Suzy Favor Hamilton Outed as Vegas Call Girl

This afternoon (December 20, 2012 to be exact), news broke that Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton — one of the biggest female sports stars to ever come out of Wisconsin — has admitted to working as a high-priced call girl for a shady Las Vegas outfit called Haley Heston’s Private Collection.

Here’s a link to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s story and a relevant quote:

Suzy Favor Hamilton, a three-time Olympian who capitalized on her wholesome image as an elite runner, mother and wife to land lucrative endorsement deals and motivational speaking engagements, has admitted to leading a double life for the last year as a high-priced call girl.

In a stunning confessional via her Twitter account, following a story published on thesmokinggun.com, Favor Hamilton wrote that she was drawn to escorting “in large part because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life.”

The 44-year-old Favor Hamilton, a Stevens Point native and former University of Wisconsin track star, admitted to working as “Kelly Lundy” with Haley Heston’s Private Collection, one of Las Vegas’ premier escort services, in the thesmokinggun.com story.

“I do not expect people to understand,” she wrote on her Twitter account. “But the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression.

“I have been seeking the help of a psychologist for the past few weeks and will continue to do so after I have put things together.”

What troubles me here is not just that Favor Hamilton is a married woman with a seven-year-old child, though that’s bad enough.

Nope.  What bugs me is that Favor Hamilton is quoted as admitting that her husband “tried to get (her) to stop” and that he “wasn’t supportive of (her) need to do this at all.”

Which, mind you, is the way most husbands are likely to behave when it comes to thinking about their spouse being a paid escort who gave away the “full girlfriend experience” and was rated quite highly by The Erotic Review, which is called by the Smoking Gun article that the Journal-Sentinel references as “the Zagat guide of the escort business.”

So it seems that Suzy Favor Hamilton has more than a few problems here — she’s been working as an escort when she’s not destitute (her husband is employed, she owns a realty firm and they live in a $600,000 home), she’s been fighting depression for the past year or more and if her marriage isn’t in trouble because of all this, she must have the most supportive husband in the history of the universe.

While I have never understood the need for men or women to go outside their marriages, I do know that not everyone is meant to be monogamous.  So for those people who have admitted open marriages and the like, I made up my mind a long time ago not to judge them even though I freely admit that I don’t get it.

So the sex part of the equation isn’t what is so very troublesome, even though I don’t really understand what would drive a high-powered woman like Favor Hamilton to go outside her marriage and have a number of risky sexual encounters for money.

It’s the lack of trust issue that bothers me more.

Favor Hamilton is someone who’s had a squeaky clean image.  She’s had endorsement deals with Disney, various running firms, has been a model in more ways than one and has been someone female runners have looked up to for the past twenty years or more in Wisconsin and much of the Midwest.

So apparently, in order for her to somehow feel better about herself, she had to throw this all away and construct an alter ego of “Kelly” the escort.  Who was willing to do just about anything if the price was right because she still had the body and panache and knew how to speak the high-powered language of well-heeled men in order to better separate them from their money.

Why this intelligent, beautiful woman couldn’t find herself in some other way, I just don’t know.  Why would she would risk her career for this, much less her marriage?  Why would she ever entertain such a thing, considering that it’s well-known that women who become prostitutes (the not-so-nice name for “call girls”) rarely retain custody of their children?

And what about the IRS audit that has to be on the horizon?  Because it would be ridiculous to assume that she’s declared all of the money she’s made as a $600-per-hour escort on her tax forms.

All of this happened because Favor Hamilton apparently enjoys risky sex in extremely expensive hotel rooms with men she doesn’t really know.

This seems so off-the-wall, so uncharacteristic, and so utterly absurd that I feel like I’ve fallen into a parallel universe.

Yet it’s the truth.

Suzy Favor Hamilton, runner and Olympian, mother and realty owner, is also a call girl.

What a terribly sad thing to have happen . . . and she did it to herself.

Bad Weather Plus Migraine Equals . . . Not Much

Many of you have heard that most of Wisconsin is under a blizzard warning.  Southeastern Wisconsin hasn’t been hit that hard thus far, but we’ve had a great deal of rain in the past sixteen to eighteen hours . . . and now, it’s turned to snow.

Before the weather turned bad, I was able to get a great deal of editing done for a very big project I’ve been working on for a few months.  I’m now over 3/4 of the way through it, and it looks likely that I’ll be able to turn it in soon.

The weather shouldn’t affect me providing the power stays on, of course.  But one of the problems I have with huge weather systems is that they tend to set off a very bad headache, and that’s what I’m dealing with right now.

So everything that I’d hoped to do today — save my visit to the Asthma Clinic, which was accomplished — is likely to go by the boards, at least until I’ve had some decent rest.

I should be fine tomorrow (when I have internship hours scheduled), providing I’m sensible tonight and rest.

So I’m going to be sensible, stay home out of the nasty weather, and just do the best I can.

As for anyone else in Wisconsin, I hope they’ll be sensible, too — or at least be smart.

See you all tomorrow, when I should be able to get at least one book review up over at SBR.  (I had hopes to get three up this weekend; now that looks most unlikely.  Boo, hiss to that!)