This Friday, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call girl whose hotel trist with then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer led to the sex scandal of the year, will appear on ABC’s ”20/20” for a sit-down interview with Diane Sawyer. If Spitzergate went down six months ago, why is Dupre talking now? Last week, the state of New York declared it wouldn’t be pressing charges against the Love Gov, meaning it’s unlikely Dupre will be charged for her part in the scandal, which frees the former escort to make her case to the public. On the same day, a lengthy profile of Dupre will appear in People. In excerpts from the interviews posted online, it sounds like the 23-year-old is looking to make apologies and mend her ways.

Growing up in New Jersey, Dupre says, she was a “happy” upper middle class kid. After her biological father divorced her mother, who later remarried an oral surgeon, Dupre changed her last name. “I’ve been searching for so long for that identity of who I am,” she explains. When she was 17, she left home and began dabbling in drugs. At one point, she appeared on “Girls Gone Wild.” At another point, she was raped. By 19, she was an aspiring singer living in New York City. Then someone handed her a business card for the Emperors Club, the escort service that lead to her infamy. “I was doing my job,” Dupre tells Sawyer. After the story broke, she moved back in with her parents in Jersey: “‘I felt like it was surreal, like it wasn’t happening,’ she said. ‘But it was.’”

Dupre says she didn’t know Spitzer was the governor of New York when she met him in a Washington, DC, hotel room. Their meeting was “Strictly business.” Watching Spitzer’s resignation speech, she says she felt pained at what she’d done to the governor’s wife Silda. “‘I felt connected to her,’ Dupre said. ‘I didn’t feel connected to him. Her pain. And I just saw the pain in her eyes.’” Her mother was supportive, her stepfather is “disgusted,” and her biological father contacted her after the story broke to tell her: “‘Damn, girl. When you do it, you do it big!’”

Today she says she’d never go back to prostitution. “Never again.” Instead, she’s pitching herself as the girl next door gone bad: “I am a normal girl.” She says wants to be a singer or write a book, plans, no doubt, that will helped along by her “20/20” appearance. But no matter how many interviews she does, she’ll likely never shake her identity as the call girl who toppled the governor. No doubt, she’s got dreams of becoming famous for something other than getting paid to sleep with politicians. In reality, more than anything else, she comes across as just, well, sad.