‘I’m not a monster,’ says call-girl Ashley

Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call-girl at the centre of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, called the New York Times on Tuesday to volunteer the information that she was 'Kristen', it now transpires. 'Kristen' was the Emperors Club VIP prostitute who Spitzer arranged to have flown from New York to Washington DC for a tryst at the Mayflower Hotel in February.

Although she refused to discuss Spitzer - who has since resigned as New York state governor - or how many times she had met him, she told the Times: "I just don't want to be thought of as a monster. This has been a difficult time. It is complicated." The newspaper reported that she had left a broken home in New Jersey at 17 to come to New York in order to become a rhythm and blues singer.

Ashley's sudden fame now makes anything possible. Her MySpace page was receiving about 1m page impressions an hour on Thursday morning before it was taken down and rebooted to remove her personal account of her life and a recording of one of her songs, What I Want. Its lyrics included the lines: "I know what you want. Can you handle me, boy?"

In her life story, she had written: "My path has not been easy". She said she had used drugs, "been broke and homeless". Yet schoolfriends contacted by the US media have described Ashley - who was born Ashley Youmans - as a "nice, conservative" beauty who liked to date older men. "She was never slutty. She would date older guys, but it wasn't like she was running around sleeping with everyone", a 22-year-old woman identified only as Stephanie told the New York Post.

Bill Coyne, who played opposite her in Grease at school in New Jersey, told ABC News: "She is naturally just a sweet, sweet person: kind spirit."

Her mother, Carolyn Capalbo, said she was "shell-shocked" when her daughter called to tell her that she had been working as an escort. But she added: "She is a very bright girl who can handle someone like the governor."

Media organisations are now queuing up to bid for her story. Divine Brown, the prostitute who was caught with Hugh Grant on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, is reported to have made more than $1.5m out of television appearances and a film that recreated the scandal.

Meanwhile, other commentators are coming round to the view expressed by Alexander Cockburn on The First Post yesterday that there was something fishy about the federal investigators' decision to target Spitzer, who made many enemies on Wall Street while he was the state's attorney general.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, said the government wiretapped 5,000 phone calls and intercepted 6,000 emails simply to close down a escort agency.

He said the monitoring of suspicious money transfers that brought Spitzer down was intended to be used against terrorists and drug dealers. As soon as it became clear Spitzer was only paying for prostitutes, the investigation should have been stopped. ·