When the blogger and prostitute Debauchette was interviewed by Diane Sawyer for an ABC News report, several tricks were used to conceal her identity. She appeared mainly in silhouette, with a distorted profile and a distorted voice. She was identified only as a "beautiful," "highly educated" woman with a day job in the arts. The tricks were not enough, however, to keep Debauchette's parents from figuring out it was their daughter on the screen when they tuned in, as fate would have it, to watch the show. Mom saw Sawyer's report twice, to make sure her instincts had been correct, then fired off an email to her daughter, quoted in a Debauchette blog post:

A few sentence fragments from her note:



"I have to say that it wasn't a complete surprise…"



"But I was in a state of denial…"



"…it explains a lot about many things…"



"I listened to what you had to say in the interview and I expect you feel you have thought all of this through."

A friend told Debauchette she was "identifiable by the way I used the word ‘yeah' and the way I touched my hair." Another didn't think she was recognizable at all.

The blogger has not responded to her mom's email.

I'm stunned, but I'm not ashamed of what I do or what I've done. I feel exposed but I don't feel apologetic. I should feel mortified, but I don't. Instead, I feel like a very private part of my life has been exposed, like they've just caught me in the middle of some sex act. So I suppose I feel awkward.

Debauchette said she appeared on ABC to counter "the old Victorian trope of the broken, dysfunctional, fallen prostitute, incapable of forming her own opinions or making her own decisions." She told Sawyer she has about seven regular clients, mostly married, and that she was once offered $2.9 million to be with a client "exclusively" for a year.

In the video below, excerpted from a longer video posted to Boinkology by Gawker video maven Richard Blakeley, Dabauchette talks about the lover who got her into prostitution, and Sawyer presses her on whether she is truly happy with her work.

Already under fire for its handling of the last Democratic presidential debate, in Pennsylvania, ABC News may very well catch some flack over this incident. But Debauchette does not sound, in her post, like an angry or burned source, and she even speculates her identity may have been compromised not by ABC's cameras or microphones but by her own speech patterns. She casts her appearance as a victory for a "pro-slut" view of sex, and, although she wrote "Hi mom" earlier in the post, ends with this anecdote about sex with a guy she calls "Gabriel:"

He fucked me over his sofa, the flat of his hand pressing down into my back. I felt him take my hair in his hand before he pulled out to come across my lower back, which splattered in a thick, swerving pattern. After, he took a snapshot of his come against my winter-pale skin. Once he toweled my back down and we both dressed, I took a look. It was a beautiful shot.

[Boinkology, Debauchette]