The decision of Britain’s most notorious anonymous sex blogger to reveal her identify came as a great relief. It finally puts paid to the suspicion that Belle de Jour c’est moi. The first time my name was linked with the site was in a Mail on Sunday article in 2004 entitled: ‘Who does Belle the Blogger think she’s kidding?’ My wife didn’t read the article, but heard about it from a friend and immediately got the wrong end of the stick.
‘I gather some prostitute with an anonymous blog has outed you as one of her clients in the Mail on Sunday,’ she said.
‘No, no, they think I’m the author of the blog.’
‘You? I don’t understand. Why would anyone pay to have sex with you?’
I tried to explain that I wasn’t suspected of being a prostitute, only of masquerading as one, but that just led to more questions about why people thought I’d have the expertise to perpetrate such a hoax. All in all, it would have been better if my name hadn’t been mentioned. Lisa Hilton, who was also suspected of being Belle de Jour, had a similar experience. ‘It upset my grandmother when I was “outed” on the front page of the Sunday Times as a working prostitute,’ she says.
Several journalists have called to ask how I felt about being a suspect and I said I was flattered because her blog was so well-written. In truth, though, the revelation that the author is a 34-year-old scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti — and that she really has worked as a call girl — has led to a reassessment of her literary abilities. I took it for granted she was a common or garden prostitute and was therefore quite impressed by her wit and erudition. Now that I know she’s a post-doctoral research scientist, I’m less awestruck.
For those who assumed she was a mischievous hack, the downward revision is even greater. The best piece I’ve seen about the affair was by Oliver Marre in the Independent: ‘Am I the only person to find it disappointing that a famous £300-per-hour prostitute hasn’t turned out to be a balding male writer?’ He pointed out that when people praised Belle’s literary talent they often meant that the person perpetrating the hoax deserved some credit for having created such a believable fictional character. Given that she’s the real McCoy, she’s entitled to less kudos.
Then again, Magnanti may just be saying it’s all true because to admit that she invented some of the stories on her blog might hurt her book sales. She claims only to have worked as an escort for 14 months and unless she was very busy in that period, it seems unlikely she could have furnished herself with enough material for such a voluminous website. It’s also curious that Orion, her British publisher, categorises her first two books as ‘Non-Fiction/Memoir’ but the third, which purports to be a continuation of the same story, as ‘Fiction’.
If I were a young journalist trying to make a name for myself, I’d go through her Diary of a London Call Girl with a fine-tooth comb, comparing locations with Magnanti’s known whereabouts at the time, etc, in an effort to prove that at least some of the entries are fake. Ironically, that would seriously damage her career as a writer, even though it would prove that she’s actually capable of writing fiction.
Her literary career will probably nosedive in any event now that we know who she is. In her most recent blog entry, she claims the reason she maintained her anonymity for six years was to protect herself: ‘It will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.’ In fact, it was a brilliant marketing gimmick, fuelling hundreds of yards of column inches. Had Magnanti originally published the blog under her own name, Belle de Jour would never have attracted the notoriety she did. No book deal, no TV show.
In the end, the truly impressive thing about Magnanti was her ability to conceal her identity for so long, and hence to keep the gravy train going. According to India Knight, the journalist she confessed to, she engaged in ‘a quite extraordinary, MI5-ish degree of subterfuge — companies set up to receive payments, false email accounts, much legal advice, smoke and mirrors.’ If things don’t work out for her as a research scientist, I suspect she could land a job with Kroll Associates.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
Comments