Ashley Dupré, stepmother to social media influencer Alix Earle, has written publicly about her past, including her role in the 2008 prostitution scandal that led to the resignation of then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and the extramarital affair with Alix’s father that later upended the Earle family.
Dupré, in an essay for Elle, described how she began working as an escort at 19 while employed as a cocktail waitress. “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. “My first answer was no, but I kept his card. Eventually, I made the call.”
She wrote that she worked without detection for two years until, at age 22, the FBI came to her door with a photograph of a man she recognized but could not name. “When they told me he was the governor of New York, I couldn’t begin to understand what was about to happen,” she wrote.
The revelation made her a fixture of New York City tabloids. “Soon, my stage name and face were on the front page of The New York Post,” 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.”
Owning the past
Dupré wrote that she does not seek to excuse her choices from that period. “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.”
Months after the Spitzer scandal broke, Dupré’s affair with TJ Earle, Alix’s father, became public. The two met by chance at a restaurant in New Jersey. “We talked for five or six hours, and our connection was immediate,” Dupré said.
TJ was married to Alisa Earle at the time. “TJ was married,” Dupré wrote. “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.”
A child caught in the fallout
Alix Earle, now 25 and a prominent TikTok personality, was a young child when the scandal broke. She recounted the experience in a 2023 episode of the podcast “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.”
Alix said she didn’t fully understand the situation until fourth grade, when she searched her own family online. “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,” she told host Alex Cooper.
She described the public nature of her father’s affair. “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.”
Alix said the scandal affected her social life as a child, recalling that other parents sometimes discouraged their kids from visiting 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.'”
Alix also described the discomfort of being introduced to Dupré as a child. “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 said. “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.”
A family built over time
Dupré and TJ Earle married in 2013, and their relationship with Alix evolved in the years since. Dupré wrote that she has made peace with her past and no longer feels compelled to justify it to others.
“Twenty years ago, I wanted everyone to understand me. Today, I don’t,” she 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,” she 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 wrote. “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.”
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