Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Former Prostitute Said Ex-Governor Spitzer Used To Sneak Her Home In A Suitcase

(JTA) — A woman who said she had had sex for pay with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer claimed that he would smuggle her into his home in a suitcase.

Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 following media reports of his frequent hiring of prostitutes, “used to sneak me into his Fifth Avenue apartment in a black suitcase … when his wife was away,’” Svetlana Zakharova told The New York Post in an interview published Friday.

Zakharova was accused of trying to extort Spitzer, though prosecutors dropped those charges.

The extortion rap was dropped as part of a plea bargain in which Zakharova admitted to trying to steal rent money from an ex-lover. Contacted by The Post, Spitzer declined to comment.  

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.