When the NY Post reported Friday morning that sex-blogger-turned-novelist Jessica Cutler was linked to the Wicked Models escort ring, Neal Ungerleider at FishbowlNY tracked down her alleged agency profile. In an email exchange Friday night, Cutler told me what she told the Post: While she knows Wicked’s proprietress, Kristin “Billie” Davis, her head had been Photoshopped onto pictures like the one above (cropped from the alleged original) . Though she came across as somewhat rattled by her experience with the press, she was doing her best to take the situation in stride. “I’ve been through this before,” she wrote, “and trust me, I would MUCH rather have everyone think I was an escort than be suspected of money laundering or something actually illegal.”
Cutler also had questions of her own about Davis’s attempt to shop a memoir, which purports to tell the story of how she ran an escort service “that grosses over $6 million per year, conducts business in five countries and works with famous models and clients.” A brief item announcing the project was posted to Publishers Marketplace shortly before the raid that led to her arrest. “So is there interest in the America’s Next Top Madam proposal?” Cutler asked, before emphasizing that she was totally uninvolved in the project, the timing of which she considers questionable: “At this point,” she observed, “a proposal would be treated as a written confession.”
(So, how about it, publishing insiders: Anybody care about this book proposal?)
One small clarification on the publishing side of thngs: FishbowlNY suggests that Cutler’s novel, The Washingtonienne, “sunk like a lead zepplin,” which, in addition to making grammarians wince, is a mischaracterization. Selling 25,000 copies of a debut novel (plus whatever she sold in 2007) is—whether or not it’s what Hyperion expected for its $300,000—nothing to snipe at.