Guo Meimei, China's most brazen 'professional mistress', confesses on TV

Philip Wen
China correspondent for Fairfax Media

Guo Meimei living the high life, here.Photo: Supplied

 

Beijing: In the end, the downfall of Guo Meimei, widely considered China’s most brazen “professional mistress”, came through the same means she achieved fame and notoriety – an indiscriminate series of ostentatious and overly revealing internet blog posts.

Ms Guo, 23, was arrested by police with seven others ahead of the football World Cup final last month, amid a crackdown on the massive illegal online betting on the tournament in China. Rather indiscreetly, she had been bragging to her legion of nearly two million followers on Weibo – China’s broad equivalent of Twitter – about the big bets she was making.

Ms Guo, with her penchant for fast cars, designer brands and documenting her glamour-filled life on social media, has simultaneously captivated China's netizens while infuriating them with her relentless flaunting of her inexplicable wealth - a gleaming example of inequality in a nation grappling with the social divide.

There are the shots of her sunbathing on luxury yachts and her sitting behind stacks of casino chips in Macau. Yet those fall in the subtle category: Ms Guo also once posted a screenshot of her bulging 10-digit bank balance for all to admire.

On Monday, China’s state broadcaster China Central Television revealed some of the money’s origins, in an astonishing news package complete with a recorded ‘confession’ by a meek Ms Guo and testimony from a sour ex-boyfriend and a snitching personal assistant.

On top of participating in the online World Cup betting syndicate, she admitted to operating an illegal poker den from an inner-city Beijing apartment. She also supplemented her income by having sex with men for money, but never for less than 100,000 yuan ($17,400) an encounter.Read more