Guilty of “Conduct Unbecoming”

Yes, it’s true, I had brought this scandal upon myself, but I could have never anticipated the fallout, or that my candor would make me a victim in another way. Like Spitzer, I was put on blast on the cover of the New York Post, then ridiculed in the national press. I was shamed by the City, including Michael Bloomberg himself. Ultimately, I was forced to resign from a career that I loved. Where, I asked myself, do you go from here? What do you become when the whole world, it seems, has found you guilty of “Conduct Unbecoming”? Can a woman ever be taken seriously after her sexual exploits have been made into front-page news? What if she doesn’t ask for forgiveness? What would society make of an unrepentant whore? Had I predicted the extent of this backlash, I would have made different choices.

Melissa Petro, a writer and former sex worker who “[transitioned] out of prostitution, [won] a coveted position as a New York City Teaching Fellow, [earned a] master’s degree in education,” and eventually taught at an elementary school in the South Bronx, was placed in New York’s infamous “rubber room” in 2010, after she wrote about her past life for the Huffington Post. She wrote about Eliot Spitzer’s pardoning over at The Cut today: “Like Ashley Dupré, the 22-year-old escort who gets credit for bringing down Spitzer (as if it’d been her idea), I was forced to remake myself — again, as I had in becoming a teacher — and this time publicly.”