A woman who said she sold her virginity for a six-figure sum claims she was tricked into lying about the sale as a televised publicity stunt.
You might recognise Aleexandra Kefren. The Romanian model appeared on This Morning at just 18 to explain why she was planning to sell her virginity to a complete stranger for a minimum of one million euros through a service called Cinderella Escorts.
You can watch the interview below, which took place in November 2017 at ITV:
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But now Kefren, aged 19, claims the sale of her virginity was fabricated to create publicity for Cinderella Escorts, alleging the ploy was the fraudulent brainchild of owner Jan Zakobielski, who she says gave her a story to memorise for the cameras.
Indeed, Kefren says she’s been contacted by hundreds of young women who wanted to follow in these falsified footsteps and sell their own virginities through the escort service.
She told Harriet Sugarcookie of Sugarcookie.com:
Cinderella Escorts claim the sale was real but say Kefren was ‘kicked out’ after she broke the company guidelines by having a boyfriend.
The mainstream media has since featured a number of other reports involving consenting women selling their virginities through what claims to be ‘the world’s biggest escort service’.
Far be it for journalists to judge what women chose to do with their bodies, their stories have been hailed as female empowerment.
Many women have followed suit and speaking to UNILAD via email, the owner of Cinderella Escorts, who publicly goes by Jan Zakobielski, says he receives ‘1000 applycations [sic] a [sic]around 600 of them escorts, the others virgins’.
But the owner uses this fake publicity from mainstream media to lure women to brothels in Athens, alleges a report on Sugarcookie.com, which also claims Zakobielski is an alias used by Alexandros Kallinikidis.
Speaking to UNILAD Zakobielski denies the allegation he’s operating under a false name and even claims Alexandros Kallinikidis is Kefren’s ex-boyfriend.
Sources have told Sugarcookie.com they believe the stories to be a front for an international sex trafficking scam run by Kallinikidis, in which the news stories glamourising enterprise are complicit.
Sugarcookie.com spoke to Lauren, a girl who alleges she was tricked by Alexandros Kallinikidis to work in a brothel in Athens last year.
Others on Twitter claim they’ve also been victimised by this alleged exploitation:
Lauren, an experienced escort, claims:
First, Kallinikidis asks for photos from the girls. Then he calls straight away, whether it’s 2pm or 2am, he always wants to call.
He sent me links to these articles about his agency and told me I had to read them before talking further. Of course I wasn’t a virgin. I’ve done escorting before in Europe. So the first thing he offered me was to be a high-end escort.
Harriet explains the alleged scam in the video below:
Recounting what Kallinikidis allegedly promised, Lauren said:
He talked about this other girl, she’s been in the newspapers and she makes £9,000 a night. He said I could do that. I would meet clients all over the world, Los Angeles, London, everywhere.
It sounded strange. Something was weird. But I trusted him. All these articles were saying the same thing, how this girl made £9,000 a night.
But it’s all lies…when I was working in the brothels, I was [with] h[with]etimes. She’s on the brothel’s website. She was making €100 per client, which was double what I was, but she wasn’t making anywhere near £9,000.
Another source, a former sex worker named as Alicia, seemed to corroborate Lauren’s account when she claimed she’d been sent to one of five brothels in Athens, along with other women, by Cinderella Escorts.
Although the ‘clubs’ are worked by a number of women, some of whom Alicia believed were there willingly, the source claimed the reality of the work was a far cry from what she’d been promised.
Alicia explained women can often end up seeing eight clients in a night, each paying €50, of which the brothel takes 50 per cent. That means the girls are allegedly lured to Athens by Cinderella Escorts end up working in brothels making €25 per client.
Speaking exclusively to UNILAD about the discovery, a spokesperson for Sugarcookie.com said they’d been contacted by the Modern Slavery Human Trafficking Unit (MSHTU) of the National Crime Agency, which is looking into the allegations.
The spokesperson told UNILAD:
We were investigating for months. But we really stepped it up once we had a breakthrough and contacted a network of women who all had similar experiences. All we did was tell their story. They did all the work.
It took so much courage for them. Some had put this experience behind them and it was difficult to revisit. But they were galvanised by a wish to stop other women going through the same thing.
It was inspiring to see them working together and sharing information to stop this happening.
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We have been disappointed by the media’s lack of responsibility. We contacted every journalist and media outlet that wrote about Cinderella Escorts’ fake virgin sales without checking facts.
We think it raises serious ethical questions about what responsibilities the media has to check facts in stories before printing.
We know online media is always hungry for sex related stories because it gets a lot of clicks and traffic. But in this case it was used to sexually exploit innocent girls.
So far no media outlet has removed stories about Cinderella Escorts’ virginity sales.
The escort service made headlines closer to home in the UK as recently as January 2018 when a woman, simply known as Jasmin, is said to have put her virginity up for sale through Cinderella Escorts.
Like the other women involved in the auctions, her virginity was medically proven through a doctor’s certificate, according the the service’s guidelines.
UNILAD met Harriet Sugarcookie in Budapest. Here’s what she had to say:
Days after Sugarcookie.com put forward their allegations UNILAD received a press release from Cinderella Escorts, signed off by a 19-year-old claiming to be Jan Zakobielski, who’s been reported as 26 elsewhere.
It reads:
I sold my agency for 50 million euro and will move to Dubai now. Therefore I thought I will tell the whole story. About my work, insider infos, about my future plans and so on.
I become from a young schoolboy to a multi-millionaire. I think it is time in my life to leave this chapter of my life behind me. I have so much more things to explore and to advanture [sic].
[sic]ote>alexandros.kallinikidis.5/Facebook Speaking to UNILAD, the man going by Jan Zakobielski denied all the allegations laid out by Sugarcookie.com, claiming ‘Harriet tell lies about us to become more famous with her porns [sic]’.
[sic]m>UNILAD contacted Kefren for further comment but she declined to be interviewed without a fee.If you have a story to tell, contact UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.
