Ashley Dupré isn’t running from her “reckless” past anymore.
Alix Earle’s stepmother opened up about the choices that once made her tabloid fodder, including her connection to the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal and her affair with the influencer’s married father. Alix, 25, shot to fame on TikTok and has built a massive following by sharing her life online – including, at times, the complicated family history that played out in the tabloids when she was a child.
Ashley was thrust into the national spotlight in 2008 when she was identified as an escort connected to then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in the prostitution scandal that preceded his resignation.
“At 19, while working as a cocktail waitress, a man approached me and told me I could make $1,000 an hour going on dates with high-profile men,” she wrote in an essay for Elle. “My first answer was no, but I kept his card. Eventually, I made the call. I could spend paragraphs explaining why. I was young. I wanted money and independence. I’d spent years operating in survival mode and had become very good at compartmentalizing. But ultimately, I made the call. It was my decision.”
According to Ashley, she managed the work for two years without anyone knowing.
“Then, when I was 22, the FBI knocked on my door and showed me a photograph of a man I had seen,” she explained. “I didn’t know who he was. When they told me he was the governor of New York, I couldn’t begin to understand what was about to happen.”
What followed was a level of attention Ashley said she never could have anticipated.
“Soon, my stage name and face were on the front page of The New York Post. There was an almost ridiculous irony to it,” she recalled. “I had come to New York City wanting to be noticed, and suddenly everyone noticed me – for the one thing I never wanted anyone to know.”
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Ashley said she can now look back at that period without minimizing the role she played.
“Context isn’t absolution. I made choices. Some were reckless,” she wrote. “Some were selfish. They had consequences. I can own all of that without believing those choices have to be the most interesting thing about me forever.”
Ashley’s affair with TJ hit the tabloids in 2008, months after she made headline news with the Spitzer scandal. The two had met by chance at a restaurant in New Jersey and things escalated from there. “We talked for five or six hours, and our connection was immediate,” Ashley recalled.
“TJ was married,” she admitted. “We crossed a line we shouldn’t have crossed, and I take responsibility for my part in that. Our choices affected and hurt other people, including his wife, Alisa, and daughters, Alix and Ashtin, and I don’t take that lightly.”
Alix was just a child when the affair turned her family life into tabloid news.
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“I remember the day very clearly,” Alix said on a 2023 episode of “Call Her Daddy.” “Paparazzi had shown up at my house and my mom quickly kind of got me and my sister out of the house over to our cousins. We stayed there for a few days and I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know they were paparazzi. I thought news broadcasters were interviewing the neighbors.”
While Alix was too young to understand what was happening at the time, she later discovered who Ashley was.
“It was in like fourth grade,” she told host Alex Cooper. “I started to kind of hear commentary from people and I had an iPad at the time. I’m Googling my family and, all of a sudden, I see that the past two years of my life had been a lie.”
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“My dad had an affair with someone who was well-known for her job having sexual relations with high-class people and one of them was even the governor of New York,” Alix said. “She was very well-known from that and, in turn, my dad’s affair became a very public situation.”
Ashley and TJ later married in 2013. But the fallout followed Alix beyond her family’s front door and into her childhood. Friends often weren’t allowed to come over to her home.
“The parents would kind of tell my mom, and she would tell me kind of the harsh truth of why this can’t happen,” she said. “She would have to sit me down and be like, ‘They don’t really respect us.'”
Behind closed doors, Alix was also grappling with her father’s new relationship.
“When my stepmom started to hang around with my dad after he had moved out, she came into his life, and we were introduced to her, which was super weird,” Alix explained. “And I was told that I had to be respectful to this woman, and we had to be nice to her. I wanted to rip her head off. It was very weird because I felt like I was a 10-year-old having to be more mature than someone 20, 30 years older than me.”
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Despite their difficult beginning, Ashley eventually became a permanent part of the Earle family. Their relationship evolved in the years that followed, as Ashley and TJ built a life together.
Nearly two decades later, Ashley said she no longer feels the need to convince the world that she is more than her past.
“Twenty years ago, I wanted everyone to understand me. Today, I don’t,” Ashley wrote. “The people sitting around my dinner table know who I am. So do I.”
“I’m not ashamed of the young woman I was,” Ashley added. “I wouldn’t make all of her choices again, but I’m also done wishing her away. She was ambitious, reckless, complicated and sometimes very wrong. But she kept going.”
“We live in a culture that can preserve a person’s worst moment forever,” she mused. “Accountability matters, but so does allowing people to grow. If we believe that no one can become more than the bad decision they made at 19 or 22, then we leave very little room for any of us to change.”
