Heidi Fleiss \nLOS ANGELES - "This is Heidi and I want to thank the people who supported me during my difficult three-year prison term. I am excited about the future and anxious to get back to work". With that statement on her new Web site, former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss is trying to put herself back in business, though not quite in her former profession. And she's not the only one among the notoriously fallen to take the cyberroute back to solvency - or respectability.
Former child television star Gary Coleman is on the Web with a site devoted to raising money to get him back on his feet following his bankruptcy filing. And Clinton-Lewinsky whistleblower Linda Tripp is online thanks to her defense fund, which has posted her site to help - you guessed it - with her legal defense.
Fleiss has opened up www.heidiwear.com, a Web site now devoted to selling clothing such as T-shirts, boxer shorts, and other mostly casual clothing - but the site also promises the coming of "an adult Web site (sic) that promises to be the ultimate sexual experience".
She says it was in large part to help her recover from bankruptcy following her well-publicized legal troubles, once she was discovered to have operated one of southern California's most profitable - and notorious - prostitution rings. Fleiss says her bankruptcy will not "affect the prompt delivery of T-shirts, Sweatshirts, Boxer shorts, or any other items on our web sight."
Fleiss spent time in prison for tax evasion after the exposure of her call girl operation, an operation which counted some of Hollywood's highest and mightiest among its clientele.
Coleman has gone by way of http://webathon.ugo.com, which is presenting "The Gary Coleman Web-a-Thon" in a bid to help the 32-year-old former Diff'rent Strokes star overcome an adulthood ravaged by litigation against his parents, legal trouble, and financial collapse.
The Coleman auction site was produced after UGO Networks, a Web entertainment firm, learned of Coleman's financial trouble. "We said we really should help this guy out, and it just snowballed," UGO CEO Joe Robinson tells Wired. The company had contacted Coleman himself, right after he filed for bankruptcy in August, but the former actor says he had his reservations.
"They were going do the Gary Coleman Web-a-thon regardless of whether I was going to participate or not," Coleman tells Wired. "I'm like, ' OK, this is a little different.' But because they said they liked me as a person, that motivated me to help them create some of the content."
Some of the content, in fact, is pretty racy. Aside from gimmicks parodying Coleman, including "Gary Grooves," a 3D image of the actor dancing to hip-hop, T-shirts, Zippo lighters, and commemorative plates showing the words "Save Me" with the cherub looks Coleman still has, there is staged telephone sex, audio recordings of Coleman talking, well, raunchy.
At the auction, visitors can bid on such items as autographed items donated by New York Yankees players Derek Jeter and Chuck Knoblauch as well as on Coleman's personal items - including several model trains and a pinstriped suit "It will allow me to reach liquidity much faster," Coleman tells Wired. "I can finally move my [junk] out of the apartment."
Linda Tripp's site, www.lindatripp.com, has a grander goal than just pulling Tripp's financial chestnuts out of the fire - the former Pentagon employee who helped expose President Clinton's affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky puts it bluntly on the home page of the site: "Help Linda Defend Herself Against The Clinton Machine."
And Tripp herself has a few comments on the site. "To smear me, to belittle me, to make me the butt of cruel jokes -- even to publicly impugn my integrity wasn't enough for them," she says. "Now they have indicted me in a court of law for doing what I had to do to prove I was being ordered to lie under oath, and that others were breaking the law. Amazingly, telling the truth could put me in a jail cell."
Tripp goes on trial Jan. 18 over her having tape-recorded Lewinsky telling her about her affair with Clinton. Judge Diane Leasure has also set hearing for legal motions Nov. 19 and Dec. 13, which might include the office of the Independent Counsel to testify about her immunity deal, according to the Washington Post.
Tripp faces five years in prison and a $100,000 fine if convicted on each of two criminal charges for illegal wiretapping and disclosing the tapes' content to Newsweek. Tripp wore a wire for the Lewinsky conversations, she has said, based on her earlier depositions in the Paula Jones case. Her attorneys say the push to prosecute her under Maryland's wiretap law is politically motivated.
