Pursuing your dreams can come at a price. Deidre Dare (real name: Deidre Clark) used to earn over £130,000 a year as an associate in Allen & Overy’s Moscow office. Then she started blogging, publishing erotic fiction that was heavily influenced by her experiences as an expat lawyer. She accompanied her prose with pictures and videos of herself in transparent nightwear. As the blog caught the media’s attention, Fifty Shades of Grey-style literary success beckoned. But three years after being sacked by Allen & Overy for bringing the firm into disrepute with her sexy writing, life for Dare seems tough…
Over to the Mail on Sunday, which yesterday described Dare’s new residential situation in her native US, where she has since returned, as follows:
“Today, she lives in the Hamptons, the picturesque playground of New York’s elite, two hours’ drive from the city, where wealthy Manhattanites own sprawling second properties. Deidre’s address, however, is somewhat misleading; her ‘home’ is, in fact, a tiny, two-room cabin off a busy highway, which she shares with Bonnie, a large and lumbering rottweiler, and rents by the night on a credit card.”
The paper proceeds to explain how Dare – who stayed on in Moscow for a year after losing her job as a lawyer, writing a weekly column called Sexpat for English-language newspaper The Moscow News, before penning a novel called ‘Slut’ – is staking everything on her ongoing £22 million(!) claim against Allen & Overy for sexual harassment and unfair dismissal.
“‘Do you have a plan B, or a plan C? There is no plan B, there is no plan C,’ she says, with some exasperation. ‘I really don’t have a plan should I fail to win the case, because I am going to [win it]. It’s just a question of endurance.'”
Dare, 47, believes that the firm didn’t really get rid of her for bringing it into disrepute with her writing, but because she spurned the advances of its then Moscow office chief Tony Humphrey, with whom she says she previously had a drunken liaison.
The case against Allen & Overy was given the go-ahead to be heard in New York in April, and is expected to take place this year. In the meantime, here’s a video of Dare dancing to Coldplay with her Rottweiler in what appears to be the aforementioned cabin.