Kenneth Starr’s wife emptied men’s pockets the honest way.
Diane Passage raked in more than $1,000 per night as a stripper at Scores, before she met and married the alleged Ponzi schemer a few years ago.
“I was rescued by my knight in shining armor, my husband,” Passage, 34, said in a recent interview. “I left because I could.”
Hooking up with Starr allowed her to become a regular on the party circuit, hobnob with celebrities and pursue her dream of becoming a music and movie producer — not to mention her dream of gaining recognition for pole dancing as a real sport.
She has claimed in interviews that she didn’t meet Starr at the club, but through a friend of a friend. However, all her connections were built on her work at Scores, sources said.
When the Detroit native moved to New York in 2001, she has said, her day job at an advertising agency wasn’t paying enough for a single mother to raise a son. So she turned to lap dances, performing under the name Chase — “like the bank,” she has said.
Passage started dating Starr around 2005 and the two married a year later.
Her most successful venture has been Pole Superstar — an annual pole-dancing competition designed to remove the stigma of seedy clubs from what she and other practitioners view as an Olympic-class sport.
Not to say she is taking the sex out of pole dancing.
“I personally am a bit reluctant to get behind the idea of toning down the image of pole dance because I find that the raciness is half the fun,” Passage has said.
In 2009, she established a charity called Single Parents in Need, or SPIN, for which the revenue from the pole-dancing would be directed. But although the organization accepts donations on its Web site, it was not incorporated as a nonprofit charity and is now under investigation, officials said.
Additional reporting by Ada Calhoun and Jeane Macintosh