Ashley Earle, Once Ashley Dupré, Tells Her Side of the Spitzer Scandal and Alix Earle's Family Story

Ashley Earle has spent most of her adult life known as someone else’s headline. This week, she put her own words to it. In an essay for Elle, the 40-year-old wrote about being Ashley Dupré, the woman at the center of the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal, and about the life she built in the years that followed.

The essay doesn’t skip the difficult parts. Ashley writes that she moved to New York to chase a music career, waited tables, and chose to accept money for dates with high-profile men. When the scandal broke and Spitzer resigned as governor, her name and face became tabloid property. Months later, she met TJ Earle, Alix Earle’s father, at a New Jersey restaurant while he was still married. She writes that they crossed a line, and that she takes responsibility for her part in hurting his then-wife Alisa and her daughters.

What followed was a slow, unglamorous rebuild. TJ and Alisa divorced, he and Ashley married in 2013, and she became stepmom to Alix and Ashtin. She and TJ now share three children together and appear alongside the rest of the family on Alix’s Netflix series, Earle Meets World. Reading the essay, you don’t get the feeling she’s asking for applause. It’s more like a woman closing the book on a chapter that was never really hers to narrate. So tell us, do you think a family’s story can outgrow its hardest chapter?