The Sharia-Fisted Playboy Sultan of Brunei -- And The Author I Know Who Was The Playboy Prince's "Second-Favorite Girlfriend"
I saw this tweet yesterday, linking to a YouTube video (embedded below):

@TarekFatah
Playboy life of the Islamic Sultan of Brunei. Sharia for the rest of us Muslims; hookers for the rulers

I started watching, and up popped Jillian Lauren, a wonderful, best-selling writer who's been on panels I've moderated at LA Times Festival of Books multiple times. (I was especially moved by the tale of how she and her husband adopted a special needs child from Ethiopia and managed to master the pretty incredible challenges of making him feel safe and loved, which she writes about in Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir.)

Back to the Sultan of Sharia For Everybody Else, Edward Ebbert writes at NYULiveWire about Lauren's time in the "infamous harem of the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei":

From College Dropout to "Princess" Adventurer

Her tale began in 1992, when she was an 18-year-old New York University dropout, living in the East Village, stripping in Times Square and working occasionally for an escort service. Broke, bored, and looking for adventure, she accepted a mysterious offer to "audition" for a job entertaining an anonymous businessman from Singapore. She was told she would be very well compensated.

Before she knew it, she was on the South Asian island of Borneo, home of the tiny, oil-rich nation of Brunei and its playboy Prince Jefri Bolkiah.

Later, the prince's lavish lifestyle would come under international scrutiny after his brother, the sultan, filed a lawsuit in 2000 alleging that the prince had mismanaged billions of dollars from the Brunei Treasury.

But in the 90s, as Lauren tells it, she was the prince's second-favorite girlfriend, a position that came with lavish shopping sprees to Singapore and a seat beside his royal highness at palace parties.

Lauren writes in lucid, sometimes lurid detail about life in the cutthroat, often bizarre world of the palace harem. Ostensibly, the dozens of girls like her were paid to attend nightly dance parties as entertainment for the prince and his entourage of male hangers-on. In reality, the women were the merchandise in a high-class meat market catering to a single customer: Prince Jefri, a man with an appetite difficult to satisfy.

Lauren was seduced by the romantic fantasy of the royal lifestyle, but part of her knew it couldn't last. I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella," she writes.

Her book about this: Some Girls: My Life in a Harem.

More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, Some Girls is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself-and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.

Here's the video, from 60 Minutes Australia, detailing the Sharia-driven barbarism in Brunei -- applied to everybody there but the Sultan and his family and cohorts.