Influencer Alix Earle has spoken candidly about her father’s affair with the sex worker who brought down the former governor of New York.
The Tik Tok star told the Call Her Daddy podcast, that she clearly remembered the day in 2008 when news broke of her father Thomas “TJ” Earle’s affair with her now-stepmother Ashley Dupré.
“I remember the day very clearly,” the 22-year-old said on the podcast. “Paparazzi had shown up at my house and my mom quickly kind of got me and my sister out of the house over to our cousins.”
At the time, Earle’s father was cheating on his wife Alisa with Dupré, who was embroiled in a sex scandal with then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in the wake of it.
When the media descended on her New Jersey home, Earle admitted she wasn’t aware of the situation and thought the press had come to interview her neighbours.
“I didn’t know they were paparazzi,” she said.
The press inevitably caught up with her. “It was in like fourth grade. I started to kind of hear commentary from people and I had an iPad at the time,” Alix admitted. “I’m Googling my family and all of a sudden, I see that the past two years of my life had been a lie.”
“My dad had an affair with someone who was well-known for her job having sexual relations with high-class people and one of them was even the governor of New York,” she continued. “She was very well-known from that and in turn, my dad’s affair became a very public situation.”
Seeing the news in front of her, Earle confessed she felt as though her “world crashed down in that moment.” With that being said, the TikTok star thanked her mom and 20-year-old sister Ashtin for protecting her from the noise of the scandal.
She proclaimed: “I didn’t know the severity of what had happened between my parents because my mom was super, super mature about it and didn’t speak to us about it and didn’t put that stress that she was going through onto us.”
“I kind of figured it out myself and then I proceeded to deal with it myself,” she went on.
TJ and Dupré wed five years later, but Earle wasn’t introduced to her until he had moved out of their house, officially breaking things off with her mother.
“I was told that I had to be respectful to this woman and we had to be nice to her. I wanted to rip her head off. It was very weird because I felt like I was a 10-year-old having to be more mature than someone 20, 30 years older than me,” she said.
But even when the media coverage ended, she was left with the repercussions. According to her, parents would approach her mother and tell her they didn’t want their children hanging out with her daughter due to the circumstances.
“She would have to sit me down and be like, ‘They don’t really respect us,’” she said.
On top of that, being around her classmates brought about feelings of humiliation.
“My teacher in high school was talking about this governor’s affair and said exactly what had happened—who it had happened with—and like looked me in the eyes while this was going on in class,” the makeup enthusiast added.
“I remember my classmates looking at me and like, laughing because this was about my family. And this was something he was literally teaching in history class.”
Now, a decade and a half later, the Earle family presents more than just a united front – they’re close friends. With younger step-siblings, Izabel, 10, Penelope, 8, Thomas, 6, Alix, Alisa, Ashtin, and TJ all spend time going to family dinners in the Hamptons and regularly see each other in New Jersey.
