Ashley Dupre — the escort who toppled a governor — is sick of hiding.
Eighteen months after the scandal that took down Eliot Spitzer, the 24-year-old wants to become a singer, a mother, an author — anything but that girl.
“Everyone likes an underdog story, and everyone likes a comeback,” she said during an exclusive interview and fashion shoot with The Post. “I’m the poster child for redemption.”
LISTEN TO ASHLEY’S NEW SONG: “I FEEL SO ALIVE WITHOUT YOU”
She’s recording pop songs and angling for a record deal, working on a book she calls a “cautionary tale,” and on her reactivated MySpace page, she talks about love, life and wishing “luck” to her former “Client 9.”
“What I meant by ‘I wish him luck’ is that I felt like there was hope in the news that he may be entering politics again,” Dupre said, though she declined to say whether the Luv Gov would get her vote. “If people could forgive him, they could forgive me.”
Sitting in the Midtown hot spot HighBar, Dupre scoffed at the idea she ever sought out fame.
“I didn’t ask for it, but now that I have it, it’s up to me to take advantage of this platform and do something amazing. I have a voice now,” she said.
Dupre released her first single, “Inside Out,” on hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Web site Global Grind last week. Her second, “I Feel So Alive Without You,” debuts tomorrow on nypost.com.
While she’s committed to a recording career, her eventual goal is to marry and have at least two children.
“Of course, I still want that dream. I’m not punishing myself with ‘I don’t deserve it.’ I absolutely deserve it.”
Right now, however, she remains 100 percent single because “dating in New York is just so tough. A lot of guys want to be with me for the wrong reasons. They wonder, ‘How is she going to be in bed?’ ”
Dupre said she was also gun shy after having fallen in with bad boys. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.”
After growing up on the Jersey Shore, teen angst and a taxing relationship with her mother forced her to leave home at 17 and move to her biological father’s home in North Carolina.
There, her life went south, too.
She met up with the “wrong crowd,” where drug use was rampant and, according to Dupre, “women were viewed as objects. Like many of them, I, too, was a victim of sexual assault.” She’s reluctant to elaborate.
“When you’re a teenager, you don’t understand the emotions that you’re feeling. [Drug use] was my out. I wasn’t suicidal by any means, but I didn’t care what happened,” she said.
At school, girls picked fights with her. “I would wear my New York cockroach-killing boots, and they were in overalls,” she half-joked.
She decided North Carolina wasn’t a fit for her, either.
“I just ran,” at first to Florida on an extended getaway that landed her on a “Girls Gone Wild” tape, then to New York City, where, at 18, she worked as a cocktail waitress in posh Manhattan clubs, including Pangaea, Viscaya and Suede.
During this time, she met a man she won’t name who ran a “modeling agency” that she said hired pretty, vulnerable and sometimes drug-dependent girls like Dupre to sleep with VIP types.
According to Dupre, nightclub culture wasn’t a whole lot different from the seedy life she had left behind.
“The guys there weren’t looking for love or meaningful relationships, and I don’t know the women are, either,” she said. “It truly is a destructive environment if you’re in it too long or live it every day. Guys think, ‘Dude, I can have a new girl every night. Why would I take the time and want to court someone and take them to dinner?'”
When she was 19, Dupre — still using drugs — started trading sex for money.
After a couple years, she met a man who encouraged her to quit turning tricks, got her off of drugs and put her up in a nice Manhattan apartment. But it turned out he was married – and his wife made him leave Dupre.
“I said, ‘What am I going to do?’ He said, ‘You’ll figure it out. You always do.’¤”
That was the last she heard from him.
It was then, in January 2008, she hit rock bottom. Heartbroken, saddled with huge debts and living in an apartment she couldn’t afford, Dupre returned to the world’s oldest profession.
“I had a plan,” Dupre insisted. “My lease was ending in April, and I was going to move to Harlem or Brooklyn. I’d work until April and get my feet on the ground.”
But in March, the news about Spitzer broke. And Dupre, who hadn’t realized her client was the governor, was thrust into the spotlight.
“A month into it, I was sitting in front of my TV, and my whole life flashed in front of me,” she recalled.
She gave only one early magazine interview and a TV appearance before disappearing into a self-imposed exile. Lucrative offers to write a tell-all and pose nude for magazines paying “up to $2 million” were turned down.
But, at long last, Dupre wants back in the spotlight.
“I’m strong, genuine, independent, a really good person. I don’t think someone who makes a mistake should suffer for the rest of their lives.”
She believes she will eventually meet Mr. Right. She’s looking for a man who is “sincere and [won’t] do a cheesy pickup line. I really like preppy boys. Tall, dark hair, handsome.”
She realizes that raising kids will be tricky for her in the Google age, when you can never bury your past.
“When I do have children, I’ll have to sit them down and explain myself. And when they have children, I’ll have to tell them that ‘Grandma did this to [herself],’ and that’s something I’ll have to live with the rest of my life.
“It’s part of my life now.”
Now that she’s finally back in the public eye, she won’t hold back. “I’ll never let anyone else speak for me.”