother, Kyle, told the AP he did not know why Dupre would agree to be interviewed about the scandal.
"I've talked to my sister every five minutes since this happened, and I'm not going to comment on it," he said. "She's just trying to get through this."
Her MySpace world
Dupre's MySpace pages provided a window into her life as she went from a broken home in New Jersey to a music career in the city.
In an Aug. 30 blog posting on MySpace, she wrote: "The past few months have been a roller coaster with so called friends, lovers, and family ... but its something you have to deal with and confront in order to move on ..."
"What destroys me, strengthens me" is the slogan next to a Dupre photograph. The photos showed her at various places, including in a bikini on a boat in a tropical locale. The number of hits to the page soared by the thousands after the story broke.
Dupre described her favorite musical artists as Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Frank Sinatra, among many others.
Her Web site boasted a recording of a song, "What We Want." "I know what you want, you got what I want. I know what you need. Can you handle me?" she sang.
She briefly spoke to the Times about the Spitzer scandal. Law enforcement officials identified the governor as a "Client 9" who had a Feb. 13 tryst with "Kristen" and paid her $4,300, according to court papers.
'It's complicated'
"I just don't want to be thought of as a monster," Dupre told the Times. "This has been a very difficult time. It's complicated."
She told the newspaper she had slept very little since the allegations against Spitzer were revealed.
Dupre told the Times she worried about paying her rent in a ninth-floor Manhattan apartment after her boyfriend recently left her. She said she was considering moving back in with her family in New Jersey.
She declined to comment when asked by the Times when she first met Spitzer and how many times they had been together.
Dupre apparently appeared in federal court Monday as a witness in the case against four people accused of operating the Emperors Club VIP prostitution ring.