• Heath Ledger's father proceeded with funding a nautically-themed bar in Greenpoint, in which Ledger had been a silent partner. The guy who designed Beatrice is involved. [Down By The Hipster, P6]
• Oh, hey, the Post has some John ; gossip! He wants to make a movie about poverty! Oh. Really? That's your John Edwards gossip? At least go for the obvious joke about how there will almost certainly be scenes in the film focused on the problem of unwed mothers, and Edwards sure knows a LOT ABOUT THAT, har har. [P6]
• Eliot Spitzer goes to Barton Gym on Upper East Side, people snicker, sad Spitzer leaves. [P6]
• After losing an initial court ruling, the crazy YouTube divorcée, Tricia Walsh-Smith, implied that her ex-husband Philip Smith and others at the Shubert Organization are behind a bunch of death threats. She's really inhabiting this role! [Post]
• The new backstory behind the Christian Bale assault allegations: His mother and sister wanted him to loan $200,000 to his sister, supposedly for her kids. He didn't want to give the money, and there was a fight, and the mom may have said some unkind things about Bale's wife. Then, the women say, Bale pushed and shoved them. The headline? Batman and sobbin'.
• Brad Pitt said the paparazzi BETTER stop taking pictures of his kids using their fancy "telephoto lenses." Situations involving the baby twins are private time, and will stay private time until he auctions them off to the highest bidder for celebrity magazine purposes. [LA Rag Mag]

• The daughter of former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, Courtenay, is dating the heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, Casey. Semel used to date Lindsay Lohan, Johnson used to date a dude, until he was "snatched" away by her aunt. [P6]
• Guy Ritchie was seen repeatedly drinking alone in his pub, listening to a folk guitarist, so everyone assumed his divorce with Madonna was about to finally happen. There was something about her kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. Then the pop starlet issued a big massive denial of the divorce, and her affair with A-Rod, and everything. No one's really sure whether to believe her.
• Eliot Spitzer hooker Ashley Alexandra Dupre is no longer suing Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis for distributing racy footage shot when she was 17. It is time to "focus on the positive" ways to exploit being a famous call girl. [Post]
• A former staffer for celebrity TV chef Rachael Ray said he was harassed for being anorexic. OK, so I suppose there is at least one bad reason to decline to eat Rachael Ray's food. [Post]
• Once-pregnant transexual man Thomas Beatie gave birth to a healthy baby girl without a c-section. [ABC News]
• There are threats of a Friends movie. Sex And The City is, of course, responsible for this travesty. [P6]

Mr. Spitzer is moving aggressively to occupy a niche created by the credit crunch, the subprime mortgage crisis, a surge in foreclosures, and a declining real estate market. He is looking to mine for riches in projects that banks are no longer willing to finance.

Distressed real estate funds — also known as "vulture" or, more euphemistically, "opportunity" funds — typically promise returns of more than 20% and are active in Florida, Nevada, and Southern California. They rely heavily on pension and university endowment investments. Mr. Spitzer is said to be envisioning projects valued between $100 million and $500 million.

This is precisely the sort of thing Spitzer could never have gotten away with back when he had to pretend to care about Regular Folk, so really that whole hooker thing has turned out to be something of a boon! As he told the union officials, people have been surprisingly supportive of him when they stop him on the street. Especially Europeans! Sex is "no big deal," he says people tell him. And the Europeans probably say "ees no beeg deal" or "c'est la vie!" Or "way to fuck hookers, Mr. Governor! Now please pay me significantly less than I paid for this property I bought and flip it for a small profit!"

Spitzer Mulls Starting Vulture Fund [NYSun]

Prosecutors have records of Spitzer's transactions, phone records and taped conversations with Emperors Club, and are confident they need little more to nail him on charges that could include violating prostitution laws and money laundering, sources said... Spitzer had to resign his office after the Feds caught him on tape making arrangements for a "date" with Dupre at a hotel in Washington, DC, on Feb. 13.

So the Feds are carefully lining up witnesses even though they already had Spitzer on tape, drove him from elected office and screwed up his marriage. Excellent: The goal here should be to drag this out as long as possible, and to ruin the maximum number of lives.

[Post, AP]

“No one in the real estate world will, pardon my French, give a shit about the prostitutes... Guys in our industry, if he started attending real estate board functions, they’d get a kick out of it,” said the consultant. “We live in this sort of perverted, celebrity-driven world.”

Centerfolds just a few floors down from his desk.

Sounds like a supportive environment. What could possibly go wrong?

[Observer]

Bear Stearns executives believed another public statement was needed. Arrangements were made for Mr. Schwartz to appear from Florida on business network CNBC.

Minutes after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Schwartz told the cable-TV audience, "Some people could speculate that Bear Stearns might have some problems...since we're a significant player in the mortgage business. None of those speculations are true."

But before he could get through his talking points — which included mentioning the firm's strong cash reserves and indicating to investors that Bear Stearns would have a profitable first quarter — Mr. Schwartz was interrupted by breaking news from New York: Gov. Eliot Spitzer, having been linked to patronizing prostitutes, was resigning. Mr. Schwartz was dismayed, but got a chance to make his points after the news break.

Later, as the crisis is reaching a breaking point, Bear convenes an emergency board meeting. But hey, former weed-smoking CEO James "Jimmy" Cayne had better things to do:

Mr. Schwartz arranged an emergency board meeting to brief directors that Thursday night. It was late, so most phoned in. James Cayne, who'd remained as chairman after stepping down as CEO Jan. 8, missed part of the discussion because he was playing in a bridge tournament at a Detroit hotel.

[WSJ; pic via Lolfed.com]

The National Enquirer, in a story headlined "Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring," reported that the Stones had apparently run personal ads in a magazine called Local Swing Fever and on a Web site that had been set up with Nydia's credit card. "Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband, experienced swingers, seek similar couples or exceptional muscular . . . single men," the ad on the Web site stated. The ads sought athletes and military men, while discouraging overweight candidates, and included photographs of the Stones. At the time, Stone claimed that he had been set up by a "very sick individual," but he was forced to resign from Dole's campaign. Stone acknowledged to me that the ads were authentic.

So. He wrote a letter to the FBI about Spitzer's hooker patronage. We know that. Also he has advice on how McCain can win the election that would probably actually work, if McCain is smart enough to run a Nixon campaign.

Stone also seems to have enjoyed Angels in America, as his description of legendary scumbag Roy Cohn closely matches a monologue the Cohn character delivers in that play. "'Roy was not gay,' Stone told me. 'He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate.'" Glad we got that cleared up.

The Dirty Trickster [New Yorker]

But the whole thing runs off the rails at the end, and the non-Spitzer Spitzer gets away with it, and no one gets to publish or gawk at pictures downloaded from MySpace. Instead the governor is permitted to keep his sex life private and his wife is left with both her dignity and independent political ambition intact. WTF? This is a detective show. I was implicitly promised the cheap thrill of watching imaginary justice visited upon make-believe criminals committing victimless crimes. Boo!

Here's a brief look at this alternate Spitzer reality. The guy who plays the governor has Spitzer's look down, although he's a bit young and has too much hair. Would-be Dupre is "Chanelle" in the courtroom scene — she doesn't look much like Jersey girl Dupre, and she's Brazilian or something so the governor just has her deported in the end.

TV Squad has a review of the whole episode.

A club called Headquarters New York is giving you a perfect excuse to do what you've been dreaming of since this whole scandal broke:

The club, located on West 38th Street, will hold an "Ashley Dupre Look-alike Contest" tonight at 10 p.m. So, if you're feeling like a girl gone wild — or a guy gone wild for that matter — we'd like to see a drag version of the infamous call girl who felled Eliot Spitzer - anyway, the point is, show up at Headquarters tonight.

[Urbanite]

So we know what Scott Storch will be doing tonight.

But she lied about her age and pretended to be in the proper frame of mind to give consent, so maybe Team Francis scores some points in Dupre's $10 million suit against Girls Gone Wild for releasing the video under her name and without permission, and under false pretenses. I'm not sure. In fact, a supercomputer somewhere is probably furiously trying to calculate how the moral high ground is altered by this tipsy future hooker's videotaped and misleading consent, given five years ago, to be in a cheap, flash-your-tits DVD produced by a guy who would later go to jail in connection with a case against him for allegedly making racy videos of underaged girls.

In the meantime, enjoy the brief video below, in which Jersey girl Dupre takes on a southern accent picked up in North Carolina, where she went to high school, and uses the assumed name Amber Arpaio to declare she is ready to Go Wild.

By the way, Girls Gone Wild appears to have retained public relations firm 5WPR to disseminate this video. The firm excluded tips@gawker.com from its distribution list. We're kind of hurt. Was it something we said? Everything we said? Awesome! Anyway, pro tip: This is not how you spell "permission," although we're guessing Joe Francis did not catch the slip:

HERE IT IS- ASHLEY/ KRISTEN IN HER OWN WORDS-GIVING PERMISSON TO BE VIDEO-TAPED BY GGW

Spitzer, New York's Love Guv, and Clemens both had reputations as brawlers, who made tons of enemies on their way to the top. The people on their side loved them, but outside of their own teams they were widely despised. Clemens wisely spent his career in the American League, where designated hitters could take his turn at bat so he wouldn't have to risk getting beaned in retaliation for his frequent knockdowns of opposing batters.

Furthermore, both men suffered from huge bouts of hypocrisy. Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings while patronizing them at the same time. Clemens was always boasting of his hard work, diet, and exercise program, while (IN ALL LIKELIHOOD) being shot up with steroids by his trainer. When his trainer finally told the story, Clemens continued to deny everything, which he does to this day, even as most of the other players named have implicitly or explicitly admitted when the steroid allegations against them were true. And, he filed a defamation suit against the trainer, which brought Clemens' entire reputation under legal review. The Post reports today that the pitcher had at least two other women on the side in addition to McCready, so take your sanctimonious family man act and inject it into your buttocks along with lots of testosterone, Roger Clemens.

An added bonus: like the lawyers who roped their careers to Spitzer's only to see them crumble along with him, Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, is going to come out of this looking like a bald-faced liar, like his client. Just yesterday he said there was no sex between Clemens and McCready; today, she's admitting it all over the place.

Spitzer was at least fighting on the side of righteousness. For Clemens, that was only true if he was pitching for your team. Among those enjoying Clemens' downfall the most: this young man:

Dupré's lawsuit claims Francis promoted the new videos by saying she was "doing a lot of hot lesbian acts," which she says is false. The suit also accuses Francis of trying to get the public to believe Dupré "is performing sexual acts'' in the videos. Not true again, she says...

"Defendants created the false impression that [Dupré] has endorsed and/or approves of the graphic, sexual content, including lesbian acts, contained in the video, which in reality she does not," the suit says.

Dupre is also not happy that Francis registered ashleydupre.net. She is also arguing that, when she encountered Francis at 17, she was both too young and too drunk to consent to the video. Obviously! Within a few short years she was already making much wiser and healthier decisions about how to live her life.

[Miami Herald, People]

The second hooker-informant also told investigators Spitzer was fond of using sex toys to enhance his own pleasure, the sources said.

"The full portrait of Mr. Spitzer's sexual interests has yet to be told," one source said.

...[The second hooker] expanded on the portrait of Spitzer's sexual fetishes in graphic detail, the sources said, also divulging that he had a penchant for props.

"Using sex toys to enhance his own pleasure," "props" — this basically means butt plugs, or something along those lines, right? This is a very important question, please speculate wildly in the comments.

Also, apparently GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone was totally right about another Spitzer kink, this one EVEN MORE OUTLANDISH:

Sources said the second hooker also noted that Spitzer liked to keep his socks on during sex - a claim previously made by Republican political operative Roger Stone.

Next up from the tabs, a step by step guide to what Spitzer was into during foreplay and other angles to this story that make everyone uncomfortable.

Also, between the above front-page headline and the inside headline — "'TWO ON ONE' VS. SPITZER" — it doesn't seem like the Post really brought its hooker-scandal A-game to this one. There are sex toys involved, after all.

[Post]

She describes herself as "Andy Warhol's Number One Publicity Protege," and she has parlayed her connection with the pop artist into a successful career. She worked at Interview Magazine and CBS Records before founding her own firm, and today she's one of the city's go-to agencies for celebrities. She even helped take Usher "to another level"! So there's that. There's no doubt she's much more likely to help launch Dupre on her own career than to serve as a solid grey corporate well between her and the media, a role Eliot Spitzer's own chosen PR firm is well suited to play.

Also, as Emily Gould discovered, Susan Blond has wild hair. And she's had her web domain name snatched by incompetent rival superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian, putting her in bad company.

We have an email in to SBI to find out what they plan to do for Dupre, and we'll let you know if we hear back.

Yet, one can't deny how upset she appeared at the press conference acknowledging the scandal; New York magazine wrote that it was delayed for an hour while Spitzer waited for Silda to "compose herself." (Maybe she wasn't crying about the knowledge of the prostitutes per se, but the amount of money spent on them?)

"They were strolling and talking. It seems very obvious they're staying together," says the witness. "They weren't holding hands, but were walking closely together under the cherry blossoms."

The Daily News' tipster also noted the couple weren't wearing hats or sunglasses. Silda was out and about enough to also be spotted by our (fairly effusive) emailer.

Maybe they want to be seen.

Eliot and Silda have dropped some big hints. If they clarify exactly what is going on, we can finally move along to judging them.

[Daily News]

Sometimes it can be sad to be newsworthy. Sorry, Charlie!

Oh, but what about school head Thomas Kelly, the guy who fired Andrew Trees and Mr. Janice Minn? Turns out, he's a bit of a schmuck.

Tom Kelly was selected to run Horace Mann by the school's board, over the protest of the school's staff. He came from a public school background, and had done admirable work with mentally handicapped kids, but he also allowed a construction companies to dump their toxic garbage all over school grounds.

Here are the dumps in question. Kelly justified this by pointing out that the companies were nice enough to place brand-new athletic fields on top of the landfills. Critics counter that these fields will give the kids cancer and also they are illegal. The State of New York closed the fields and the taxpayers were stuck with the bill for cleaning them up.

Here's a fun factoid: the toxicity of the fields was revealed the same fall that Kelly started at Horace Mann. Then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a Horace Mann alum. His wife Silda is on the board of trustees—and was on the search committee that picked Kelly.

Spitzer only sued one of the three towns that took the cancerous construction garbage through illegal no-bid contracts. It was Eastchester, not Kelly's town of Valhalla. Take from that what you will!

In 2006, the Valhalla field finally reopened, mostly safe for use. Mostly.

The soil was analyzed for PCBs, pesticides, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and volatile organic compounds. Most chemicals for which testing was performed were not detected in the soil, according to the DEC. But of the chemicals that were detected, most fell below state safety guidelines.

Levels of PAHs above state guidelines were found only in sample TP-7, which was the soil taken from the steep slope on the western side of the athletic field, facing Columbus Avenue. In that sample, the DEC acknowledged that levels of PAHs exceeded state guidelines, but concluded that "routine exposure to soil on the slope is probably unlikely." The agency noted that the District should maintain the grass cover on the slope to further reduce the potential for exposure.

(During Kelly's Horace Mann tenure, the school got artificial turf for its athletic field, which is not located on top of a cancerous dump.)

The Daily News' follow up to their own front page splash last week about Davis' client list was Saturday's front page splash about New York Rangers hockey star Sean Avery's number being present in the black book. Avery denied everything. This morning, the Post strikes back with a story purporting to debunk the NYDN's Avery connection:

"I personally spoke to her, and she confirmed that she has never had any contact with Sean Avery in any shape or form," Davis' lawyer, Mark Jay Heller, told The Post yesterday...

"It is believed that alleged black book . . . is not authentic," Heller said.

Heller also says he MAY launch a lawsuit against the NYDN. Hey, maybe he can team up with Eliot Spitzer when he decides to sue the Post for connecting him to Kristin Davis! A charge which is repeated in today's story, although it has now been reformulated slightly to read, "Davis, who was rumored to have been one of Spitzer's personal favorites, is currently jailed on charges of promoting prostitution."

Mitigating evidence in favor of the black book being real: The NYDN used it to contact several people who did admit seeing Davis' hookers. So it would be a pretty convincing and incredible forgery.

We will continue to follow this shady, unclear story until the truth comes out and we can definitively say which media outlet is most deserving of mockery.

[pic via NYP]

"I decided to go forward and talk to the IRS about Ron Burkle and all the Machiavellian connections and all the monies and cash exchanged between Ron Burkle and his big buddy Bill Clinton," she says. Burkle, who likes to fly around on private jets and flirt icky-old-man-style with much younger women has been such a headache for Clinton while his wife is trying to run for President that he had to pretend to cut all ties with the man.

Next, McClintock touches on the subject of Eliot Spitzer and prostitutes, which reminds her of something about Burkle and Clinton. Something you can watch here.

Some of the artists mentioned on the Emperors Club site (which is still live, and which is amusingly identical to their whoring site) were contacted by Artnet. They had no clue they had awesome seven-diamond profiles on this escort service's art page. They also weren't too surprised, of course, because, yeah, making it as an artist pretty much already is whoring.

Success is about sex appeal and convincing rich people to spend considerably more money than reasonable people might expect on you. For the buyers, it's not about the pleasure of the act or the object itself so much as the power, and the status.

All of this is patently obvious of course, which is why that one artist actually auctioned herself off for sex, that one time. Right? Was that a real thing, or an "art" thing? Or did we see it in some bitingly satirical movie?

Artnet News [Artnet via Artforum]

After getting scooped on the Davis-Spitzer story by the Post yesterday (or not?), the NYDN today strikes back with a cover story touting how they have exclusively obtained her black book with all her clients. We were offered the same black book yesterday, in an unsolicited email. The guy doing the offering was looking for a cash offer himself. I'm pretty positive it's the same black book that the NYDN ran with for their story, because the snippet we got includes some of the same info included in their story. Wonder how the paper got it? We'll let you know if we find out.

Not only that: the NYDN says in their story, "But law enforcement officials yesterday shot down a report that then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been identified as a regular client of bottle blond Davis." With no real elaboration.

Meanwhile, the Post today reports that Jessica Cutler, the whorish DC blogger "Washingtonienne," actually worked for Davis' escort service for a while. Cutler refused to say whether she did or not. More importantly, the Post refers to it as "a Manhattan call-girl ring that counted Eliot Spitzer as a client." Which would seem to indicate they're standing behind their story yesterday.

One thing is clear: If either paper had this story really nailed down and air tight, they would be giving it much more play. If the Daily News had rock-solid proof that the Post fucked up on the Spitzer connection, they would certainly make that a blowout story. Likewise for the Post—which didn't even put the Kristin Davis story on its cover today, opting instead for a piece on Yankee Hideki Matsui's wedding. And the fact that the Times, which has the most rigorous sourcing standards of all three papers, hasn't come down on either side of this tawdry but certainly newsworthy story makes us believe that hard facts are hard to come by.

So why not settle for informed speculation and inside rumors, then? If you have any insight into how this story is playing out, email us.

Incidentally, the former Governor could learn from the experience of David Mellor, a cabinet minister in the UK's Conservative government of the early 1990s. When an affair was revealed in the tabloids, Mellor's image was saved by one anecdote. His cunning publicist claimed Mellor had sex with his lover while wearing the "strip" of his beloved soccer club, Chelsea. That fact turned a sleazy adulterer into a man of the people, and Mellor survived. Spitzer, now fixed in the public's mind as an arrogant plutocrat who demands unsafe sex at $5,000 an hour, is in even more dire need of a humanizing detail. Unfortunately, the only clothing he made a habit of retaining, according to one former madame, were his black socks. Not the same. And his publicist doesn't appear to have the same shamelessness as Max Clifford, the Machiavellian genius of media manipulation in the UK who saved Mellor.

Seemingly self-appointed Republican "strategist" Roger Stone began his illustrious career pulling dirty tricks for Dick Nixon at the age of 19. He later served as post-resignation Nixon's "man in Washington," and competed with noted asshole Lee Atwater to see who could be more repellent and quasi-legal in support of Ronald Reagan's reelection. According to, well, Stone himself, he was responsible for disrupting the 2000 Florida recount. Recently he started an anti-Hillary Clinton organization called C.U.N.T.. That little scheme followed Stone's perfected model of gaining attention and press for himself, generally to the detriment of whatever cause he is ostensibly supporting, which is why it is best to take all of his grandiose claims of political sophistication with large grains of salt.

Last August, someone calling from Roger Stone's New York apartment called Eliot Spitzer's dad and left a crazy, sweary message. Once the details of the call were released to the media, Stone declared that it wasn't him at all, as he was attending a performance of Frost/Nixon the night the call was made. Frost/Nixon didn't have a performance that night, but whatever. Then Stone claimed to have gotten a tattoo of Richard Nixon's face, because the story was not yet crazy enough for his liking.

Stone sent the letter after the FBI called him up to maybe ask about that sweary phone call. Stone's response, of course, was to have lawyers send them a letter about Spitzer's whoring. "'Mr. Stone respectfully declines to meet with you at this time,' the letter states, before going on to offer 'certain information' about Spitzer." Of course, the banking investigation that eventually led to the Emperors Club bust was already underway by November, so even if the date on the letter is accurate, who knows if it had any effect.

The whole thing could be bullshit, but at least it's well-crafted bullshit. The socks!

Beach man told FBI of alleged Spitzer sexscapades [Miami Herald]

• Just FYI, Beowulf was the hero, the good guy, the guy who saved the king, not the one who brought him down. Read the book. Grendel is the monster.

• Oh my god! I just lost 3 minutes of my life. I’m such an idiot.

• Really!? In the Times? You’re an idiot.

• Does Veronica Webb have any level of formal education??? Did anyone edit her article? God.

• This complete and utter tripe, served with a delicious topping of ignorance, was absolutely fabulous!

  [NYT]

[ELIOT SPITZER LOOK-A-LIKE] An Eliot Spitzer look-a-like and a sound-a-like (not necessarily be the same person.) Caucasian man in his 40s. Slight baldness, receding hairline. Also, we will not be showing the actor's face and will be seeing him more in profile and silhouetted.

[YOUNG WOMAN] Caucasian, 20s a pretty brunette, long hair, nice figure. Again, we won't be showing her face and will be seeing her more in profile and silhouetted.

[DAVID PATTERSON LOOK-A-LIKE] African-American male in 40s. Again, no face and will be seeing him more in profile and silhouetted.

[BRITISH GUY] A guy with a British accent that could do a turn as an on-camera spokesman. The idea being that, because he is British, he would say, 'G'morning Guv'nor!' He would need to be likable and funny in his performance.

[FBI GUYS] A couple FBI guys. 25 to 50 years old. The idea being that two guys are sitting in a van outside the hotel and, while watching Spitzer, comment on the hotel amenities.