The Secret Life of Belle de Jour

Last year, the world came to know the woman behind the famous blog site The Diary of a London Call Girl when the sex blogger revealed her real identity. Dr Brooke Magnanti, also known as Belle de Jour is a British research scientist respected in her profession in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group at St. Michael’s Hospital in Bristol.

Belle de Jour’s real identity has been one of the great literary mysteries as her blog recalling her secret life as a call girl earned popularity leading it to become a best- selling book in 2005. Her literary pieces were even turned into a TV series, “Secret Diary of a Call Girl.”

In 2003, Magnanti ran out of money while in the final stage of her PhD thesis. With the help of an escort agency in London she became a high-class prostitute earning around £300 an hour. The 34-year-old scientist has no regrets about her short stint as a sex worker. “I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable. I did the two – computer programmer by day, prostitute by night – for three or four months.”

Belle’s blogs have been well acclaimed as well as criticized for suggesting that prostitution and sex work is glamorous. Many even speculated that Belle de Jour does not exist and that her diary is fictional.

Magnanti continues to work as research scientist and is currently an advocate of defending the reputation of sex workers. She has appeared in several radio and TV shows including a BBC show to discuss sex education. She is also invited to many speaking engagements including the Westminsters Skeptics debate on the sex trade where she criticized anti-prostitution campaigners for their habitual use of derogatory terms in reference to sex workers. Brooke Magnanti is also pursuing her career as a novelist and is currently writing a novel which will be published in 2012.