In new book Irish prostitute talks about her double life as middle class mother

From convent school to wife, to prostitution - the diary of a double life in Ireland

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Scarlet O'Hara, professional escort, talk about her memoir "Between the Sheets"

Photo by accommodationforstudents.com

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Scarlett O’Kelly is not her real name. She’s about 40 years of age. She grew up on a farm, went to a convent boarding school and to university, and describes herself as “well-groomed and attractive”. Her three children are of school-going age.

Now she has written a famous tell-all called ‘Between the Sheets’, to be published by Penguin, that will shock millions of Irish about the life of a middle class hooker and escort.

She separated from her husband about a decade ago. She lives in a small town in Ireland. As a prostitute, she has slept with over a hundred men, unknown to her family and all but two of her friends. She published a book this week about her double life, entitled 'Between the Sheets'. It makes for riveting reading.

When the recession started to bite a few years ago, her ex-husband’s maintenance payments dried up, as did her freelance work. She doesn’t specify what kind of white collar work she used to do beforehand and is careful to change details about her background and those of her clients, who are given false names to protect identities.
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The stress of her financial predicament made her go into the escort business, which, she stresses, is different to working as a prostitute on the street or in a brothel. To get business, she advertised online as a “masseuse”. Usually she met clients in hotel rooms.

“It was out of needs – of needing money,” she says during a telephone interview. “I don’t think I had a huge amount of foresight when I started except that I had bills to pay. I had children to feed.”

Her rates are high – €400 for the first time; and €300 for repeat visits. She would talk on the telephone initially to prospective clients, often for 20 minutes to an hour, as part of a screening process.

Discretion, as well as rigorous health safety measures, is one of the cornerstones of her selection criteria. She tries to choose attached men – married or in relationships – so that they have as much to lose as her in getting caught out. Prostitution is illegal in Ireland, unlike, for example, New Zealand. She discovered that a lot of her clients were looking for what is known in the business as “GFE” – the girlfriend experience. It justified her high rates. She tries to build rapport and doesn’t hassle clients if they run over time, who, she found out, dislike “clock watching” prostitutes andv meeting men in the corridor waiting for their turn.

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