Should Call Girls (and Boys) Kiss and Tell?

As public trainwrecks go, Spitzergate was a doozy. This week, we observe the one-year anniversary of the resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who, after a successful career busting escort agencies, was himself felled by revelations that he was a high-paying john. Ashley Dupre, one of the escorts he was seeing, feels he's been "punished enough."

The real casualties of his downfall, however, are people whose sin was trying to earn a living in one of New York's more durable service industries -- among them Kristin Davis, who is reported to have played matchmaker for the governor and spent three months in Rikers Island for operating an escort business. (Until one of her escorts spotted Spitzer in a local newspaper, Davis says she had no idea who she was dealing with.)

Davis has just released a memoir, The Manhattan Madam, about running America's "most successful" prostitution ring. Never mind if "successful" in her time-honored profession used to mean staying out of jail. Davis, no slave to traditional values, sees herself as a trailblazing madam. And perhaps she is.

On her website, a beguiling pop-up called The Black Book Poll asks what Davis should do with her client list: "Give it to the media," "Sell it & make my money back," "Put it online for free," or "Hide it & forever remain silent."

Which made me wonder: what ever happened to the sacred cow of customer privacy that has helped define the demimonde of high-class hooking for so long?

Well, it's 2009. It's called "sex work" now. If it's just a job, a transaction like any other, does it still have to be a secret? What kind of discretion, if any, should a client now expect from a modern madam after his payment has been processed and his session has ended?

I put in a call to Natalie McLennan, author of The Price: My Rise and Fall as Natalia, New York's #1 Escort. Natalie worked in the industry for one fast, crazy year, faced felony charges in 2005, and spent 26 days in jail before returning to Montreal. She's a 21st-century escort whose brief career was accelerated by the Internet, but her response when asked what Davis should do with her client list is surprisingly old school: a dainty gasp.

"Hide it, of course! Destroy it!" she says. "Why destroy everybody's life? Does she feel abused? Were they bad to her?" Natalie admits she never got past her "honeymoon" period as an escort. Her year in the life sounds dizzying, but there is nothing dizzy about her vehement refusal to name names. When shopping her memoir to publishers, she says, she was routinely asked if she would name her clients, "but naming names wasn't even an option." As a memoirist, she says, "I wanted to be honest with myself, but I kept everybody else's skeletons in the closet. I was discreet about people's identities and personal details."

A generational world away is Janice, a madam in her early seventies who never felt at home on the Internet. I wasn't surprised by her reaction to the possibility of Davis revealing her list.

"That disgusts me. What will she gain by it? This is coming from anger and it's not going to make her feel good. Wives and children will be hurt. Men could lose their jobs."

But Davis lost her job. Where's our concern for a woman who paid the price for everybody else's illicit activity? Her clients -- who, she says, used corporate accounts and credit cards to book dates with escorts -- haven't been punished the way she has, even though they left paper trails for the authorities to follow.

Janice is more concerned about the wider impact. "If you're unfortunate enough to get caught, ruining other people's lives isn't going to help," she says. "If the police start arresting clients, we don't have customers anymore! They will be so afraid, they'll stop. I want them to believe that they'll be left alone so they'll continue spending money."