Influencer Alix Earle opens up about her dad's affair with Ashley Dupré, recalls how her ‘world crashed down’
Back in 2008, news of her father Thomas ‘TJ’ Earle’s affair with Ashley Dupré, who is now his wife, surfaced
Influencer Alix Earle has opened up about her father’s affair with now-stepmother Ashley Dupré. Back in 2008, news of her father Thomas ‘TJ’ Earle’s affair with Ashley surfaced.
In a conversation with the Call Her Daddy podcast, Alix said she remembers the day. “I remember the day very clearly,” the 22-year-old said. “Paparazzi had shown up at my house and my mom quickly kind of got me and my sister out of the house over to our cousins.”
At the time, Ashley was in the midst of a sex scandal with then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer. He eventually resigned in the wake of the controversy. Thomas, at the time, was allegedly cheating on his wife Alisa with Ashley.
Alix said that when the media came to her New Jersey home, she innocently thought they had come to interview her neighbours. “I didn’t know they were paparazzi,” she said.
Alix Earle felt as though her ‘world crashed down’
“It was in like fourth grade. I started to kind of hear commentary from people and I had an iPad at the time,” Alix admitted. “I’m Googling my family and all of a sudden, I see that the past two years of my life had been a lie.”
“My dad had an affair with someone who was well-known for her job having sexual relations with high-class people and one of them was even the governor of New York,” she added. “She was very well-known from that and in turn, my dad’s affair became a very public situation.”
Seeing the news, Alix felt as though her “world crashed down in that moment.” She went on to thank her mother, as well as her sister Ashtin, 20, for shielding her from the chaos. “I didn’t know the severity of what had happened between my parents because my mom was super, super mature about it and didn’t speak to us about it and didn’t put that stress that she was going through onto us,” Alix said.“I kind of figured it out myself and then I proceeded to deal with it myself.”
‘I was told that I had to be respectful to this woman’
Five years later, Thomas and Ashley tied the knot. Alix, however, was introduced to her only after her father officially broke things off with her mom and moved out of the house. “I was told that I had to be respectful to this woman and we had to be nice to her. I wanted to rip her head off. It was very weird because I felt like I was a 10-year-old having to be more mature than someone 20, 30 years older than me,” Alix said.
Even after everything was settled, however, Alix continued to face the consequences of her father’s decision. She said parents would tell her mom that they did not want Alix to be friends with their children. “She would have to sit me down and be like, ‘They don’t really respect us,’” Alix said.
“My teacher in high school was talking about this governor’s affair and said exactly what had happened—who it had happened with—and like looked me in the eyes while this was going on in class,” she continued.
She added, “I remember my classmates looking at me and like, laughing because this was about my family. And this was something he was literally teaching in history class.”
However, years later now, Alix and her mother, sister, younger step-siblings and father spend time together, regularly seeing each other in New Jersey and going to family dinners in the Hamptons.
