By Laura Topham and Helen Weathers
For six years, her identity remained a closely guarded secret: a tantalising mystery for all those hooked on the stockings-and-stilettos tales of high-class call girl Belle de Jour.
A male fantasy with her Chanel nail varnish, lacy knickers, sexual tricks and vast knowledge of French cinema, the anonymous author of the best-selling memoir The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl prompted a frenzy of speculation.
Was Belle real? Was she, in fact, a man with an exceptionally feverish imagination? After all, her sensational diary, which started life in 2003 as an award-winning blog and inspired a glossy TV drama starring Billie Piper, was considered by some to be almost too good to be true.
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'Everyone loved Belle de Jour' Well, now the truth is out and it is almost stranger than fiction. For not only is Belle de Jour real, but it emerges she is a high-flying, 33-year-old academic by the name of Dr Brooke Magnanti (pictured below).
A petite, American-born blonde, she has a PhD from Sheffield University in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science, and works at the Bristol Initiative for Research for Child Health, researching the effects of exposure to pesticides on foetuses and infants.
But she's now revealed that, as an impoverished student, she worked from 2003 to late 2004 as a £300-an-hour prostitute through an escort agency, pocketing a third of the fee for her two hour sessions with clients, whom she met two or three times a week.
Dr Magnanti "outed" herself on Sunday in a three-page interview in a broadsheet newspaper.
"Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn't," she said, swatting away criticism that her diaries glamorise a seedy, dangerous industry.
'Fiery and passionate'
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