Ashley Earle (née Dupre) was “reckless” in her relationship with now-husband Thomas “TJ” Earle, she confessed in a new op-ed.
Alix Earle’s stepmom wrote in an Elle piece, published Monday, that she and the then-married businessman “crossed a line [they] shouldn’t have crossed” when their romance began in 2008.
“I met TJ by chance at a local restaurant in New Jersey, Parker House,” she explained. “We talked for five or six hours, and our connection was immediate.”
Dupré, 41, added that she “take[s] responsibility” for her role, admitting her and TJ’s “choices affected and hurt other people, including his wife, Alisa [Earle], and daughters, Alix and Ashtin [Earle].”
She noted, “I don’t take that lightly.”
However, Dupré wrote, “The life TJ and I eventually built is deeply meaningful to me. I can acknowledge that the way our relationship began was complicated and caused pain without letting that define everything that came after it. Both things can exist at once.”
She went on to recall becoming Alix and Ashtin’s stepmom when she wed TJ in 2013, which she remembered wasn’t “easy at first.”
The former cocktail waitress, who has since welcomed three children with her husband, told the magazine, “Alix has since joked that she once researched putting Nair in my shampoo, so it’s safe to say things weren’t always seamless.”
Her relationship with TJ, notably, kicked off months after the Eliot Spitzer scandal, with Dupré making headlines as an escort name-dropped in an FBI investigation on former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
The reveal led to Spitzer resigning from office and getting divorced.
“I could spend paragraphs explaining why,” she wrote in the op-ed. “I was young. I wanted money and independence. I’d spent years operating in survival mode and had become very good at compartmentalizing. But ultimately, I made the call. It was my decision.”
As Dupré looked back on what led to the call girl career — and ultimately to her connection to TJ — she clarified that “context isn’t absolution.”
The former sex columnist for The Post wrote, “I made choices. Some were reckless. Some were selfish. They had consequences. I can own all of that without believing those choices have to be the most interesting thing about me forever.”
Earlier this month, TJ also made rare comments on his affair with Dupré.
“I didn’t know what the f–k to do,” he said in the premiere episode of Alix’s “Earle Meets World” Netflix show. “You have all these people around you [and] their whole world was blown up in a moment’s notice in a very public way. It was all on me; it was all my fault.”
Alix, for her part, told “Call Her Daddy” listeners in 2023 about the drama, which felt like her “world crashing down” — and left her wanting to “rip [Dupré’s] head off.”
She said, “I was told that I had to be respectful to this woman and we had to be nice to her. … It was very weird because I felt like I was a 10-year-old having to be more mature than someone 20, 30 years older than me.”
Alix and Dupré have since put their amicable dynamic on display on social media — and on the family’s reality show.
Read the full article here
