Eliot Spitzer is in the news again. I have trouble with his name. Whenever I hear or consider it I think it means he spits her out, when logical thinking would go the opposite route, where she spits him out. There’s something to think about.

I always thought he was a weirdo, even before his fall from office revealed his sexual peccadilloes. By one account he called himself a “steamroller” in a meeting where he threatened to shut down Wall Street corruption. Who, besides Elvis, calls himself a steamroller in any context?

I played a small if not insignificant role in the Spitzer saga. When the story broke news outlets everywhere were chomping at the bit trying to identify the escort, who turned out to be Ashley Dupré. My friend at the Times who wrote the story about me a few years earlier had kept in touch with me, mining for story ideas and sources. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say I wrote his first book for him. He, of course, did the writing, but I seem to remember that every single chapter came from one of my ideas or from my direction. To a lesser extent same could be said of his epic Times magazine piece about passwords.

He was among the teeming reporters trying to identify Ms. Dupré. With the resources available to his august news gathering machine he identified the escort website where she had a profile. I don’t remember if he pinpointed her exact profile, or if that even mattered. What they could not figure out was who maintained the website. It was described as anonymous, or discrete, and the site’s owner bragged that she was performing a needed service for these women who would otherwise have a hard time finding a place to advertise their services. Or something like that. I’m a little foggy on the details now but in substance the hurdle the Times needed to get past to identify Ashley was to first find out who hosted her website.

The site owner claimed she hosted escort profiles anonymously but she did not use registrar-level obfuscation of her domain name’s WHOIS record. That might have made identifying her well nigh impossible. The WHOIS record was intentionally obscure but it had some openings. It was an in-the-moment thing for me where my exact technique in identifying her is lost on me now, but I think what happened was I traced her name through a WHOIS lookup or traceroute of her site’s IP address, or else the DNS. WHOIS lookups are typically done on domain names but you can also query IP addresses and DNS for what can be surprisingly precise ownership information, sometimes down to the office number at somebody’s place of work.

After finding the name of the site owner I found that in years past she had advertised her “discrete” escort web hosting services on a number of message boards, using her real name and phone number. I sent that over to the Times, they contacted her, and this self-declared “discrete” web hosting provider sang like a jaybird, easily giving up Ashley’s name and contact info. Ms. Dupré was front page news the very next day.

My role in this was quite small but I think its relevance is that it worked to Ashley’s advantage, at least in the very short term. The Times, for whatever you can or cannot say about them, treats its sources and subjects with respect, in this case referring to her as “Ms. Dupré” and giving her obviously youthful point of view and comments the same weight as a world leader. If the Post or Daily News got to her first they would have sent their hatchet jobbers after her. That, of course, came to pass anyway, but when the story broke she was presented to the public in what I interpreted as a sympathetic manner. She might have come across as something akin to a deer in the headlights but she was not ridiculed or made to look manipulative or evil.

I said above that the hosting provider “sang like a jaybird” but it probably was not that easy for her to give up Ashley’s name and contact number. I do not know content of their conversation was but I would imagine the Times made the case that Ashley was going to be identified eventually, and that if anyone should break this story first it should be them on account of the respectful way they would profile her. But then what the hell do I know…

One memory of this incident that I cannot erase was browsing the various profiles of that escort website. All I remember thinking was “Who does this?” It felt filthy to me but in time I came to understand how powerful people seek out situations where they do not have to be in charge. To say I “understand” is not to imply that I sympathize or could even identify with that illusory mindset, but at least it gives a perspective on where someone like Spitzer is coming from. He was actually said to be a pretty nice guy in these situations, as far as johns go. That’s not something anyone from his professional and political life ever said. I don’t mean to sound sympathetic to Spitzer, although really there are so many worse things people can do in life besides pay for sex. I just remember thinking that as smart a guy as that must have a capacity to find some way to redeem himself, or give something back to society. There I go again with my annoyingly bottomless capacity for empathy.