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Saturday, January 08, 2005

Tired Times

The Times has apparently grown bored of the Belle de Jour masquerade, less than a year after unsuccessfully despatching a crack team of investigative hacks to reveal her identity.

The Times, Books, Inter alia, January 8, 2005

The invite for Belle de Jour’s book launch is a Venetian ball-style mask with cut-out eyes emblazoned with the question, “Who is Belle de Jour?” Yawn, not that old espadrille. Belle, supposedly a former call girl you may recall, made her name with an explicit online blog. The publishers have apparently invited all those accused of being Belle — Rowan Pelling, Toby Young, Sarah Champion — to the launch on January 20. Will the lady herself be there? “She wants to remain anoynymous. But she may well turn up,” says a Weidenfeld bod. Double yawn. Good for sales, though. But what about the blog? Back in September Belle wrote: “I’m afraid . . . the time has come for me to go.” No doubt because now her blog’s become a book she’s not about to shoot her wad, so to speak, online. This week she’s back, whingeing that she “will probably be forced to purchase a copy of my own book when it is out”, to protect her (zzzzzz) identity.

Internet 'call-girl author' unmasked, By Sam Coates. Investigation by The Times has identified woman who has set literary tongues wagging, The Times, March 18, 2004.

I was branded a call-girl blogger. Media speculation about the identity of the author behind an internet diary of a London prostitute fell upon one woman last week when she was 'unmasked' in the Times. Here writer Sarah Champion gives an exclusive account of how it feels to be mistaken for the notorious 'Belle de Jour.' The Observer, Sunday March 21, 2004.

Mourning glory, The Observer, Letters. March 28, 2004
I deny concluding for the Times that Sarah Champion is 'Belle de Jour' (News, last week). I was able, very quickly, to come up with what the FBI calls 'a person of interest'.
My brief role in the Times investigation was abruptly halted when the reporter, Mr Coates, called me to say that the search was over. On Saturday, following Ms Champion's entirely credible denial [as she wrote in The Observer last week], the Times reported that 'Don Foster, the literary sleuth who identified Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors, took only 20 minutes to establish to his own satisfaction that 'Belle de Jour [...] is really Sarah Champion, a 33-year-old author from Manchester.'
Never have I said, either on or off the record, that Belle's identity has been established by anything I ever said or contributed. I made perfectly clear, in a series of telephone conversations and email exchanges with the Times, of which I have a complete record, that Champion is a person of interest. Contrary to what the Times has reported, I do not believe that the search for Belle is over. Donald Foster, Poughkeepsie, NY United States

Posted by Nick @ 20:05 GMT

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