Call Girls In France
🛑 ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻
Call Girls In France
site categories
News
Film
TV
Awards
Lifestyle
Business
International
Video
Podcasts
Read More About:
Cannes 2013
Cannes Film Festival
international
Subscriber Support
Get the Magazine
Customer Service
Back Issues
E-edition Access
The Hollywood Reporter
About Us
Advertise
Careers
Contact Us
Accessibility
Legal
Terms of Use
Privacy Policy
Privacy Preferences
AdChoices
The Hollywood Reporter is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2022 The Hollywood Reporter, LLC. All Rights Reserved. THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER is a registered trademark of The Hollywood Reporter, LLC.
Our Sites
Artnews
BGR
Billboard
Deadline
Fairchild Media
Footwear News
Gold Derby
IndieWire
Robb Report
Rolling Stone
SheKnows
She Media
Soaps
Sourcing Journal
Sportico
Spy
StyleCaster
The Hollywood Reporter
TVLine
Variety
Vibe
WWD
optional screen reader
About Us
Advertise
Careers
Contact Us
Icon Link
Plus Icon
The Hollywood Reporter is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2022 The Hollywood Reporter, LLC. All Rights Reserved. THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER is a registered trademark of The Hollywood Reporter, LLC.
Subscribe now and save 15%. Sale Ends Soon.
Subscribe now and save 15%. Sale Ends Soon.
A businessman -- and Gadhafi associate -- who was convicted in a 2007 prostitution ring bust reveals all the dirty secrets of how models (and even some Hollywood actresses) swarm the hotels and yacht parties during the fest: says one escort, it's "the biggest payday of the year."
Cannes Hookers Illustration - P 2013
This story first appeared in the May 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Like Brad Pitt , Angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone , Lebanese businessman Elie Nahas was once a regular at the Cannes Film Festival .
But since his bust in 2007 for his part in the most explosive prostitution scandal in the history of the festival, Nahas, 48, can’t leave his native Lebanon. He hopes that his eight-year prison sentence, slapped on him in absentia by a French judge after a trial in Marseilles in October, will be overturned on appeal this year, but he’s not overly optimistic. In fact, he also is fearful that if he leaves Lebanon, he’ll be picked up by Interpol.
Nahas, who owns a Beirut-based modeling agency, used to work as a right-hand man for Moatessem Gadhafi , the playboy son of Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi, Nahas’ longtime pal. It was during this time that Nahas was arrested on charges of running a prostitution ring that supplied more than 50 women “of various nationalities” to the younger Gadhafi and other rich Middle Eastern clients during the festival. Moatessem was killed with his father in Libya in 2011.
The women ran the gamut, from full-time escorts to models to beauty queens, and they serviced men in hotels, on yachts and in the palatial villas in the hills above Cannes, police said. Philippe Camps , a lawyer for a Paris-based anti-prostitution organization that was a civil plaintiff in the trial, tells THR that some of the women were brought to Cannes under false pretenses and coerced into prostitution.
Police broke into Nahas’ room at the city’s famed Carlton hotel in August 2007 and arrested him after a lengthy investigation involving wiretaps, which helped them identify Nahas and seven others as key members of the vice ring. (Prostitution is legal in France, but soliciting, whether with advertising or on a street corner, is not.)
Nahas remains bitter about his arrest and subsequent conviction and denies he was running a prostitution ring. He says he was unfairly singled out in a sea of rich players who move in and around the Cannes Film Festival’s second-biggest business after movies: sex.
“Why me?” asks Nahas during a phone interview with THR from Beirut. “The police know what goes on during the film festival, and they turn a blind eye. But they went after me. Why? Because I worked for Gadhafi.”
‘They Can Make up to $40,000 a Night’
Every year, women ranging from what the French call putes de luxes (high-priced call girls), who charge an average of $4,000 a night, to local streetwalkers, who normally get little more than $50 or $75 an hour turning tricks in nearby Nice, converge on Cannes for what one Parisian hooker calls “the biggest payday of the year.” The influx is hard not to notice. “Hookers stand out in Cannes. They’re the ones who are well-dressed and not smoking,” tweeted Roger Ebert in 2010.
“We all look forward to it,” says a local prostitute in Cannes who goes by the name of Daisy on her website but declined to give her surname. Daisy is one of many independent escorts who have their own websites and usually avoid going to hotels and bars — except during the festival. “There’s a lot of competition because there are so many girls, but the local ones have an advantage. We know the hotel concierges.”
The local prostitutes, says Daisy, routinely drop cash off with concierges at the town’s top hotels. In return, if they are lucky, concierges sometimes steer clients their way. During the 10-day festival, an estimated 100 to 200 hookers stroll in and out of the big hotels every day, according to hotel sources.
Nahas says the money can be bigger than most people realize. The most beautiful call girls, he says, know to target the high-end hotels “where all the Arabs stay.”
“They can make up to $40,000 a night,” says Nahas. “Arabs are the most generous people in the world. If they like you, they will give you a lot of money. At Cannes, they carry money around in wads of 10,000 euros. To them, it’s just like paper. They don’t even like to count it. They’ll just hand it to the girls without thinking. I know the system.”
The serious action starts after 10 p.m., he says. Call girls sit in the lobby, and prospective clients check them out.
“It’s all done with hand signals,” he says. “The guys signal their room numbers with their hands and the girls follow them.”
Some of the “luxury prostitutes” come as part of an organized ring, the type of operation that police said Nahas ran, and others fly in small groups on their own, mainly from Paris, London, Venezuela, Brazil, Morocco and Russia. Still others take advantage of the other big event taking place on the Cote d’Azur, the Monaco Grand Prix, and rent hotel rooms in the town of Beausoleil, just behind Monaco, and commute between there and Cannes, a 40-minute drive.
Nahas denies he was running a prostitution ring but admits he arranged for women to come to Cannes during the festival. His job, he says, was to pick them up at Nice International Airport, bring them to the port at Cannes and place them on small boats that took them out to Gadhafi’s yacht, the Che Guevara, and other luxury vessels.
“I was not party to anything else,” insists Nahas. “I don’t know what took place between any of them. I had no part of it. They may have just been there to talk and have fun.”
Until his 2007 arrest, Nahas was best known for throwing a $1 million birthday party for Moatessem Gadhafi in Marrakesh in 2004. He paid Enrique Iglesias $500,000 to attend and flew in Carmen Electra for $50,000, he says. Kevin Costner also attended.
“Gadhafi never touched Carmen,” says Nahas. “In fact, she was a little angry because she felt he didn’t pay enough attention to her. But Gadhafi was shy, believe it or not. Women had to make the first move.” (A spokesperson for Electra could not be reached for comment.)
Nahas — who was jailed for 11 months after his arrest in France then released for lack of proof — says the younger Gadhafi sent him $25,000 a month to live on after his reputation was ruined in Lebanon and he no longer could work. Since Gadhafi’s death, the money has dried up. “I cry blood for him every day,” says Nahas.
When Nahas was arrested, police confiscated an address book that contained dozens of names and contact information for some of the richest princes and potentates in the Middle East. Nahas admits that he knew them all but denies that he procured hookers for them.
But even if he did, says Nahas, there are plenty more like him all over Cannes during the festival.
“Please,” says Nahas. “Every year during the festival there are 30 or 40 luxury yachts in the bay at Cannes, and every boat belongs to a very rich person. Every boat has about 10 girls on it; they are usually models, and they are usually nude or half nude. It’s drugs and drink and beautiful women. Go out on one and you’ll see. The girls are all waiting for their envelopes at the end of the night. It’s been going on there for 60 years.”
A “gift” contained in an envelope, according to Nahas and a number of veteran Cannes escort women interviewed by THR , is how prostitutes get paid at the festival.
“It’s always a gift,” says a Russian woman who oversees a Paris-based escort agency with branches in London and Dubai. “Clients are told to put the money in an envelope and write ‘gift’ on the outside of it.”
Women installed on yachts in Cannes during the film festival are called “yacht girls,” and the line between professional prostitutes and B- or C-list Hollywood actresses and models who accept payment for sex with rich older men is sometimes very blurred, explains one film industry veteran.
“You’d definitely recognize more than a few names from Hollywood,” he says. “These are actresses who made bad career choices and fell off the radar. They tell themselves what they’re doing at Cannes is OK, that they’re just on dates with rich men, when the reality is they’re doing what prostitutes do. But they like the money.”
Carole Raphaelle Davis — a longtime French-American film and TV actress ( 2 Broke Girls , Angel ) who grew up in international circles in Paris, London and Thailand — says few people realize that some prominent and moneyed society women spent many years as high-priced prostitutes.
Davis, who is married to TV comedy writer Kevin Rooney and divides her time between France and Beverly Hills, says she has two acquaintances who used to work the Cannes Film Festival as well as other exotic locales around the world. “I could never understand how they could do what they did,” says Davis.
Davis says she has been propositioned by some of the richest men in the world but could never imagine sleeping with them for money.
She says the women she knew “traveled the world like jet-setters,” and one of them eventually ended up marrying one of the richest men in France.
“This woman didn’t even enjoy sex, she told me,” says Davis. “But she didn’t mind it, either. She didn’t mind sleeping with men who were repulsive. She said it never lasted more than five minutes, so it wasn’t that bad.”
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News
Send us a tip using our anonymous form.
This website no longer supports Internet Explorer, which is now an outdated browser. For the best experience and your security, please visit
us using a different browser.
John F. Kennedy (right) and Jackie Kennedy visiting the American Embassy in Paris, 1961
Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Social Links for Larry Getlen
View Author Archive
follow on twitter
Get author RSS feed
Filed under
france
infidelity
jackie kennedy
john f. kennedy
prostitution
sex and relationships
sex workers
5/23/18
This story has been shared 71,973 times.
71,973
This story has been shared 71,330 times.
71,330
This story has been shared 66,127 times.
66,127
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
Email
YouTube
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.
In May 1961, an elderly woman in Paris heard a knock at the door of her six-story walk-up apartment. It was only the most powerful man in the world.
The president of the United States was going door-to-door hoping to find the call girl he had discreetly arranged to meet.
John F. Kennedy, it turned out, used a fake excuse about a doctor’s visit to attend a long-arranged dalliance while in Paris for a crucial summit, only to wind up in the wrong building, knocking on the doors of random Parisians who were left with the surprise of their lives.
The tale of this ill-advised but ultimately, er, successful liaison is recounted in “ Madame Claude: Her Secret World of Pleasure, Privilege, & Power ,” by William Stadiem (St. Martin’s Press).
Madame Claude, born Fernande Grudet on July 6, 1923, in Angers, France, was one of the world’s most successful madams.
Starting in 1957, she ran an exclusive, high-class prostitution ring that offered a very specific type of woman — tall, supermodel-gorgeous, classy and upscale (or at least trained to appear so) — to the world’s richest and most powerful men.
The young women who worked for her were known as Claude girls, which became a well-known and powerful brand. She scouted them carefully, paid for plastic surgery if needed, and ultimately hoped to marry them off to aristocracy.
“A date with a ‘Claude girl’ was one of those pinnacle Paris experiences,” writes Stadiem, “like staying at the Ritz or dinner at Maxim’s or wearing a Lanvin suit . . . an apotheosis of luxury that the French do better than any other nationality.”
According to Stadiem, Madame Claude’s client list included the world’s most successful men of the time: Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Sammy Davis Jr., former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, three generations of Gettys, the Shah of Iran, Marlon Brando, Darryl Zanuck, Groucho Marx. If you were rich, famous and male in the 20th century, chances are Madame Claude knew what you liked in bed, and provided exactly that.
For Kennedy, his desired liaison required almost as much detailed preparation as an actual political summit.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, Kennedy thought a meeting in Europe with French and Soviet leaders Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev, respectively, could serve as a reset for his presidency. He decided that he and first lady Jackie Kennedy would embark on their first official European tour. This would be the trip where Jackie so entranced the French that Kennedy famously introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
But while Jackie was thrilled at the prospect of meeting novelist and newly appointed French Culture Minister Andre Malraux, one of her literary idols, her husband looked to fulfill a different sort of fantasy.
“If JFK had a type, it was the wholesome, snooty, proper, preppy girl whose flaunted untouchability he could violate . . . girls like Jacqueline Bouvier,” writes Stadiem, who notes that Kennedy learned about Madame Claude from Sinatra.
“Here was a madam who specialized in exactly what JFK was after.”
The liaison, Stadiem writes, was arranged directly between Madame Claude and Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary. When Salinger first proposed the arrangement, Claude turned him down, fearing the many things that could go wrong if the president’s visit to a prostitute went haywire.
But Salinger, the brains behind many of Kennedy’s most impactful speeches, convinced Claude that any problems could work in her favor — that a scandal would make her a legend to the sex-comfortable French, and that a successful dalliance would bring her to the attention of the world’s most powerful men.
“‘Rise to the occasion,’ Salinger exhorted Claude. ‘Do it for your career. Do it for your country,’ he riffed, paraphrasing JFK’s inaugural address. ‘Think big!’ ” Stadiem writes. “Weighing risks and rewards like the shrewd banker she might have otherwise been, Claude decided to go for it.”
On the trip, Kennedy hoped to hook up with French actress and Jackie Kennedy-lookalike Anouk Aimée, who had just appeared in the Federico Fellini hit “La Dolce Vita.” The president, Stadiem writes, had been “obsessed about her.”
“What does he want her for? He’s already got her,” Claude, referring to Aimée’s resemblance to the president’s wife, asked Salinger.
“The explanation was that JFK liked the package more than the contents,” Stadiem writes. “He was drawn to Jackie’s looks but wanted a more seductive, sexual version.”
Aimée, however, was horrified at the suggestion, rejecting it outright — not for any reticence about a paid encounter, but because she considered Kennedy a “puerile warmonger.” Claude told Salinger only that she was away on business and, therefore, unavailable.
While Claude searched for a suitable replacement, Kennedy and Salinger spent much of their time in the month before the summit determining how they would fit this diversion, for which they had a maximum of one hour, into the two-day trip without anyone finding out. They even had a code, speaking about “buying Jackie a gift saddle at Hermès” whenever they needed to discuss the side excursion.
“If the world had any idea how much of his time was focused not on NATO or Algeria or Vietnam, but on a hot date from Madame Claude, the perception of history would h
Ts Escorts Philadelphia
Escort Girls In Baltimore
Www Backpage Com Fort Lauderdale