Father ‘introduced Belle de Jour to prostitutes’

The father of the 34-year-old research scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti who revealed herself to the Sunday Times as the London call girl Belle de Jour, has said it may have been his fault that she went into prostitution. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Paul Magnanti admitted he had used 150 prostitutes since his marriage broke down in 1991 and had introduced his daughter to some of them in an effort to persuade her that women who sell their bodies can still have "a human face".

Sixty-one-year-old Magnanti, who has not seen Brooke for three years and claimed to be stunned to learn of his daughter's secret life, said: "I had been loyal and faithful to one woman for 24 years. After my marriage ended I decided that I wanted to sleep with 24 women in one year.

"Brooke did not approve of me seeing prostitutes. Some I lived with on and off for a couple of years... Brooke did not get on with the girls I knew, but she came to see them as human beings.

"Prostitutes are still women, but for whatever reason - and it is mostly drugs - they have to sell their bodies."

Magnanti, who lives in a simple suburban house in Florida, told the Mail that his association with prostitutes had led him into drugs - "mostly crack cocaine" - but that he now kicked the habit.

Asked for his reaction to the news that his own daughter had become a call girl, he replied: "She has not done anything wrong. Brooke is a very independent woman, and I support whatever she has done."

But he was glad that she was no longer a prostitute. "In my experience prostitution is wrong and corrupts people. I know that from my own experience. It only leads to heartbreak. But I will not condemn her for doing what she had to do to pay for her education."

Dr Brooke Magnanti, who as we reported yesterday works as a research scientist in Bristol, told the Sunday Times that she became a £300-an-hour call girl when she ran out of money while doing her PhD six years ago.

She worked for 14 months for a London escort agency, during which time she began to blog about her experiences and then wrote the memoir The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. This in turn became the basis for the TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, starring Billie Piper.

However, even her literary agent had no idea of her real identity until she decided to "come clean" with the Sunday Times in order to foil a Daily Mail scoop.

Brooke told the Sunday Times that she had already informed her work colleagues, who had been "amazingly kind and supportive", and was going to tell her mother, Susan, at the weekend.

She has now done so, by phone to America where her mother lives with a new partner. Yesterday Brooke issued a brief statement saying: "My mother is being fully supportive and says she's 'not one to judge'. I, for one, am happy and relieved."

A spokesman for her employer, Bristol University, said: "This aspect of Dr Magnanti's past is not relevant to her current role at the university." ·