(818) 390-1734
(818) 390-1734
An investigation into the life of a family member, inspired by the methodology of Patrick Modiano's writings about Dora Bruder.
Samantha was a tangible figure to me from around 2004 to 2007. There are photos taken from holidays, weddings, and funerals in which she holds me, aged three or four-ish, on her lap. On one of these occasions, she asked to take me on a drive to meet one of her friends. My parents wouldn’t let her; they later tell me that she was high, that when she took that drive without me, she got lost and crashed her car.
I brought her up during our weekly family phone call, curious. My father says that he lost touch with her a long time ago.
“She’d get a new phone number and call every so often and I’d offer to get her help, but she’d never follow through, and before long that phone number would become obsolete.”
He explains that to this day he doesn’t know how to contact her, that all he has is a phone number she gave him in 2012, that it is disconnected now.
—
He calls me later that evening on the landline to elaborate at my request. “I’ll walk you through an outline of at least what I know. Much of this you’ll have to verify, but it’s all online somewhere.”
“Samantha’s story started when she was 16,” my father says. “Her name back in those days was Samantha Burdette.” I learn that she was born in Arlington, Texas. Her family moved to Denver when she was five. At 16, she became a runway model and quickly found success and glamor, visiting places like Japan and Paris. At 19, she moved to Hollywood and got caught up in “the Heidi Fleiss thing.”
He explains that Heidi Fleiss ran a prostitution ring in the mid-nineties. The madam managed “four or five girls, all models, who worked for movie stars like Charlie Sheen.” He also tells me that “when she got busted the Californian media heavily publicized the trial, so I can probably find all of this information online.”
A 1994 Vanity Fair article confirms his story. Fleiss was in charge of an exclusive operation that provided girls for the wealthy and powerful: Saudi Kings, mobsters, the Clinton and Bush Administrations. A sting operation jointly led by the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles Police Departments took her down. Undercover officer Detective Sammy Lee, posing as a rich Japanese businessman, requested girls for a fake event. “Fleiss asked Lee to describe his dream girl (‘tall, slender, brunette’) and sent Samantha Burdette, who resembles the late Natalie Wood, to Lee’s hotel room that night,” the article reads. “Samantha is a typical Heidi girl. Strikingly lovely, she left Colorado when she was still a teenager for a glamorous modeling/acting career in Japan. She wound up living with John Casablancas, the head of the Elite modeling agency, and then with Axl Rose of Guns n’ Roses. Then she started working for Heidi.”
“The family story is that she got involved with it because she had gotten involved with drugs,” my father tells me.
The night that they busted the ring, June 9th, 1993, Samantha was found to be in possession of illegal substances, a charge that was added to those of prostitution and solicitation. He says that she agreed to testify against Fleiss in exchange for immunity. According to a 1994 article from the LA Times, Samantha testified that clients paid up to $10,000 a night, and that Fleiss took 40% of her earnings. The reporter described that Samantha, “leggy” and “miniskirted” on the stand, appeared “ill at ease” during her testimony, and “frequently sought eye contact and exchanged knowing smiles with Fleiss, her former boss and friend.”
“‘Samantha is beautiful, but she is a lost soul,’ said Heidi sympathetically.” Reading this stings. It makes me vengeful. I imagine finding Fleiss, who, after serving just 20 months in a low-security prison, can now be found at the tropical bird sanctuary she operates in Pahrump, Nevada. I picture myself screaming at her, interrogating: Was Samantha the one who left her soul behind somewhere, or did you strip it from her?
Other girls who worked for Heidi have since told of the price they paid for their lifestyles. They speak of expensive jewelry and first-class plane tickets, as well as various kinds of designer and prescription drugs. Copious amounts of cocaine, namely, were often handed out perhaps as recompense for the physical and sexual abuse.
Though the girls could choose when they wanted to work, they were to follow Fleiss’ rules as one of the girls explained: “You were not allowed to have long hair, you were not allowed to be too pretty, you were not allowed to wear too much makeup or be too glamorous … because someone would fall in love with you and take you away. And then she loses the business."
The rest of the Vanity Fair article paints a vivid picture of what it looked like to work for Fleiss in those days: “To be a hooker you have to accept that you’re living a lie.”
—
I look up pictures of Natalie Wood and see the resemblance. A strong, square jaw, pronounced cheekbones, a pointed nose, and what my mother calls “Tanner Eyebrows” – thick, angular, and noticeable in every face on my Dad’s side of the family, including me.
Brief correspondence with Samantha’s half-sister, Christina, provides me with some more photos and a testament that “she really was beautiful.” She adds, “for all her shenanigans, she was also intrinsically kind—a rare trait in our family.” Christina reflects, “I think about her every day.”
I look up John Casablancas, an American modeling agent and scout who founded Elite Model Management. Casablancas is remembered for his development of the supermodel concept. He is the father of the Strokes’ frontman Julian Casablancas. I see that he was responsible for the careers of Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista.
I desperately try to find images of Samantha during her modeling career. I scroll through pages and pages of photos of John Casablancas with various beautiful girls, but none bear a resemblance. I encounter a recent documentary “Casablancas: The Man Who Loved Women,” and a W Magazine review of it, titled “The Man Who Invented Supermodels Also Took Advantage of Them.” Figures.
I look up “Axl Rose” and find many accounts of women attesting to his abusive nature. I look up “Axl Rose Samantha Burdette,” and find that “an old rumor exists that MJ [Michael Jackson] and Axl were both into some call girl called Samantha Burdette that worked for Heidi Fleiss. She was supposed to be Axl’s girlfriend but she couldn’t stay away from [Michael].”
My father doesn’t know what happened to any of the other girls involved, but explains that after the Fleiss trial, Samantha couldn’t work; no one would employ her. It was then that she changed her last name to Alexander in an attempt to escape the publicity around Samantha Burdette. She briefly married a man from Argentina, who acquired a green card from the deal, and left her shortly thereafter.
“That marriage was really always a scam, and she didn’t realize this but everyone else pretty much suspected and believed that he was just using her,” my father says. His family was supposedly wealthy landowners who had cattle. “And that’s all I know about him.”
Christina later corrects his information, tells me that the husband, Joao Flavio, was from a very powerful family in Brazil. Samantha dated his father, Joao Flavio Sr., for years before she married Joao Jr., whom she jokingly refers to as the “Brazilian Brad Pitt.” She provides me with a photograph, and I see the resemblance. Christina says that Joao Sr. was a scumbag but that Joao Jr. seemed like a nice kid. He went with Samantha to Christina’s wedding, and still, every so often, messages Christina on FaceBook to ask after his once-wife. I wonder about their marriage– perhaps the scam my family refers to was the will of Joao’s father. I think about what it means to be “used,” and about how much of Samantha’s story unfolded at the will of powerful people who did not care about the consequences she would bear as a result of their desire. A quick search leads me to a Facebook flier announcing, in Portuguese, the death, at 86 years, of Sr. Joao Flavio Alves, on April, 24th, 2020 due to natural causes.
Back on the phone with my father, I interrupt with carefully manufactured casualness to clarify that she was about 21 years old, my age now, when she turned back to prostitution to make a living and her drug addiction worsened. According to my father, she served at least two terms in prison for possession. “The second time she was arrested, they searched her motel room after she was picked up walking the streets near the LAX airport.” He is confident that anyone can find Samantha Alexander’s arrest records, but my search for them remains unsuccessful.
“Gaylon argues that all that isn’t true, but it is.” Gaylon is Samantha’s mother, my father’s sister, my aunt. She gave birth to Samantha in October 1967, when she was a senior in high school. Her father was a man named Kenny Schaffer.
“He was Gaylon’s boyfriend for a while, but he was a piece of shit punk.” I learn that Gaylon always managed to hook up with men who were abusers, less than willing to make an honest living. I wonder whether behavioral patterns – desires, failures – can be passed down genetically.
“That’s pretty much the environment we grew up in. Nobody went to school, Stephen was a drug dealer, Sharon was a drug addict.” Stephen and Sharon are my father’s brother and other sister. Sharon died from that addiction many years ago.
—
Around 2012, my father worked in California every week. Samantha reached out to him, met him for dinner, and brought a man with her. Prior to their meal, he had searched her phone number, had seen that it showed up on the web as belonging to a prostitute, and that it appeared alongside pictures of her. At dinner, he brought his findings to her attention. The man she was with revealed himself as her pimp.
“Well, the only way I can make sure you have work is to advertise your phone number, so I don’t know what you expect me to do,” he told Samantha. That was the last time my father saw her.
A year later, Gaylon and Christina went to California to meet with Samantha in an attempt to get her to come back to Denver and get clean. “I’m not sure exactly what failed there but something failed that prevented that from happening.” He thinks that they took Samantha in, but she stole from them. “Christina tried and tried and tried for years to stay in touch with her and try to help her and then something happened.”
—
I say goodbye, love you, thank you, to my father. I begin searching online for a “Samantha Alexander” who once lived in Los Angeles. I find her on a few of those websites that amalgamate publicly available information into streamlined profiles of names, dates, and numbers. I confirm that the software and I are both thinking about the same person, out of all the Samantha Alexanders who exist, because my family members are listed under “possible relatives.”
I see that her middle name is Renee. I see that out of sixteen previous addresses, she has been evicted twice on record, first from 11976 Walnut Lane, Los Angeles, CA, 90025 in June 2003, and later from 753 North Kings Rd Apt 207, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, in February of 2007. I find five offenses in what BeenVerified believes is her criminal record: a DUI for drugs, driving without proof of insurance, and careless driving, all in Denver, 2008. There are also two health and safety code violations from 2011 and 2012 in Los Angeles.
Her last name on these records is Samantha Alexander Moraes, and her next of kin lists a Joao Moraes. I wonder whether Samantha has failed to shed the remnants of the Brazilian man, or whether this is someone new. I search for Samantha Moraes in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County case records and find six cases from the years 2008 to 2012. When I look for the specifics of each one using the case number, no match is found.
Nothing tells me about her current whereabouts save for a list of phone numbers, most of which are zip-coded the areas around Los Angeles, one of which is zip-coded to Manhattan, New York, 10001. This area is a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. I imagine her getting sandwiches from the deli guy who always flirts with me, and wonder if we would order the same thing – a honey ham sandwich with pickles.
One of her emails is picklelover78@gmail.com. I imagine her hopping the M15, smoking on a stoop I love to laugh on, keeping her head low when she passes the guy who hangs out on my corner and once tried to follow me inside my apartment. I wonder if she would give him a cigarette when he asked for one, if she would make sure to smile and make eye contact while she did it because she saw a bit of herself in him, and him in herself.
I find a threadbare, almost juvenile LinkedIn profile saying that a Samantha Alexander went to Kansas State University from 2013 to 2017, and that she wants to be a nutritionist. The personal statement claims that this interest comes from a longtime affinity for soccer. Skeptical, I text my father to ask if Samantha ever played soccer, and he is doubtful. Even if she did, she surely never went to college. This is either someone else, or a fabricated account of her own creation. I wonder what she might have made it for, why she picked these particular lies.
Sensing a lull in my search, my father gives me the phone number he once used to look her up. It leads me to two escort review sites. On both of them, her name is Summer. On one, there are two grainy images, selfies, of her. Both websites have the sort of information that I assume someone who orders an escort would want to know: she is not a porn star, she is available during the day and night, she does smoke, but not during the session. Next, physical description: white, with straight, black hair. She is a C cup, has no piercings or tattoos, her crotch is shaved. The most recent review of her services is from 2017, but it’s locked, reserved only for the site’s members. I am relieved to see evidence of her existence past 2013, disheartened that it exists only in this form.
After I complete my research to the best of my abilities, my father calls, with a reluctant kind of hope in his tone that I feel guilty for inspiring, to ask if I’ve found anything more recent. I have to tell him no. “Hm, yeah. Okay,” he says, and falls silent.
In an effort to counter his dismay, I tell him that I searched through California death records for her name, and that nothing came up. I try to convince him that this is a good enough reason not to worry, but I know that I checked less-than-thoroughly, and have seen enough Dateline to know that nobody really cares about bureaucratic procedure when prostitutes die.
—
Looking for Samantha also led me to a recent interview outlining the story of another girl who was in the ring; her name is Alexandra Datig. Like Samantha, she met Fleiss when she was twenty. When she decided that she wanted out of the ring, she reached out to the authorities and became the “key informant” for the 1993 sting. The article reads that now, “Datig has turned her life around. She doesn't want to be known as a former prostitute, but a human trafficking survivor.” She works for the Los Angeles County Task Force for Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, and is writing a book about her life. When it comes out, I will scan its pages for mention of Samantha and hope that it tells a story not of sexual scandal, but instead one of desire, sacrifice, pickles, and the way my Aunt Gaylon still waits for her daughter to come home.
Meanwhile, back on EroticMonkey.com, under the kind of filter that superimposes makeup on the subject of the photograph – lipstick, eyeliner, blue eyeshadow, – Samantha smiles. She sits, wearing a red T-shirt, in a bare room somewhere in Los Angeles, California. I wonder if she is still there, and consider whether it would be better or worse if she isn’t.