from www.hedgefund.net – Kristin Davis walked into the bar/restaurant Hotel Chantelle on New York’s Lower East Side last Friday early to do an interview before her birthday party.
Decked out in outfit befitting a one-time hedge fund executive turned “Manhattan Madam” – a revealing white, frilly micro-mini top – Davis, who actually turned 36 in July, needed time before talking to a reporter to greet her guests, who started to roll in after her arrival.
Among them was Barbara McLean Davis (no relation), a model and designer of children’s toys and books, who called the birthday babe a “lovable, kind person with the biggest heart.”
As it turned out, over an hour would pass before a one-on-one with HedgeFund.net.
That happens when taking numerous photos with former employees and assorted well-wishers; checking out burlesque dancers and an opera singer entertaining visitors including White House party crasher and Davis’ date Tareq Salahi (without his wife Michelle, who ran off with a rock guitarist), and navigating a sea of costumed pimps, porn stars, and party girls.
After all that, she was ready to field questions.
Davis’ claim to fame was being the operator of a call-girl service whose most famous client was disgraced former NY Governor turned CNN talk-show host Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 after he admitted to frequenting prostitutes.
She has since served prison time in connection to the Spitzer resignation scandal, run unsuccessfully for the New York governor’s office, and has alleged an affair with baseball star Alex Rodriguez.
Davis has also spoken publicly on a variety of topics and didn’t hold back when interviewed.
A critic of the prosecution of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominque Strauss-Kahn, arrested in May for an alleged sexual assault of a maid in a New York hotel but released after the Manhattan District Attorney’s office dropped charges against him earlier this month, Davis still took issue with the Frenchman she alleged was another former client.
“I thought we put the maid on trial, why don’t we get the details from him,” Davis said. “That’s how it should be.”
She is also no longer in the prostitution business – claiming it started during her hedge fund days when she would procure women for company-sponsored parties – saying her time in New York’s notorious Rikers Island “took the pimp right out of her.”
But Davis has not completely left her former life completely behind, as she has finished her second book, “Sex Secrets,” about the women who once worked for her, and she is currently raising money for a nonprofit called Hope House to help victims of sex trafficking. And she still gets requests from those who used her services.
“People still call me and ask, ‘Do you still have girls?’ and have to tell them I don’t have any more girls,” Davis said. “Anybody who spent any time in Rikers Island would have learned their lesson the first time around.”
She also welcomed an opportunity to return to working in a hedge-fund administrative capacity as she did at Conifer Securities, now-defunct Brookhaven Capital Management and Bisys Hedge Fund Services. That did not extend to starting her own fund because she said it was not “her expertise.”
Davis then gave kudos to regulations such as Dodd-Frank to make hedge funds more transparent as it would “protect investors.”
Davis also will not “stand down” from a future gubernatorial run, changing her mind only if New York State decriminalizes prostitution and legalize marijuana use. Davis finished last in a field of seven candidates for governor in the 2010 election.