Celebrity News:

Overnight she went from "Kristen," the "very pretty" petite brunette whose services where purchased by disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer the night before Valentine's Day, to a household name.

When she woke up Thursday morning, Ashley Alexandra Dupre -- who was born Ashley Youmans but legally adopted the name Ashley Rae Maiko DiPietro after her stepfather -- was arguably the most notorious woman in America.

Her face is splashed all over television. Intimate details of her life gleaned from her MySpace page have been broadcast and published around the world. Family, friends, former teachers, neighbours and old acquaintances have come out of the woodwork to scrutinize her in the media, variously characterizing her as a "wild kid," "sweet," "nice and conservative," "having a heart of gold," and marching to a "different drum."

A struggling aspiring nightclub singer from a broken home in New Jersey, the 22-year-old's 15 minutes of fame arrived with a bang.

Will she be able to overcome the stigma of the source of her newfound notoriety to parlay her name recognition into a legitimate showbiz career?

Rebecca Sullivan, a professor of popular culture at the University of Calgary, wonders if this is the kind of recognition Ms. Dupre bargained for.

"It's instant celebrity: you had paid sex with a politician -- Big Brother cannot be that far off," she said. "What often happens to them is it's a descent into C-level soft-core porn celebrity."

Ms. Dupre has joined the pantheon of sensual beauties whose infamy is derived solely from their involvement in sordid sex scandals. From Christine Keeler, to Jessica Hahn, to Donna Rice, to Monica Lewinsky, these women will forever be footnotes in the lives of powerful men.

Ms. Dupre will have a hard time being taken seriously, Prof. Sullivan said, because women who rise to prominence due to sex scandals, however unwittingly, are often the objects of scorn, hostility or at the very least derision.

"It plays into a certain cultural stereotype of the wanton jezebel, someone who we adore and revile at the same time," Prof. Sullivan said.

Ms. Dupre has moved quickly to cash in on her instant name recognition. Hours after she was exposed, she downloaded her pop album Unspoken Words to online music seller Amie Street.

With tracks like Move Ya Body and Can you handle me, boy? - which The New York Times described as "amateur" and the National Post as "not horrible" - the album is available to listeners for $1.96.

The opportunity to capitalize on this sudden infamy exists, said Rob Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York, but history has not been kind to other women in her league.

"The prospects of being able to take that beyond her temporary position at the head of the news cycle into some long-term career in showbiz slash celebrity-dom [are] dismal," he said. "Even Monica Lewinsky, and that was the mother of all sex scandals, even she is getting dangerously close to being the answer to a trivia question."

A more likely scenario is that Ms. Dupre ends up a regular contestant on reality TV, on a vehicle like The Surreal Life or Celebrity Boxing, where he recalled Paula Jones, one of former president Bill Clinton's paramours, in a bout against fallen figure skater Tonya Harding.

"[Ms. Dupre] has now got everybody's attention and that's what one in a million people ever get ... The question is, is there anything she can now do to keep our attention?" Prof. Thompson said. "I wouldn't put my money on it."

Gisele Baxter, a professor in the department of English at the University of British Columbia, said Ms. Dupre will be up against a complicated conundrum of celebrity culture.

While a sex tape can catapult the status of Paris Hilton, prostitution is still taboo.

"There is currently a sort of crossover celebrity from sex culture in people like Jenna Jameson or fetish model Dita von Teese, and in some celebrity arenas, a background involving nude or erotic photos or exotic dancing might not matter too much," she said.

"However, the trade of sexual favours for money still has a notoriety and stigma attached to it."

Ms. Dupre reportedly now lives in Manhattan in a 35-storey skyscraper called the Chelsea Landmark where rents start at US$3,500 a month. But she grew up on the Jersey shore, attending high school in Wall Township before leaving home at age 17 to pursue a music career.

Joseph Pawlak, who graduated from Wall High School in 2003, told the local Hackensack, N.J., newspaper, he was good friends with Ms. Dupre, once inviting her to a dance, and that his mother loved her.

Recalling her as a part of the popular crowd who lived in a "huge house," the Boise, Idaho, university student professed himself shocked by her most recent occupation.

"She was a real nice girl who was polite and friendly, and she wasn't a troubled girl or an outsider at all," Mr. Pawlak told The Record. "Back in high school, she had her head on straight and she didn't hook up with a lot of guys or anything."