This is one whore with chutzpah.
Melissa Petro, the stripper/hooker who was reborn a public-school teacher, thinks her Bronx art students are too dumb to understand Petro’s written ravings about her career as a proud and empowered slut.
Petro floated into the National Arts Club yesterday in a virginal white mohair coat, navy-blue minidress, and brown sky-high platform do-me pumps. So I asked the clueless Ms. Petro what the devil she was thinking when she boasted on the Internet about making her living on her back or her knees.
“I write for adults. I write on sites that speak to adults,” she responded in a high-pitched, little-girl lisp.
“I don’t think my thtudents could comprehend my work, and if they did, they deserve an A,” she said condescendingly.
Bloody gall! I guess Petro believes that the best anyone who lives in The Bronx deserves is a teacher like her.
Last month, Petro, who was removed from the classroom last winter, walked away from her job at PS 70, to the relief of parents everywhere. She’d been outed by this newspaper as a former sex worker, then charged by the school system with “conduct unbecoming a teacher.” More like conduct unbecoming a human being.
But the fierce feminist prostitute she portrays in her writing was replaced yesterday by a nervous, nearly tearful girly-girl.
Petro, 31, waded into the ornate, but faded, Arts Club in Manhattan along with horror lawyer Gloria Allred, who complained that Petro’s constitutional right to speak out about her slutty ways was violated by the school system. She forgets that there exists no legal or moral right for an openly loose woman to get her hands on the city’s most vulnerable kids.
Cry me a river. Petro said she grew up poor and from a broken home. “For me, stripping was a means to socioeconomic opportunity,” she said, as if suggesting poverty is a natural excuse for moral bankruptcy.
“Years later, circumstances would lead me to work as a prostitute.” Circumstances? An indifferent father? An overwhelming need for Chanel, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent? She wouldn’t say.
“That choice, for me, was a mistake.” The job was “physically demanding, emotionally taxing and spiritually bankrupting.” Don’t forget risky, messy and potentially contagious — to youngsters who see their teacher as a role model.
Petro announced — get this — that she’s reinventing herself as a crusader for “social justice” and plans to work with teens at risk for sexual exploitation. Holy cow! This woman is allowed to get her hands on more kids?
Allred, by the way, isn’t suing anyone.
What is the root of Petro’s cluelessness? A hint is dropped in a report by the schools’ Office of Special Investigation, which pointed to Petro’s published loathing for brown-skinned people. Like those she taught.
The bleached-blond Petro, who lives in Manhattan, wrote a filthy and “racially insensitive” 2007 article in Post Road Magazine about stripping and whoring in Cincinnati, the investigator noted.
“I drive through the black neighborhoods, past pawnshops, liquor stores, chicken joints,” she wrote, in the language of cliché.
“I imagine unattended babies in diapers crawling down sidewalks through shards of broken glass . . . Yes, I am afraid of this city. I drive down Martin Luther King Boulevard and I try not to stare.”
Melissa Petro, Happy-Hooker-turned-social-giant. Wrap her in police tape, and hide the kids.
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick