Manhattan AG's Office Suspends Lawyer Who Moonlights as a Dominatrix

Manhattan AG's office suspends lawyer who moonlights as a dominatrix
The New York Post by Jamie Schram and Bob Fredericks  -  September 17, 2011

A well-respected lawyer in the state Attorney General’s Office spends her days toiling in securities fraud -- and her nights moonlighting as a dominatrix, The Post has learned.  Alisha Smith, 36, who dresses demurely as a buttoned-down prosecutor, turns up the heat when she becomes perky persecutor “Alisha Spark,” a nom de dom she uses when she performs at S&M events for pay, according to a fetish source.  “They pay her to go to the events. She dominates people, restrains them and whips them,” the fetish source said.  At a recent event in which she posed for photos with fellow fetishists, she was espied wearing a skin-tight, see-through latex dress with heart-shaped pasties. Now Smith is on the receiving end of some serious discipline from her bosses at the AG’s office. Yesterday, she was removed from her duties -- for which she earns $78,825 annually -- after The Post inquired about her saucy S&M lifestyle.  “The employee has been suspended without pay, effective immediately, pending an internal investi-gation,” said a spokesman for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  The spokesman would not elaborate on why Smith was being professionally spanked.  It comes just three years after she was lauded by then-AG Andrew Cuomo for her role in obtaining a $5 billion settlement from Bank of America and others in a securities-fraud case.  Smith declined to speak to The Post when approached outside her Manhattan home.  Her attorney, Marshall Mintz, would not comment on her side work or on whether she’s been paid.  Sources familiar with the issue say Smith’s punishment has less to do with her personal pleasure and more to do with the possibility that she profited from it.  It is common in the S&M community for dominatrixes to receive payment for appearances at fetish parties, where they unleash tawdry torments on eager sub missives.  Sources cited a standing executive order in the Attorney General’s Office that requires employees to “obtain prior approval from the [Employment Conduct Committee] before engaging in any outside pursuit ... from which more than $1,000 will be received or is anticipated to be received.”  Smith has left traces of her secret S&M life online.  In an Aug. 5 Twitter posting to friend and well-known dominatrix Jade Vixen, Smith tweeted, “Ricky’s doesn’t have the 500ml. www.liberator.com is the cheapest I could find for Eros” -- a reference to Eros Power, “a premium cream lubricant” on a sex-products Web site.  “They’ve known each other for years,” the S&M source said of Smith and Vixen, whose real name is Edythe Maa. “They’re very close.”  The source said Smith and Vixen regularly attend fetish parties where they “work together on one” submissive.  In a recent photo from a fetish event, a sexy Smith is seen sandwiched between Vixen and Vixen’s boyfriend, each of whom is dressed in a rubber nurse’s costume.  Three of Vixen’s male associates have met untimely deaths since 2008.  On Aug. 18, she found her boyfriend, 49-year-old engineer Peter Stelzenmuller, dead in the attic of their Pennsylvania home. The attic was filled with paraphernalia, including rubber masks and clothes and cans of whipped cream.  Stelzenmuller is believed to have died of self-suffocation, police said. His obituary claimed he had been trying on scuba gear.  In December 2008, a former Vixen client, David Krieg, shot and killed her then-boyfriend, Anthony Ottaviano, a lawyer.  Krieg later blew his own brains out.  On Aug. 19, a day after finding Stelzenmuller dead, Vixen tweeted: “Ladies night with Mistress Tyler, Alisha Spark and Lydia Mischief.”  Additional reporting by Eric Kriss and Reuven Fenton  -  jamie.schram@nypost.com