Why the ‘Manhattan Madam’ is in the Mueller inquiry
Throughout President Donald Trump’s term, it has sometimes seemed as if the world chronicled in the tabloids has invaded the corridors of power in Washington. Trump’s alleged affairs with a pornographic film star and a former Playboy bunny have become national news, joined by figures from publications typically more associated with supermarket checkout lines than the White House briefing room.
This week, Kristin Davis, a former high-class procuress from New York, is set to become a witness for the federal prosecutors who are looking into ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
If you have been wondering about how Davis found herself enmeshed in Mueller’s Russia investigation, here are a few answers to some questions you may have.
Who is Kristin Davis?
A former finance worker and a twice-failed candidate for elected office, Davis, 43, is perhaps best known as the “Manhattan Madam” — a name used to describe her by The New York Post and The Daily News, for whom she offered tantalizing grist at the height of her fame in the early 2000s. After serving in the back office at a hedge fund, Davis tried her hand at a more lucrative venture: running an escort service that she called “Wicked Models.”
In the years she ran her business, she and the city’s gossip pages claimed, without much in the way of corroborating evidence, that she had furnished prostitutes to a list of famous men, including Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who resigned his post after The New York Times reported that he was a patron of a different escort service. In 2008, Davis was charged with money laundering and promoting prostitution and spent four months in jail on Rikers Island.
Two years after finishing her sentence, Davis, a self-described Libertarian, ran for New York governor as a protest candidate on a platform touting the legalization of pot and prostitution. She was advised in her campaign by Roger J. Stone Jr., a veteran Republican strategist whom she had known for years. In 2013, Davis ran for a different office — New York City comptroller — challenging, of all opponents, Spitzer. She withdrew from the race a month before the election after she was arrested for a second time on federal charges of illegally selling prescription drugs like Adderall and Xanax.
What is her connection to the Russia investigation?
Prosecutors have not said what information they think
looking into ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. One potential topic is Davis’ long association with Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump.