Texas stripper (and reporter) fights newspaper firing

By day, Sarah Tressler was a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. By night, she was an exotic dancer. That’s what got her fired, she says.

Tressler, 30, has filed a gender discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that the Houston Chronicle wrongly fired her from her job as a society reporter, according to the Associated Press.

Tressler says she was told she failed to reveal her side job on her employment application. A graduate of New York University’s journalism program, Tressler says that her bosses at the paper always told her she was doing a good job.
She was leading this double life -- also writing a blog, Diary of an Angry Stripper, and doing lots of tweeting -- until she was “outed” by a rival newspaper.

“I was very upset that I was fired, because I had been told by many editors I was doing a good job,” Tressler said at a news conference Thursday in Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press. “There was no question on the form that covered my dancing and I answered the questions on the form honestly.”

One guess as to who is representing her. That’s right, Los Angeles celebrity attorney Gloria Allred. Tressler tweeted this picture of herself and Allred on Thursday.

“Sarah’s work as a dancer is lawful and is not a crime,” Allred said in a statement quoted by the news service. “It does not, has not and will not affect her ability to perform her job as a journalist.”

So how is Tressler keeping busy these days as an unemployed reporter? She’s writing a book based on her blog, and is working on a stripper workout called Bootycamp.

The Houston Chronicle did not return a phone call seeking comment.

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