I’m not naive. I know life isn’t always fair and justice isn’t truly blind.
Yet Eliot Spitzer getting off scot-free and US Attorney Michael J. Garcia’s saying, “We have determined that there is insufficient evidence to bring charges against Mr. Spitzer,” tests the limits of even the most cynical New Yorker.
There’s a trail of wired money transfers between Spitzer’s bank account and the Emerald Club, and the ex-governor himself has acknowledged (if obliquely) his role in the scandal – yet the government claims they don’t have the goods?
Let’s be honest: Eliot Spitzer, like so many johns before him, is getting a free pass because of his wealth, his connections and, yes, his gender.
In 2005, I was involved in a high-end escort scandal that in many ways would foreshadow the Spitzer/Dupre affair.
In need of money and in a toxic relationship, I made the fateful decision to give escorting a try.
For a while it seemed the perfect solution to my problems. I was making unimaginable amounts of money and, for the most part, I liked my clients.
There was the Hollywood agent, a real-life Ari Gold, who treated sex the way I imagined he did his deals – brusquely, all business and with no time to waste.
There was the sports legend who relived his glory days by hiring a woman who would worship his stamina in bed.
There was the British aristocrat who hired me and a gorgeous male escort to put on a drug-fueled show in front of him.
But, like Ashley, the easy money and nonstop party came crashing down when the feds busted my agency.
I landed on the cover of New York magazine as “The $2,000-An-Hour Woman” and, shortly after, in jail. I spent 26 days on Rikers Island.
My first night, I slept next to a homeless woman who reeked of urine.
I was cavity-searched, threatened and had my private property stolen.
But none of my clients ever faced legal consequences for engaging in the same activities I did.
And the FBI has never released their names. (And nor will I.)
Clearly, there is a double standard at work. Spitzer may have lost the governorship in a humiliating public scandal, but I can assure the former governor that that doesn’t compare to the private pain of having your mother visit you in jail, where you’re clad in a standard-issue uniform and not allowed to hug her.
Three years later, I still struggle with the fallout from my arrest.
Why is it that escorts, bookers and escort-agency owners are consistently punished and made examples of – and the same isn’t true for the clients of these agencies?
Clients who, like Spitzer, have full knowledge of the laws they’re breaking but don’t hesitate to do so over and over again?
It’s obvious that when Spitzer participated in his illegal activities, he was acting under the assumption the so-called “sheriff” was above the law.
Apparently, he was correct.
In August 2004, Natalie McLennan was working for and dating now-convicted pimp Jason Itzler when he auditioned and recruited a 19-year-old named Ashley Dupre into his high-end prostitution ring, New York Confidential. McLennan’s memoir, “The Price: My Rise and Fall as Natalia, New York’s #1 Escort,” will be published on Nov. 25 by Phoenix Books.