Ashley Dupré was 22 when a client she met at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel turned out to be New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. In the federal investigation into the escort service Emperors Club VIP, he was “Client 9.” She was “Kristen.”
Spitzer paid $4,300 in cash after their February 2008 encounter, including an advance toward future bookings. He resigned the following month. Dupré was not charged and received immunity to testify.
“I don’t think he’s difficult,” she told the service afterward in a wiretapped conversation. “I mean it’s kind of like, whatever, I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is. I’m not a moron.”
Today, she is Ashley Earle, a mother of three and stepmother to Alix and Ashtin Earle. The family’s Netflix series, Earle Meets World, revisits both the scandal that made her famous and the affair that brought her into their lives.
Dupré moved to New York at about 19 to pursue an R&B career. She worked as a cocktail waitress at nightlife venues, including the Hotel Gansevoort. She has said her first paid encounter began when an older, wealthy man at a club offered her $1,000 to go home with him.”I was like, wow, a thousand dollars sounds good. But I was scared,” she recalled.
Jason Itzler of the escort agency NY Confidential later said he recruited her at 19 while she was waitressing at the Gansevoort. He described her as a “little lamb” and said he bought her $2,000 Manolos after their first date. She eventually worked for Emperors Club VIP as Kristen, charging about $1,000 an hour. She was in the middle tier of the agency’s seven-diamond scale; its highest tier cost $4,300 an hour.
Dupré has also spoken about using cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana, as well as alcohol. She has said a married man once paid her rent and helped her stop using drugs. When his wife found out, he left. Facing debt, she returned to escorting.
“You have to be emotionally disconnected,” she later said. “I was whoever they wanted me to be, and he was whoever he wanted to be.”
The same year the Spitzer scandal broke, Dupré met Thomas “TJ” Earle at a bar. He was still married to Alisa Earle, and their daughters, Alix and Ashtin, were young children.
That July, the New York Post photographed Ashley and TJ together, exposing their affair. His marriage to Alisa ended. On Earle Meets World, TJ takes responsibility: “It was all on me; it was all my fault.”
Meanwhile, Dupré was trying to build a public identity beyond the Spitzer scandal. She wrote the New York Post’s “Ask Ashley” advice column from 2009 to 2012 and finished third on VH1’s Famous Food in 2011.
She also appeared on the cover of Playboy’s May 2010 issue and posed fully nude for an eight-page spread. Dupré said she had waited two years to accept Playboy’s offer because she did not want to be known only as “Spitzer’s girl.” She had already rejected a reported $1 million-plus offer from Hustler, saying she did not want to pose “spread-eagle.”
During the Playboy shoot, Dupré said, her hairspray-coated hair caught fire while she was surrounded by more than a hundred candles. Her stylist patted it out with his hands.
“Posing for Playboy gave me the opportunity to regain a sense of control,” she said. “I spent the last two years trying to be known as anything other than a prostitute. You might find this shocking, but it’s kind of hard to live down.”
Ashley and TJ married privately in Paris on October 13, 2013. According to contemporary reporting, the ceremony took place in the penthouse of the Four Seasons Hotel George V. She wore Inbal Dror. No children, relatives or friends attended.
Alix and Ashtin learned about the wedding the following week, when their father told them in the car on the way to school.
Ashley and TJ have three children together: Izabel, Penelope and Thomas James Earle II.
Alix has been blunt about how difficult it was to accept Ashley. She has said she was told to be respectful when she “wanted to rip her head off.” She and Ashtin once put toothpaste in Ashley’s shoes.
Their closeness came only after what Alix describes as “years and years of fighting and hashing it out.” She now sees Ashley as more like a sister, but has emphasized that the family did not simply move past the divorce and become a happy, blended household overnight.
During a trip to Aspen on Earle Meets World, Ashley tries to explain to Alix and Ashtin how she got into escorting.
“I was working all these jobs and trying to pay my bills … somebody came up to me and said, ‘You can do this,’ and I said, ‘Okay, I want to not have emotion, and be like a guy.'”
The sisters later said they did not really understand what she meant.
Ashley has also described how painful it was to hear Alix revisit her past on Call Her Daddy. The hurt, she said, was not about what Alix discussed, but what she left out about the life Ashley had built since.”I felt like I lost my spark,” Ashley said. “Because for 17 years I’ve literally … worked so hard on my life, about doing the right thing by my stepkids, by my kids.”
“I’m not mad at what she said,” Ashley added. When an off-camera interviewer asked whether she meant what Alix had left out, she agreed. “Because I am a good person,” she said. “I have been a great stepmom.”
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