Belle de Jour blames '˜zero tolerance' for attack on sex worker

Brooke Magnanti has had a varied career, to put it mildly. She first became famous anonymously as blogger Belle de Jour, writing of her adventures as a high class call girl, which spawned two bestselling books and the TV series Secret Diary Of A Call Girl starring Billie Piper.

But she’s long since left that world behind, to become a full-time writer living in the Scottish highlands with her husband, who works for the fire service. And now, she’s penned her debut novel, a thriller partly inspired by her other former career, as a forensic scientist who specialised in decomposed bodies (she has 153 autopsies under her belt).

“Within a few weeks of taking up my doctoral research at the Medico-Legal Centre in Sheffield, I had already heard more about heroin overdoses, cyanide suicides and al fresco hangings than a person really ought to,” American-born Magnanti, 40, reveals. “I do miss it. There’s a sense of community when you’re working in the mortuary. You talk about cases that you’ve worked on like you would talk about family holidays. I’m still friends with some of the people I worked with.”

These days, she’d rather talk about her scientific and writing career than her 14-month stint as a high class call girl more than a decade ago, which she pursued to pay her student rent. Belle de Jour detailed her work as a £300-an-hour escort with such amusing candour in her award-winning blog. For six years, her identity was a closely guarded literary secret, until November 2009 when she revealed she was a scientific researcher named Brooke Magnanti, who’d come to the UK to study forensic science in Sheffield.

She gave the sex work up because she simply didn’t need the money any more - and by that time was concentrating on writing the first Belle de Jour book, alongside her scientific career. She says she never experienced the violent side of the sex trade while she was working in it, but ironically did during her work as a forensic scientist.

“There had been the violent murder of a sex worker in Sheffield, which has still never been solved. At the time I was a student there, not yet a sex worker, living in student accommodation in an area of the city that had once been well-known as a red light district.

“The city began a crackdown on kerb-crawling and street prostitution that drove sex workers out from the well-trafficked, well-lit and policed city centre to the industrial fringes of the city. It was in this time that the woman was attacked. She was identified because she was dying when police got to her; she’d been stabbed 19 times and she was even able to give a description of her attacker before she died, but the person who killed her has never been found. The more I learned, the more the effects of ‘zero tolerance’ policing seemed partly responsible for her untimely death.

“This would not have happened if she had been on the streets with loads of walk-by traffic and well-lit corners.”