ABC News will get the first television interview with Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. An ABC News insider confirms Diane Sawyer conducted the interview yesterday.
As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan first reported, the interview will air next Friday on 20/20.
“This is not the Eliot Spitzer story. This is the Ashley Dupre story,” the ABC insider tells us.
The only public comments made by Dupre since the scandal broke in March has been a few sentences to the New York Times in the days after Spitzer resigned as Governor. The New York Post got an exclusive as well — but just pictures.
Interestingly this will be the continuation of Sawyer’s previous reporting on prostitution in America. Within weeks of the Spitzer story breaking, ABC aired Sawyer’s two-hour special, “Prostitution in America: Working Girls Speak,” in which she spent time at the famous legal brothel, Moonlite Bunny Ranch.
Gawker’s tipster reports ABC “paid a large ‘consulting fee’ and for ‘archival footage’ — the standard way interview subjects are paid by the networks.”