Celebrity Mound

Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the woman at the center of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s call-girl scandal, withdrew her $10-million lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis and his film company on Thursday afternoon.

The suit, originally filed in April, claimed that Dupré’s name and image had been exploited for profit.

“Ms. Dupré wants to eliminate all negativity from her life and focus on the positive,” Dupré’s attorney Richard C. Wolfe said in a statement. “She has prospects for many exciting new projects and is looking forward to starting a new chapter.”

Francis could not immediately be reached for comment.

The lawsuit alleged that Dupré was duped into signing a release form and exposing her breasts for Girls Gone Wild cameras in 2003, when she was only 17.

After the lawsuit was filed, Francis said he was “surprised and in fact amazed” by her claims, noting that he had not released new video of Dupré “due to corporate policy of not using footage of individuals younger than 18.” Francis also asserted that Dupré gave her consent on video when the footage was taken, and at that time provided his camera crew with identification that showed she was 18. Francis later released video clips that supported those assertions.

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DISGRACED former Gov. Eliot Spitzer is set to receive an award tomorrow, but we’re guessing he won’t feel flattered. The first annual George Burns Memorial Sugar Daddy Awards will name Spitzer the “Ultimate Sugar Daddy.” He’ll win a pound of sugar, a year’s worth of free lap dances from strippers at the VIP Men’s Club in Chelsea and an unlimited supply of testosterone pills. Other “honorees” include Woody Allen, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Hugh Hefner and Bill Maher, all described as men who “have a penchant for women 20 years or more their juniors.” The list of winners will be read by buxom dancer Vera of MTV’s “A Shot at Love 2 With Tila Tequila.” “Sugar daddies are an icon of baby boomers – older men who use their money shamelessly to date younger women in a perpetual search for the fountain of youth,” Vera told Page Six. “We’ve even had a few on the list come to VIP club, and they are always fun when they do.”

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The federal case against him is so strong that prosecutors had no interest in striking cooperation agreements with the ringleader of Spitzer’s hooker-supplier, Emperors Club VIP, and his second in command, sources told The Post’s Murray Weiss.

Prosecutors have records of Spitzer’s transactions, phone records and taped conversations with Emperors Club, and are confident they need little more to nail him on charges that could include violating prostitution laws and money laundering, sources said. Probers are also said to be looking into whether he used campaign funds to pay for his pleasures.

The case against Spitzer includes the cooperation of curvy call girl Ashley “Kristen” Dupre and a second hooker. Her old boss, Mark Brener, 62, will plead guilty Thursday without the sweetheart deal he was hoping for – he’ll have to serve up to 30 months in the slammer on money-laundering and prostitution-conspiracy charges.

Brener’s deal comes one week after his ex-girlfriend, Cecil “Katie” Suwal, 23, tearfully pleaded guilty to identical charges and agreed to 21 to 27 months in jail. His lawyer, Murray Richman, declined to comment on the deal, but has long insisted that Brener – who ran his sex business out of a Cliffside, NJ, apartment – would not testify.

The day Suwal appeared in court, her lawyer, Alberto Ebanks, suggested she and Brener had parted on bad terms, telling The Post’s Kati Cornell: “She is as much a victim as anyone. She is not the bad guy here, not to point fingers at anyone.”

Spitzer had to resign his office after the Feds caught him on tape making arrangements for a “date” with Dupre at a hotel in Washington, DC, on Feb. 13.

A hooker booker who worked for Brener, Temeka Lewis, pleaded guilty in a cooperation agreement that requires her to testify about Spitzer’s involvement with the ring and his alleged attempts to conceal payments for sex.

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At least people think they are seeing her. The high-priced prostitute was spotted last week at boutique gym Peak Performance in Chelsea, where fellow singer Natasha Bedingfield goes as well. Our spy swears the jealous Dupre bragged that since the scandal, her MySpace hits on her song “What You Want” “had surpassed Natasha’s.” Bedingfield, who is working out with the gym’s owner and renowned trainer Joe Dowdell, is said to have ignored her “rival.” Clubgoers at The Plumm on Thursday night thought they saw Ashley, and swear Ice T, Coco, producer Keya Morgan and Kid Rock were annoyed she was there in the VIP section. We are skeptical since no one thought to take a photo of the infamous floozy.

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Girls Gone Wild released a video of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the woman at the center of the scandal that led to former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s resignation. The company says it was shot in Miami in 2003.

Some girls celebrate their 18th birthday by registering to vote, catching R-rated films or even buying an experimental pack of cigarettes. Not Eliot Spitzer’s Achilles’ heel, Kristen (aka Ashley Alexandra Dupré).

Guess how Ashley spent her big day? We can exclusively reveal the first shots of the call girl’s romping week of X-rated shoots with Girls Gone Wild. The above stills are the first to surface from her raunchy video debut, Spring Break 2005: Anything Goes.

Clearly Joe Francis’ skin set was quite the match for the Emperor’s Club prostitute. It’s so nice to see this gal unwind with some “friends” her own age!

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Before she allegedly got a call from New York’s governor, Ashley Dupré had gone wild.

In the video vaults of Girls Gone Wild is footage of an 18-year-old Dupré cavorting naked on the GGW bus and doing scenes with another woman in 2003, the video company announced Tuesday.

GGW found the footage – seven full tapes worth – after the company’s CEO Joe Francis offered $1 million to Dupré to appear in one of his videos – an offer he promptly withdrew.

Francis will soon release a special video featuring Dupre, now 22, the alleged high-priced call girl linked to the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

“I met her on spring break at the Girls Gone Wild beach house in April 2003,” Francis tells PEOPLE. “She got into the Jacuzzi. … She threw her arms around me. I never made the connection that this was Ashley. But my cameraman had been in touch with her for a while. I didn’t make the connection until really recently. Then it was like: that’s Ashley!”

Joe Francis’s Girls Gone Wild has offered Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the ex hooker who brought down former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a $1 million deal for a photo spread and tour.

“Her face is on the cover of every newspaper in the country,” Francis said in a statement. “It’s clear that the public wants to see more of her. This is a serious offer and I hope she gets back to me right away.”

Francis wants Dupre to share her side of the Spitzer story in print and DVD – though she would not have to pose nude – and tour with Girls Gone Wild.

The 22-year-old has already made over $200,000 from downloads of her songs, the New York Post reported Saturday.

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Before she was known as “Kristen”, the woman at the center of the prostitution scandal that forced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s resignation, 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupré was simply Ashley Youmans, a small town girl from the New Jersey shore who yearned for her father and struggled with her family’s split.

After her parents, William Youmans and Carolyn Capalbo, broke up, Ashley “used to cry about that and say how much she missed him,” childhood friend Erica Kane tells PEOPLE. Adding to the heartache was her older brother Kyle, 26, who was incarcerated after a 2000 drug arrest, according to the Asbury Park Press. (More recently, on Monday, Kyle pleaded guilty to heroin charges and is expected to be sentenced to probation on April 14, according the newspaper.)

But after her mother married oral surgeon Michael DiPietro, Ashley, who was in the fifth grade at the time, would say even more so “how much she missed her dad. She always used to talk about that,” says Kane. “[Her life] looked perfect. She was a beautiful girl, boys thought she was pretty and she got along with everybody. But she wanted her real family. She wanted her real father and her mother together and her brother back in the house. She wanted everybody under the same roof.”

A Comfortable Lifestyle
Still, friends say Ashley had a comfortable life with her stepfamily, in a spacious house in tony Wall Township, N.J. A popular student, former classmates recall that Ashley was driven to school in a Jaguar, that she dressed well and made friends on the cheerleading squad.

“Ashley was a good girl. She was a sweetheart, everyone loved her,” says a childhood pal. “She had a good heart.” And a good voice. Bringing friends to her house to play with the karaoke machine in her room, Ashley would belt out songs by Brandy, the source says. Adds Kane: “She made up this whole dance to Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself.’ We used to hang out in her play room at her house and just dance around to that song.”

Moving to North Carolina
But once in high school, something changed. In her sophomore year, she abruptly left home to move in with her dad and his new wife, attending Manteo High School in the Outer Banks in North Carolina. “It was my decision,” Ashley wrote on her MySpace page. “And I’ve never looked back.”

“She was a normal cool girl,” says former boyfriend Wayne Hunter, who dated Ashley until 2003. “She wasn’t a saint, but I would put her better than a lot of girls that I’ve known. [The recent scandal] has surprised me because she wasn’t really like that.”

While Ashley was popular with the boys, she had trouble making female friends while there. “She was the hottest girl in town when she was here and all the other girls gave her hell,” says Hunter. “They were jealous. The girls wouldn’t hang out with her. It was ridiculous. The girls here were really mean to her.”

Big City Dreams
With hopes of a career in the music industry, Ashley moved to New York City after high school. “She told me she got a nice little apartment and was just starting out slow, trying to make her way up in whatever she could do,” says Hunter.

Ashley took jobs as a cocktail waitress at hot spots like Retox and Pink Elephant to pay the bills while she recorded songs like “Move Ya Body” and “What We Want” in her free time, and booked gigs performing at clubs like China Club and Remote Lounge.

The aspiring singer became embroiled in the nightlife scene. “She’d roll around with an elite, older, upper echelon of men in Manhattan society, all the ‘players’ in nightlife and entertainment,” says a source. “She would go out of town now and then but said she was working on music projects.”

Unexpected Fame
Now that her alleged involvement with Emperors Club V.I.P. has been exposed, “she’s just trying to work through it,” says high school friend Joe Pawlak, who remains in touch with Ashley. “We’re just trying to keep her head up and keep her strong, have her look at this as a positive. People make mistakes. All you can do is try to go on, grow from the experience.”