The fall from grace of the governor of New York, after it was revealed he was spending large sums on escorts, has led to speculation about the sexual appetites of the ultra-rich, who have the wherewithal to indulge their fantasies writes Denis Staunton.
ELIOT SPITZER'S shamefaced appearance before reporters in New York this week had all the elements of what has become an American political ritual, including the stoic wife standing alongside as he made an admission of guilt that contrived to flatter himself.
"Over the course of my public life, I have insisted - I believe correctly - that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct," he said. "I can and will ask no less of myself. For this reason, I am resigning from the office of governor."
At 48, Spitzer had been one of the brightest stars in the Democratic Party, tipped as a possible presidential nominee in 2012 and already a hero to many on the left. As New York's attorney general, he had angered Wall Street with aggressive investigations into corporate chicanery that seldom produced convictions but succeeded in changing behaviour in the financial services industry.
The business world may have viewed Spitzer as a vindictive, politically motivated prosecutor who recklessly trashed reputations, but to many small investors and working people he was a white knight, a fearless crusader against corporate greed. "I haven't felt like this since I heard that Jack Kennedy was shot," one veteran trade union leader said of Spitzer's resignation this week.
What made Spitzer's fall most painful to his admirers was the nature of it. As a prosecutor, he had broken up prostitution rings in New York City, and just last year, as governor, he sought to increase the penalties facing men who used their services. Now he was exposed as "Client Nine", a regular user of Emperors Club VIP, a high-end escort service that offered prostitutes for up to $4,500 (€2,900) an hour.
On the night before Valentine's Day, he had arranged for a woman called Kristen to travel from New York to Washington to meet him at the Mayflower Hotel, just across the road from the White House. Investigators said that Spitzer also met women from the Emperors Club during visits to Texas and Florida in recent months and some reports have suggested that he spent $80,000 (€51,000) on the club's services over the past year.
An FBI wiretap recorded Spitzer negotiating with the escort service's booking agent, discussing the advance payment he had sent and the $500 credit that he wanted to use towards his next assignation. The wiretap also recorded a conversation between Kristen and the booking agent after her encounter with Spitzer.
Kristen was identified this week as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a 22-year-old aspiring musician who ran away from her home and has been struggling in New York ever since. "I am all about my music, and my music is all about me," she says on her MySpace page. "When I was 17, I left home. It was my decision and I've never looked back. Left my hometown. Left a broken family. Left abuse. Left an older brother who had already split. Left and learned what it was like to have everything, and lose it, again and again."
SPITZER'S ENCOUNTERS with prostitutes might never have been discovered if his bank had not alerted the authorities to suspicious movements of cash from his accounts. Spitzer seemed to be withdrawing large sums and moving them around to disguise the fact that they were coming from him.
Investigators initially suspected that Spitzer was using the cash for bribes or some other form of political corruption but they soon traced the deposits to QAT International, which was later linked to the Emperors Club. No one knew at first the nature of QAT's business or why Spitzer seemed to be trying to hide what appeared to be payments to a mysterious company that seemed to have no real business.
Much of the media attention surrounding Spitzer's fall has focused on the high cost of the prostitutes he used, but Russ Alan Prince, an expert on the ultra-rich who runs a market research consultancy based in Connecticut, is unimpressed.
"Actually, the money Spitzer was spending is at the low end," he says. "There's a group out of Hong Kong which basically provides concubines for a year at a price of a minimum of $1 million (€640,000). Weekends are a minimum of $50,000. So Spitzer, as far as paying, was at the low end of the spectrum."
For a book he co-wrote, The Sky's the Limit: Marketing Luxury to the New Jet Set, Prince surveyed 661 people who owned private aircraft and found that 34 per cent of males and 20 per cent of females had paid for sex.
Prince, who believes the real figure may be higher, says that the super-rich don't use prostitutes to avoid expensive personal entanglements but to experience something that would otherwise be unavailable.
"It was really about unique experiences. Women were talking about four-hour sessions. Men were talking about multiple orgasms with one partner in one session," he says. "It was the quality and uniqueness of the experience that they were really looking for and that's why they were willing to spend their money, as opposed to just finding somebody else to have sex with, because it turns out with that kind of money there are more than enough people who are happy to line up. They were really paying for quality at a level that was very different."
Spitzer, whose father is worth about $500 million (€320 million) and who has himself been successful all his life, has been subjected this week to a deluge of pop psychoanalysis about the appetites of powerful men.
Prince says that, although the very rich and successful have higher levels of infidelity than others, they are not all that different. "It's just that they have the ability to indulge themselves much more," he says. "A lot of people have fantasies - these people can actually enact their fantasies and they can often do it in a way that they're protected. I'm sure you have people all over the place with the same fantasies. It's just that they're doing it."