Spitzer girl ‘Kristen’ boosts music career on MySpace

'Kristen', the girl at the centre of the prostitution scandal that brought down New York governor Eliot Spitzer, has been identified by the New York Times as 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupre. It turns out that Ashley - also known as Ashley Youmans and Ashley Rae Maika DiPietro - not only works as a $1,000-per-hour call-girl, but is also an aspiring singer. As a result of her exposure, tens of thousands have flocked to her MySpace page in the past 24 hours.

By Thursday morning nearly 80,000 people had logged on to her social networking profile - stripped down and unusually easy to load for a MySpace page - to hear her latest single What we want. "My path has not been easy," she says on her profile. "When I was 17, I left home. Left a broken family. Left abuse... I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own."

As one internet expert commented, someone involved in such a scandal would normally pull their personal profile from the web as quickly as possible. Ashley, however, seems to be keen to make the most of the PR opportunity. Her album, Unspoken Words, is available for sale on the music portal Amie Street.

The revelation of Kristen's identity follows Spitzer's resignation announcement on Wednesday - his deputy, David Paterson, will take over next Monday - amid news that his tryst with Dupre at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC on February 13 was not the first occasion on which he had made use of the Emperors Club VIP service.

Citing sources close to the federal investigators who discovered his use of call-girls, the governor was revealed to have spent as much as $80,000 on prostitutes across America during his period as governor and, previously, as the hard-hitting state attorney general.

Because Spitzer asked for Dupre - aka Kristen - to be flown from New York to Washington for their assignation, it is possible he could be prosecuted under the 1910 Mann Act which prohibits sending a woman over state lines "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". In the past, Charlie Chaplin, Chuck Berry and cult leader Charles Manson have all been prosecuted under the statute.

Meanwhile, The First Post's US-based commentator Alexander Cockburn reports today that many signs point to the downfall of Spitzer being orchestrated by Wall Street, where he has still not been forgiven for his tough line of any financial wrongdoing during his period as attorney general.