The Price: My Rise and Fall As Natalia, New York's #1 Escort
Page 26
When it came time to start handing them out, I jumped into the pile first, grabbing all of my gifts and handing them out.
One by one, they opened them and cried or just smiled and hugged me. I gave them another round of presents. Same thing.
“Whoa, Nat,” my mom said, “Slow down.”
And then it started. One by one they handed me gift after gift. There were presents for me. I just hadn’t seen them. I’d never gotten so many beautiful presents in my life. I wanted to cry, but instead I just smiled the biggest, face-stretching smile I have ever smiled.
When it came to my mom, she handed me a big department store box. I opened it and blushed. It was a pair of pink Hello Kitty pajamas. I loved Hello Kitty when I was a little girl. I ran into her room to try them on and then ran back. Everyone cracked up as I posed for pictures, hamming it up for the camera.
I told them how I’d been scared when I hadn’t seen any presents for me at first.
My brother just looked at me and smiled, “Nat, this is the best Christmas I’ve ever had.”
My brother never says stuff like that.
We had a long hug…maybe the longest I’ve ever given him. I took a nice sip of wine and plopped down on the floor next to the tree. I felt so happy and content. Then I got this weird feeling, like my life was spinning back onto itself, kind of like déjà vu. I looked around the room, from my perfect spot under the glimmering tree, and realized that it wasn’t déjà vu. I was home. The nightmare was over.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AFTERMATH
My legal case was resolved, and thankfully I didn’t have to serve any more time in jail. I was relieved it was finally over.
I’ve funneled all of my addictions into healthy living. I work out five times a week, minimum, and I’ve kept up my vegetarian diet.
Jason got out of jail in 2007 after pleading guilty to money laundering and serving more than two years at Rikers. He has a MySpace page covered with photos of him drinking champagne with half-naked girls. He’s wearing a tee-shirt that reads “Page Six Pimp.” He claims that he’s done with pimping and doing drugs. He’s told everyone from Larry King to Howard Stern that he’s going legit. He talked about starting a match-making service for the ridiculously wealthy called DNA Diamonds, but it fizzled before it got off the ground. He moved to Miami to work in marketing for one of his childhood friends.
I later found out what happened to Mona and Clark.
They had their baby.
Mona pled guilty to promoting prostitution, but never did any time.
Clark also ended up getting off more or less scot-free. The papers reported that he had allegedly cooperated with the D.A.’s office in our case. He pled guilty to one count of promoting prostitution and spent a total of three days in jail. Jason claimed, while Clark was COO of New York Confidential, he stole more than $500,000 from the company. In typical Jason fashion, he publicly threatened to sue Clark to get it back. The tabloids reported that after New York Confidential, Clark was connected to another agency called Velvet Traces. He also reportedly dated Ashley.
Hulbert ended up spending six and a half months at Rikers. As of last summer, his case was still pending. We’re still in touch. Recently, I called him and asked if he wished we’d never come along that day on West Broadway and commissioned a painting. He didn’t even hesitate.
He said no.
I waited for him to continue.
Then I jumped in, “Even with the consequences and bullshit you had to go through as a result?”
He answered, “No, it was the best party I ever went to.”
Jason’s lawyer, Paul Bergrin, was charged with a litany of crimes related to New York Confidential, including laundering over $800,000 of Jason’s profits and then taking over, or more like taking, the business from Jason when he was locked up. Bergrin was also charged with “misconduct by an attorney.” It turns out that, in an effort to get Jason’s midnight curfew pushed back, he allegedly claimed Jason worked for him as a paralegal on one of his other cases: a soldier charged by the U.S. military in the Abu Ghraib scandal. I know. You can’t make this stuff up, right?
Mel Sachs died of cancer in 2006. He is remembered as one of the city’s most flamboyant defense attorneys with a client list that spanned from David Copperfield to Kanye West to Yankee pitcher David Wells.
The owner of TheEroticReview.com, David Elms, was jailed in California in June 2008 when he reportedly failed a series of drug tests and violated his probation, stemming from other charges unrelated to the site. He faces up to four years in prison. The escort industry reeled at the news.
I spoke to Scott one final time after it all went down. He had finally started making his own money doing a lot of high-profile charity work and fundraising for a certain Republican candidate. He ran for local office. He flew me out to visit a few times, and we always had fun together, but I could see his life was moving in a different direction. He had his sights set on a life in politics. He ended up marrying a tall blonde, the perfect wife for a politician.
“Natalia, should I be worried?” he asked. “Do people know I was your client?”
“Scott, on my end, you have nothing to be worried about. All of the booking sheets with your name on them, all the credit card imprint slips with your name and info on them, are gone.”
“Okay,” he sounded relieved.
“But,” I continued, “you might want to do something about your credit card bills. If anyone looks for Gotham Steak, it will be there.”
“Right,” he answered. I could almost hear his wheels turning, trying to figure out if there was anyone his family knew who could make that little problem disappear.
Jeremy Piven contacted me about developing a feature film about my life at New York Confidential. He said he wanted to play Jason. I spoke to him on the phone a few times. He kept inviting me out to L.A., but I got the feeling he was more interested in sleeping with me than putting together a movie deal.
I guess some things never change.
* * *
When New York’s governor Eliot Spitzer went down in a ball of flames for booking a $4,300 session with an escort named “Kristen,” I confess I laughed my head off. Prior to being elected governor in 2007, he was New York’s attorney general. He was known for being a “by-the-book” hard-ass, responsible for a string of high-profile prosecutions for white-collar crime, consumer fraud and environmental pollution. He was allegedly the driving force behind the crackdown on high-end escorting that led to my arrest and subsequent visit to Rikers Island.
Funny enough, turns out Mr. Morality had a long history of paying to play. Up until he was caught red-handed, he had allegedly spent over $80,000 (that they could trace) on escorts over an eight-year period— basically the entire time he was the state’s top law enforcement and elected official. “Hypocritical” doesn’t even begin to scrape the surface. Pathological, maybe.
I couldn’t escape the news once it broke. As an ex-New York escort, I was bombarded with calls left, right and center asking me to come on TV shows to talk about my experiences with other politicians and comment on Eliot Spitzer’s actions. Cameramen and reporters even showed up at my work. My fellow staff already knew about my past, but after all the media attention, most of our clients found out as well. My bosses were supportive of me, but I could tell they were worried about how the clientele would respond. Surprisingly they were open-minded, offering words of encouragement, and whispered in my ear that they wanted to hear all the details later.
Almost immediately after I watched the scandal unfold on CNN, I was interviewed live on the Today Show via satellite and was invited to be a guest on Larry King Live later the same day. That afternoon, before my second appearance, I got an email from Jason, (who touched base with me about once a month) titled, “Don’t you know this girl?”
Oh, my God.
There was a photo of my little Ashley in a white bikini sitting on a yacht docked in what looked like the French Riviera, but what
I knew better to be off the coast of Miami, where she was probably partying it up at the Winter Music Conference.
Kristen was Ashley. Ashley was Kristen. She had finally gotten her wish: she was famous. And then some.
As the story spiraled out of control, the not-quite contrite governor was forced to resign in a dramatic (and hugely pathetic) press conference with his humiliated wife, Silda, standing by his side. Ashley kept a low profile, hiding out as the press scoured the eastern seaboard trying to get a shot of the girl who had brought down the former Sheriff of Wall Street. Spitzer got his own New York magazine cover: the governor grinning like a schoolboy with an arrow pointing to his crotch and the caption: “Brain.” Brilliant.
Ashley’s only connection to the outside world was her MySpace page, which featured recordings of her songs and MySpace friends’ links to Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige. The songs sounded exactly how I expected them to sound: poppy, heavily produced club anthems. The lyrics, while not quite Alanis Morissette, said it all: “I know what you want. You got want I want. I know what you need. Can you handle me?”
Of course, the obvious question crossed my mind. Had she been turned into a government informant way back when and kept on the payroll? It seemed like an awfully big coincidence that she was allegedly let go after her arrest during her New York Confidential days and then happened to be at the center of the government’s biggest prostitution sting operation in recent memory.
I have no idea if that’s what happened. The official story is that someone in a bank noticed the governor’s suspicious wire transfers and thought that they may have stumbled onto some kind of blackmail plot and reported it to the D.A.’s office, and they had no choice but to investigate. The whole thing smelled pretty fishy to me.
Of course, as the scandal consumed the news media, and the reporters couldn’t locate Ashley, and it came out she was once with New York Confidential, they turned to Jason and me for comment. The last thing I was going to do was disparage my old friend. I never brought up the rumors about her involvement in our bust on the air. Even if it were true that Ashley was responsible, or provided the cops with info that helped them make their cases, I didn’t hold a grudge. The way things were going, we were headed off a cliff with or without her help. She was young (nineteen), and if it happened the way my source said it happened, they probably threatened her with serious jail time. If she decided better us than her, and she gave them the information that helped bring us down, I really can’t blame her.
I did the interviews with the Today Show, Entertainment Tonight and Larry King Live and tried to give an accurate representation of myself, and Ashley, and why we did what we did. If there’s one person who could understand what she was feeling at that moment, it was me. I knew she might get hurt and probably wasn’t allowed to speak for herself, so I talked about what a good person she was and how I hoped she would get through it. I discussed the good and bad parts of the business. I even told the story of a girl I knew who married one of her rich clients and ran off to Paris with him.
I took some flack for it. Conservative bloggers and some mainstream media outlets ripped me for being an apologist for immoral behavior—behavior that devastates lives and got me locked up. I’m nothing of the sort. I’m just not going to go around judging people. I’d faced enough of that in my own life.
Ashley will be fine. Like me, she survived a rough upbringing, and she’ll survive this. She loves life and people glow when they’re around her. I’ve read that she’s signed to do a reality pilot with Reveille, the mega-producers behind Big Brother and, perhaps fittingly, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire ? So maybe she’ll become a reality star and/or finally get that recording contract she always dreamed about.
* * *
I had an amazing moment. I got the chance to audition for a play here in Montreal—a play written by Ayn Rand, my jailhouse savior, of all people. I totally freaked out at first. It had been two years since my last audition in New York. Would I even remember how to act, never mind audition?
But as the audition grew closer, I told myself that according to the method theory of acting I was Meryl Streep by this point, with everything that I had been through, right?
Then the doubts crept back in. Maybe I’d lived too much, done too many drugs, and lost my center somewhere along the way.
They handed me the monologue—something random about a girl confronting an older guy; nothing specific about what the conflict was. But I’m good at subtext. It screamed abuse to me, and that’s how I performed it.
The director was blown away. He said no one else picked up on it. I was surprised. It seemed so obvious to me.
As I left the audition room, I was giddy. I’d really kicked ass, but more than that, I’d had fun—clean, non-chemical, non-porno fun. They gave me the lead, and not just the female lead. They actually flipped the main character, irony of all ironies, the role of the district attorney, from male to female.
Then came my publishing deal. I had to quit the play. It wasn’t really a hard choice; everyone involved in the play understood. I was being given the chance to tell my own story and not let the tabloids and the haters and the prosecutors and Jason and everyone else have the last word on what I did, and who I am.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would first like to thank my family: my mother Susan, my brother Brent and sister-in-law Julie, my grandmother Lillian and late grandfather Edward and my aunt Audrey. Above everything else, it is your unconditional love and support that has guided me and kept me whole. I am blessed to have such a wonderful, caring family.
I’d like to thank my agent Jason Anthony, now of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, who found me and never stopped believing in me and this book. Thank you for your patience, compassion and guidance.
Thank you to Michael Viner, my fabulous editor Henrietta Tiefenthaler, Sonia Fiore, Darby Connor and everyone else at Phoenix Books. And thank you to Brian Gross of BSG PR for helping get the word out.
I am grateful to have such an enthusiastic film agent in Judi Farkas of Judi Farkas Management, who loved this project from the very beginning.
Thank you to Terry Hughes and Chantelle Hartshorne for helping me create the cover image. You are both great at what you do, and great at who you are.
Love and thanks to Jordan for your friendship and encouragement—knowing you are always there is everything. Thank you to Carol St. James and the staff at Spa St. James for welcoming me so warmly.
Thank you to John Nicholas Iannuzzi and Peter Fields for your counsel and advice.
NOTES
1 Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake were cast in the same North American talent search.
2 Later, I found out it was more like 5,000 square feet. A dishonest Manhattan real estate agent—what a shock.
3 I actually looked it up in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I fit the profile to a T.
4 I never injected, though. Too scared of needles.
5 Not his real name, obviously, and you’ll see soon enough why I didn’t want to identify him here!
6 Morgan and Ron hired me a new attorney, John Nicholas Iannuzzi, an old-school New York lawyer who rescued me, and whom I adore to this day.
7 They’d begun filing the paperwork, but it would take months to finally go through.
8 My dad’s sister. She’d become more a part of our family than his. I guess she just likes us better, so there!
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE - THE AUDITION
CHAPTER ONE - CANADIAN CHAMP
CANADIAN CHAMP
CHAPTER TWO - MY FIRST TIME
CHAPTER THREE - “YOU’VE GOT $650 SHOES ON— ACT LIKE IT”
CHAPTER FOUR - “ROCKET FUEL FOR WINNERS”
CHAPTER FIVE - MEET THE CLIENTS
CHAPTER SIX - THE PERFECT FLOWER
CHAPTER SEVEN - BIRTHDAY BOY
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE $2,000-AN-HOUR WOMAN
CHAPTER NINE -
THE JASON SHOW
CHAPTER TEN - DARK CLOUDS
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE FALL OF NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL
CHAPTER TWELVE - COVERGIRL
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - CAGED
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - COMING HOME
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - AFTERMATH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES