Below The Beltway

While Elliot Spitzer wallows in self-pity and waits to see if he’ll get indicted, his favorite prostitute seems to be doing well so far:

Hooking for the Emperors Club and emerging as the Earth’s best-known call girl is surely not the career plan Ashley Alexandra Dupre had in mind when she moved to New York to make it as a singer. But now that she’s achieved fame at the media stakeout level, as “Kristen,” a bunch of music biz talent scouts and managers are giving her a listen.

Hello, silver lining!

No, a record deal isn’t a sure thing. But look at it this way: She had no chance on Tuesday, before anyone knew her name, and she has a slender chance now that more than 2.3 million people have visited http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta and heard her songs.

“People want to see if there’s an opportunity there,” says Ted Cohen, a former talent scout for Warner Bros. and now managing partner at TAG Strategic, which advises start-up music companies on all aspects of digital media. “Is what she’s posted a hit? No. But if someone like Jay-Z or Danger Mouse or Jimmy Iovine wanted to give her a shot, she’ll have a shot.”

As any aspiring singer will tell you, the hard part of breaking out is getting noticed, and let’s just say Ms. Dupre has that covered. Yesterday, a scrum of reporters hunkered down at the apartment building in the Flatiron District where she lives, waiting for just a glimpse of the woman who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer. And as news of her life’s ambitions spread over the Internet (“I am all about my music,” she proclaims on her page, “and my music is all about me”) the songs she’d posted online were suddenly getting what they apparently never had before: an audition with some of the more powerful figures in the music biz.

(…)

“If Paris Hilton can make a hit song, anyone can,” says Erik Parker, director of content at the hip-hop Web site SOHH.com. “Paris Hilton, she swung the doors wide open.”

Actually the doors were open before Hilton.

“Look, Traci Lords had a music career after she’d acted in pornographic movies as a minor,” says Cohen. “People are very forgiving, and she’s going to emerge as the victim in all this.”

Whether any producers or managers have made any offers, we don’t know. So far, the only opportunity offered publicly to Dupre has come from Penthouse, whose publisher, Diane Silberstein, said she’d “love to have her in the magazine,” perhaps even on the cover.

To which we say: Perhaps?

Welcome to the New America, where selling your body can be the road to fame and fortune.