New Zealand- from www.stuff.co.nz – In a back room of a Hamilton go-karting track, Lisa Lewis lays a brown towel on the carpet.

From the moment she arrived a quarter-hour earlier, the 28-year-old has taken control of proceedings, cheerfully barking orders to the pit crew in an effort to transform the chilly, petrol-scented complex into a fitting venue for a stag’s night “toy show”, her third and final of the evening.

On her instruction, staff have removed unflattering fluorescent tube lights from the ceiling until only one pair remains.

“We want to make it sexy,” she says, her voice nasal with a cold, before determining the light needs to be dimmer still. Another tube is removed, the circuit is broken and the storeroom falls completely dark.

Abandoning her attempts at ambience, Lewis relocates to the next room and summons a semi-circle of nervous men around her on office chairs. She presses play on the stereo, then embarks on a virtuoso performance of crotch gymnastics.

The docile young stag responds with good grace to the humiliation of being led around on all fours by a belt around his neck, and drizzled with oil like a bruschetta. It is a far cry from the scene barely an hour earlier, in a hotel across town, where Lewis had delivered an identical routine to a pack of hyenas.

In a cramped, sweaty room, middle-aged and prodigiously drunk men had piled themselves on a bed, pushed to the side of the room to create a sort of grandstand.

They would not stay put, spilling beer on her rug, muttering comments about her perceived physical shortcomings, then crawling behind her on all fours, craning their necks for a better view.

The scene threatened to get nasty, particularly when Lewis whipped the stag, which he did not like one bit. But Lewis maintained control, coralling the drunks with the weary admonishments of a kindergarten teacher.

Afterwards, as she packed her costumes into her suitcase, mindful of a babysitter who needed relieving at midnight, one of the men approached alone. Suddenly a gentleman, he asked politely if it was all right to text her later.

Like all his mates, and thousands of others across the country, he had already had his picture taken with Lewis and her famous breasts. For $1200 he could sleep with her too.

Lewis made her name with a bikini-clad streak across Waikato Stadium during an All Blacks test in 2006, and has come to be described in her frequent media appearances since as a “celebrity stripper”.
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She might more correctly be described as New Zealand’s only celebrity prostitute.

A natural attention-seeker with a genius for self-promotion, Lewis has kept herself in the public eye since her act of disorderly behaviour, getting headlines for a high-profile Trade Me auction of her bikini, for reverting to a previous career as a stripper, and for becoming the country’s first naked newsreader.

Two years ago, she decided to capitalise on her household name in the most direct and lucrative way available to her.

When the press revealed she was offering her services for $7000 a night, she initially panicked, removing her rate card from her website, and declaring that she regretted her foray into sex work (although not before pointing out that those unmasking her made more money out of prostitution, through advertising escorts, than she did).

But the Hamilton-based solo mother has since embraced her profession. “I do consider myself to have one of the best jobs in the world,” she says.

She leads a unique life: flying around the country to heavily promoted appearances in strip clubs, staying in top hotels, and cultivating a symbiotic relationship with the media to maintain her brand which, in turn, sustains demand for her services.

She employs a part-time PA, drives a fearsome V8 truck and says that, financially, “I’m doing the best I’ve ever done in my life”.

A down-to-earth petrolhead who will chat to anybody, Lewis has become the suburban, relatable face of New Zealand’s decriminalised sex industry, and a vocal critic of those who dare look down on it.

Last year, her brassy entrepreneurialism earned her an unsuccessful nomination for a businesswoman of the year award, and the mainstream pulpit of a blog for the Waikato Times.

The blog was the newspaper’s most well-read but is now in hiatus; the editor announced Lewis’s retirement shortly after a controversial and later heavily redacted post in which she detailed a specialist act involving a 5m pearl necklace.

Says New Zealand’s adult industry king Steve Crow: “No one would come close to having a profile like Lisa’s. The secret is her personality. She’s no prettier and doesn’t have a better figure than a lot of girls.

“But she’s right out there, she uses her real name and everyone knows who she is. She’s not ashamed of it. Why should she be?”

Lewis sees herself as a “people’s celebrity”, a term which captures the peculiar nature of her profile: widely recognised and frequently approached for photographs by the public, but unwelcome at A-list events.

She’s been rebuffed from appearing at charity fixtures, the Tua-Cameron fight, The Apprentice and even kicked out of a sex expo for being too grubby.

But she doesn’t let the lack of an invitation stop her. Although she had no official role in the Hamilton 400 V8 Supercar event last year, Lewis bought her own ticket and attended in a bikini festooned with tiny tyres.

Organisers booted her out, deeming her outfit tacky and all but accusing her of soliciting. But Lewis got her name and photo in the papers again. Afterwards, in a reprise of her famous Trade Me auction, she sold the bikini online.

“I’m famous for getting into trouble,” she says. “It is really a form of intelligent marketing.”

Beyond the simple realisation that a young woman in a well-padded bikini is still irresistible to editors, Lewis has an understanding of what interests the media.

She is not above issuing a third-person press release, or quoting herself as punctuating a sentence “with a childish Katy Perry giggle”.

Despite her boasts about her discretion, she has been criticised for feeding material to the press to keep herself in the headlines, or gain the upper hand in disputes.

She faced such accusations when news broke last year that the wife of a prominent Hamilton golfer was threatening to take her to the Disputes Tribunal to recover money he had spent on her services.

Aside from her canny plays for attention, Lewis grows her customer base the same way as any other small business in the service industry. Lewis used to run a personal assistant company, and brings similar marketing tactics to bear on her current job.

She does flyer drops, billboards. Without bidding, she solicits and forwards testimonial references from her clients to attest to the quality of services rendered.

“After a few rolls in the figurative hay, I can say that I am an extremely satisfied customer,” one emailed.

Another regular, one of a number of female customers, said she started seeing Lewis after finding her brochure in her company’s mail box, and thought it might help with her depression: “She makes me feel sexy, and comfortable with myself.”

Lewis charges her $1200 an hour, and $5 to read her text messages.

Lewis has a great many detractors, but what her fans seem to admire, above perhaps even her physical attributes, is her moxie.

Amongst the vitriol posted at the end of her blogging career, one commenter wished her “good luck with whatever you choose to do next. Blogging may not be for you, but at least you gave it a go; a trait unusual in New Zealand these days”.

When she briefly tried to escape her notoriety in the wake of her streak, she took a job as a BP forecourt attendant, and says she gave it her all, even through the weeks when radio jocks would call her workplace every day to sass her.

When she broke her nose during a bungled pole dance during a Brisbane sexpo last year, she continued her routine to the end, then appeared at a Boobs on Bikes parade a few days later, topless with a bandaged nose.

“I am a professional and I will not let event organisers down,” she told the press.

Lewis SAYS her life story should be made into a movie. The material is certainly there. Born on Auckland’s North Shore, her parents separated when she was one, and she was “brought up between two extreme opposites” of her strict Christian father and her more open-minded mother, Karina Fitch.

From her earliest memories, her parents were engaged in a vicious legal wrangle for custody, which saw Lewis bounced among 16 schools around the North Island.

From the age of four to nine she was sexually abused by a babysitter, who had been molesting scores of other children, and who later died in prison.

The abuse occurred while she was staying with her mother, who Lewis claims for years forbade her from disclosing to her father what had happened, so as not to jeopardise custody arrangements.

After fifth form, she left school and, with a vague notion of working in God’s service, began working as a receptionist at her father’s church. She says she was a well-behaved teenager, but did not get along with her stepmother and was asked to leave her father’s home.

“They thought I had an attitude,” she says. “I was working at the church all day, going to prayer meetings at night. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

Needing extra income to support herself, she answered a “dancers wanted” ad in the paper and, for a while, worked at the church during the day and as an underage stripper at night, before her cover was blown when a church member came into the club.

Lewis says her foray into strip clubs began as a naive mistake, thinking the ad was calling for hip hop dancers.

But she had grown up with three relatives working as prostitutes at times during her childhood.

When, as a fourth former, she entered a teen beauty contest, her corporate sponsor was a Hamilton massage parlour.

“I guess it makes it understandable what industry I got into,” she says, adding she felt the work helped with her recovery from the abuse.

Lewis found a sense of family among the dancers, but also picked up a speed habit. It wasn’t until she moved to Wellington, and was taken under the roof, guidance and employ of skin mogul Brian Le Gros, that she was able to beat it. (She is now staunchly anti-drugs.)

After several years she left, dancing in a Tokyo club for six months, where she met a multimillionaire American construction magnate, and followed him to Dallas, Texas.

He was 41. She was 20. Their unhappy marriage lasted 15 months.

When she suspected he was sleeping with his ex-wife, he did such a number on her with his denials that she thought she was going mad, and was committed to a mental institution for a week.

The episode “led me to self harm”, she says, adding that he continued his affair while she was institutionalised.

He later told reporters of the relationship: “I got my money’s worth.”

Lewis returned to New Zealand with only her suitcase and her ex’s name. She stayed with her sister in Queenstown, worked as a hotel cleaner and, according to her mother, once attempted suicide by walking into the lake.

She eventually got pregnant to a man who left three days after their child was born.

Then, after a medical emergency led to a near-death experience for her child, she drew up a “bucket list”. In 2006, while living in Hamilton, the opportunity to cross off one of the goals presented itself when a man invited her to an All Blacks test on their first date.

“I didn’t expect my streak was going to get as much attention as it did,” she says, pointing out that a man who streaked at the game on the same night has remained anonymous.

She responded to every media request that flowed in afterwards, because she’s “just that sort of person”.

But she soon found there could be a downside to the attention when a rebuffed suitor who had paid $13,500 for her breast enlargement surgery resurfaced in the press with an axe to grind.

(She says she had met the truck driver on an online dating site, ascertained he was not her type, but was happy for him to bestow gifts on her.)

More problematically, news reports consistently referred to her as an ex-stripper, although she says she hadn’t danced for years.

“I thought if they’re going to keep publishing that, I’m going to become one again.”

She returned to the pole, got the naked news job, and kept building her profile to the extent that she claims her co-workers at a Hamilton strip club became resentful, and bullied her out of the place.

In need of extra cash, and being constantly asked for “the other” by her private lap dance clients, she says she decided to finally cross the line into sex work two years ago, setting her prices at an astronomical level because she didn’t really want to do it.

She had no idea that punters would pay that amount, let alone that she would actually enjoy the work.

Lewis says she has no regrets about her career, that it takes no toll. On the other hand, she admits her pride prevents her from acknowledging a downside to anything she does. It’s clear her work has come at some cost, that it has made relationships difficult.

Lewis maintains a hypervigilant level of security around her home life, responding to any questions about it with a prickly defensiveness.

She recently had a scare when a session with a likely methed-up client went awry, although Lewis says it was her only job that has ever gone badly, and ended without the man laying a finger on her.

Nevertheless, her mother worries that Lewis’s child “will grow up without a mother”.

Her work has also estranged her from her family. Lewis spent Christmas apart from her relatives, with whom she had been feuding since she claims her aunt showed other family members, including her grandmother, explicit pictures from her website.

Their condemnation particularly rankles with Lewis, given that other family members have worked in the industry.

Says Fitch: “Some in the family don’t agree with what she does. She might feel that’s hypocritical. But she’s got to learn to treat people with respect.”

Fitch says she craves a close mother-daughter relationship, but Lewis won’t return her calls.

“I couldn’t have given her more than what I’ve given,” she says, listing various crises in her daughter’s life when she has come to her aid.

“But she doesn’t let her guard down. When she was pregnant, she cut me right out of her life. The knife came down. I found that the hardest thing.”

She says much of the family’s issues with Lewis are less to do with her job, than the way she treats them. The narcissistic self-belief and penchant for drama that have kept her in the media spotlight have also wreaked havoc on family relationships.

She claims Lewis plays people off against each other, manipulates the information she holds about them, and is indifferent to the consequences.

Lewis is not invited to her sister’s upcoming wedding, not because she is a prostitute, but because years ago, while staying with her and her partner in Queenstown, she made allegations about him to the police.

Says Fitch: “I’m Lisa’s biggest supporter. She is beautiful. She’s top at what she does. She’s a wonderful mum. I see her doing extremely well in the future; I think she’s going to run in politics.

“But with all this retaliation and cutting off people, she must get lonely. I have grave concerns that she’s going to find it very hard as she gets older.”

Lewis says she holds no grudge against Fitch for whatever failings she might have shown as a mother. She acknowledges Fitch trying to do her best, and credits her as the only person who has consistently supported her career.

Lewis says if she is aloof, it’s only because she “never felt I had a mother or father that were really there for me growing up”.

“[It] makes it easy to understand why I left home so young, and lived this life experience I have lived.”

But when she learns her mother has brought up parts of her life she herself has left out, Lewis suddenly becomes aerated.

To her, her mother’s contributions to the story – about her week in an institution, her self-harm – don’t make her appear sympathetic, only weak.

Lewis ends the phone call, and cancels a scheduled photo shoot. Later, a legal letter arrives, containing a list of the parts of her life she wants expunged from the record.

She is extremely uncomfortable with losing control over the story, with someone else having a say in how her life is described. That’s not how it is supposed to work, she says.