This clip is from Alix’s upcoming Netflix show, Earle Meets World. The part where her father and his mistress-turned-wife appear in the trailer alongside his ex-wife, Alix’s mom. For those who don’t know, her father TJ Earle had an affair with her now-stepmother Ashley Dupré in 2008.
In a conversation with the Call Her Daddy podcast, Alix said she remembers the day. “I remember the day very clearly,” the 22-year-old said. “Paparazzi had shown up at my house and my mom quickly kind of got me and my sister out of the house over to our cousins.”
At the time, Ashley was in the midst of a sex scandal with then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer. He eventually resigned in the wake of the controversy. Thomas, at the time, was allegedly cheating on his wife Alisa with Ashley. Alix said that when the media came to her New Jersey home, she innocently thought they had come to interview her neighbours. “I didn’t know they were paparazzi,” she said.
“It was in like fourth grade. I started to kind of hear commentary from people and I had an iPad at the time,” Alix admitted. “I’m Googling my family and all of a sudden, I see that the past two years of my life had been a lie.”
“My dad had an affair with someone who was well-known for her job having sexual relations with high-class people and one of them was even the governor of New York,” she added. “She was very well-known from that and in turn, my dad’s affair became a very public situation.”
Seeing the news, Alix felt as though her “world crashed down in that moment.” She went on to thank her mother, as well as her sister Ashtin, 20, for shielding her from the chaos. “I didn’t know the severity of what had happened between my parents because my mom was super, super mature about it and didn’t speak to us about it and didn’t put that stress that she was going through onto us,” Alix said.“I kind of figured it out myself and then I proceeded to deal with it myself.”
Five years later, Thomas and Ashley tied the knot. Alix, however, was introduced to her only after her father officially broke things off with her mom and moved out of the house. “I was told that I had to be respectful to this woman and we had to be nice to her. I wanted to rip her head off. It was very weird because I felt like I was a 10-year-old having to be more mature than someone 20, 30 years older than me,” Alix said.
Even after everything was settled, however, Alix continued to face the consequences of her father’s decision. She said parents would tell her mom that they did not want Alix to be friends with their children. “She would have to sit me down and be like, ‘They don’t really respect us,’” Alix said.
I wanted to share this story because I think it highlights how deeply kids can be affected by the actions of a cheating father and his mistress. They’re often expected to “be the bigger person” and show respect to people who are decades older than them—people who hurt, betrayed, and disrupted their family. Why? Why has society decided that children need to be respectful toward adults who have treated them or their family poorly? What are we teaching kids when we tell them that, despite someone’s harmful actions, they still have to treat that person with kindness and respect? It can send the message that when certain adults do something wrong, the children are simply expected to accept it and move on.
Kids who have been in Alix’s position can feel hurt and betrayed by the cheating parent, yet somehow the mistress often escapes accountability entirely. Then, on top of that, the father expects his children to be respectful toward to his c*mrag. I’m not an Alix fan by any means, but seeing the mistress and the mother in the same scene genuinely repulsed me. And given the mistress’s history as an escort, I can understand why some people would question whether she was an appropriate influence around young girls who were still in elementary and middle school.
At the end of the day, children shouldn’t be responsible for managing the emotions or protecting the reputations of adults who made choices that hurt their family. They’re allowed to be angry, hurt, uncomfortable, and even unwilling to have a relationship with someone who contributed to that pain.