We couldn't help but click on her pictures, then read over her My Space account. We learned about her story, too, and pictured the reality of her young life.

She was a Jersey girl, on the run from a bad family situation, looking to move to the big city to chart her own course. Music was her escape and hopeful vocation, but in order to pay her bills there, she'd need some cash. She'd been homeless, hungry, knew what it felt like to struggle in a place that sucks up the vulnerable and rewards the powerful. And so, the brunette beauty with the rockin' body turned to prostitution. Not the icky, street pimp kind. But the undercover, businessman variety, where no one gets hurt, everyone has money (and usually a wife), and girls earn their keep not on the streets but in the finer hotels, discretely behind closed doors. Hey, it pays the bills and it's better than stripping.

We feel for Ashley Dupre, the exotic and at once wholesome-looking call girl who allegedly serviced New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer several times over. Somebody's daughter, nobody's concern, she took the easy money to fund her life, hoping it would give her freedom to sing and perhaps one day make music a reality. The odds in that world were certainly against her. And now, she's the slutty coda on a promising political career and what will be a historic scandal. Did we mention a family with three teen daughters has been destroyed?

If New York seemed tough before, wait till she feels the brunt of the paparazzi onslaught, camping outside her building, following her everywhere, calling her parents in search of a story, a television appearance, an exclusive with the party girl who took down a state.

Wonder how long it takes to sell her tale of sex and power to OK magazine or some other publication that pays for news and offers her the world to spill the details of how she romped with the governor and how he liked to do things "not safe," according to the fed transcript. Was he into weirdness, lonely, angry? What did he like? And why does she think he'd sacrifice his career — and his good name — for a few nights of passion, if you could call it that, with a no-name girl half his age — for big money.

It hasn't been easy for Monica Lewinsky. Nobody paid her but she's still a punchline, even as she moved on with her education and business ventures. She's still the chubby bimbo with the stained blue dress who got the president impeached.

For Ashley, we hope it's different, and if she takes the money and runs — why wouldn't she after her name and image have been blasted all over the globe — that she uses it to change her life for the better. We hope she will continue to sing and that life ahead blesses her with self-esteem and direction — not sleaziness and despair.

— Andrea Billups, The Washington Times