The London Call Girl Blogger
I used to follow Belle de Jour - the diary of a London call girl - back in the days when I was still living in the UK capital. It was titillating and seemed authentic despite the anonymity of the author. The writing was excellent and the subject matter was naturally quite interesting. I was not surprised when the blog won the Guardian best written blog award in 2003. The online success was followed by a few books that proved quite popular (but I never read). However, the identity of the author remained elusive. Until now.
Behold, Belle de Jour is Dr Brooke Magnanti, a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. She is a specialist in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology currently working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. In an interview for the Sunday Times she confirms that she was a call girl for 14 months:
From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.
She charged £300 an hour for her services, of which she got £200. The average appointment lasted two hours; she saw clients two or three times a week, “sometimes less, sometimes a great deal more”. How many men has she slept with for money? “A lot.” Dozens? Hundreds? “I can’t honestly remember,” she says, laughing. “Somewhere between dozens and hundreds.”
