Famous London Call Girl Identity Revealed

“The first thing you should know about me is that I am a whore.”

So begins the show Secret Diary of a Call Girl, which is based on the books The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, which, in turn, are based on the blog Belle de Jour.

Belle was a call girl between 2003 and 2004, charging $500 an hour for her services, of which she got to keep a little under $350.

“The average appointment lasted two hours; she saw clients two or three times a week, ‘sometimes less, sometimes a great deal more,'” reports The Times.

Belle’s blog was so successful, so full of wit and humor, that many wondered whether she was real at all. Was she really a woman? Could a woman write this well and enjoy sex so much? Is she real at all?

Belle has come out of the closet, ladies and gentlemen. She is a London woman. She is Brooke Magnanti, a researcher specializing in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology with a a PhD. in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science.

The story recounted by India Knight for The Times of how complex it is to prove a person is a blogger is to me far more interesting than the fact that Brooke Magnanti is–OMGOMG–a call girl:

I am — as you would be — completely fascinated by meeting Belle/Brooke. She has contacted me because she’s had enough of being anonymous. There is also an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth lurking in the background; outing herself while she still has a measure of control over how it happens seems the sensible option.

“The what-ifs are what make me upset,” she says. “What if this happened; what if that happened? And I thought, well, there’s only one way to find out.”

Of course, having been anonymous for so long, she needs to prove to me that she is who she says she is before I agree to meet her. This turns out to be incredibly difficult and throws up interesting questions about authorship. I can’t very well ask to see her passport or utility bills — they may say Brooke Magnanti but they’re hardly going to say Belle de Jour.

Is she the real Belle? You or I could claim to be Belle de Jour; all we’d have to do is talk persuasively to someone about being on the game, using information that we could lift verbatim from the real Belle’s blog and books. (It’s rather odd that nobody thought of this: if you wanted to flush out the real Belle, surely all you’d have to do is produce a fake one.) We’re in e-mail contact before we meet; she tells me she’s in Croatia, but her agent tells me she’s in the West Country. Which is it? He says she’s recently told her mother about her former career; she tells me she hasn’t yet. She offers to show me her laptop, with her Belle typescripts on it, but I don’t have the time to wade through thousands of words checking for verisimilitude.

And yet I believe her — call it instinct. Brooke/Belle tells me her real name and provides details of an authoritative source that handles Belle de Jour’s cunningly concealed money trail. The Sunday Times newsdesk speaks to him; he confirms that Brooke is Belle and that the payments end up in an account belonging to Brooke Magnanti. After our interview, I ask her to post something cryptic up on her blog; this she does.

Read the whole thing–you know you want to.

Oh, and you can add @belledejour_uk on Twitter.