Lingerie queen used to tease and please

WHO is Zahia Dehar? In France she’s so infamous she’s known as only Zahia (pronounced Zy-ah), the name she’s also given to her new couture lingerie label and brand.

With her long mane of peroxide hair, Barbie doll body and cat-shaped eyes, the 20-year-old has graced the pages of Vanity Fair and the cover of V Magazine. Algerian-born Dehar is the new darling of the fashion world, having already shown two of her collections at Paris Fashion Week this year.

But Dehar isn’t the darling of the football world. Three years ago she was working as an escort in Paris, and was in the middle of what was the biggest sex scandal to rock the French sporting world, involving two of France’s top footballers and allegations of under-age prostitution.

In early 2010, right before the South Africa World Cup, details emerged that French star footballers Franck Ribery and Karim Benzema had paid for sex with Dehar when she was only 16. While prostitution is legal in France, soliciting in a public place, brothel ownership and paying for sex with a minor is illegal.

After the dust settled, Dehar disappeared. She says of the fallout from the scandal ”I spent six months crying. I thought I’d never get out, that I would die like this.”

When Dehar re-emerged months later, gone were the trashy clothes and dark roots in her hair, she had rebranded herself as a new high-fashion Bridget Bardot. The artists Pierre and Giles called her ”a new Eve, innocent and luminous”.

To launch her new look, she starred in an avant-garde film dressed as a fashionable Alice in Wonderland, armed with only a whip and a feather duster. She also featured in strange short film called Bionic – the story of a sex doll (Zahia) who exercises her own free will.

Dehar doesn’t seem able to escape her bad girl past though. Asked by French magazine Liberation if her new life is a fairytale, Zahia replied ”No, a fairytale is when everything is magical. Here, it’s more complicated.”

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