The internet virgin

They must have made an incongruous trio as they drank together in the Conservatory wine bar in London's West End - Rosie, a tubby, 19-year-old virgin in sloppy student clothes, Jess, her 27-year- old, crop-haired lesbian lover, and Tom, the besuited, middle-aged businessman keen to pay more than £8,000 to fulfil his lifetime ambition of sleeping with a virgin.

Nonetheless, at the end of the hour's meeting, Tom handed over a banker's draft for £8,400 to Rosie - the amount he had bid for her virginity on the internet - and all three went back to his hotel in Central London.

On the fifth floor, they parted ways. Rosie going with Tom to his room and Jess to another down the corridor.

As the sordid deed was done, Jess lay alone in her room, weeping into her pillow. The following morning, when Rosie was reunited with her girlfriend, she seemed equally distraught. 'We just lay together, side by side, on her bed and Jess was sobbing,' she admits. 'It had been a very tiring, emotional experience for both of us.'

Four months on, however, and Rosie Reid now claims she has 'absolutely no regrets'.

In fact, the doctor's daughter doesn't even bother to defend her actions as she sits on the bed in her student digs in Bristol. She is far too pleased with herself to do that.

As far as she's concerned, this unsavoury encounter was a financial transaction, pure and simple. It has, she boasts, made a huge difference to the quality of her life as a student.

Since pocketing the cash, she has been able to give up her 'boring' part-time waitressing job. Her annual university fees of £1,125 have been paid, her overdraft has been cleared. She's spent £400 on clothes and still has enough left to see her through the next two years of study.

With rewards like these, she insists, she would, if such a thing were possible, do it all over again.

'I really don't have a problem with what I did,' she says. 'It was consensual sex. To be honest, if anything, I exploited Tom by taking so much of his money. I would probably have done it for £2,000. That's still not bad for a night's work,' she says.

In fact, the Bristol University social policy student even seems to think she has learnt valuable lessons from her seedy experience which will stand her in good stead for her proposed career.

'Ultimately, I'd like to be a social worker. But first I'm going to join the police force and work as a liaison officer,' she explains. 'I want to help young people and show them the right way to live their lives.'

Ironic words indeed from a teenager who grabbed the headlines by auctioning her virginity on the internet to fund her studies.

So, on the face of it, no regrets. But scratch the surface and Rosie's situation is deeply worrying. When we met, I found her to be a muddled but strong-minded young woman.

And though she claims to be happy with Jess, one suspects that, after rushing headlong into lesbian relationships at the tender age of 15, Rosie is deeply confused about her sexuality.

She admits that part of her motivation for selling her virginity was a curiosity to experience heterosexual sex.

'There was part of me that wanted to see what sex with a man was like,' she confesses in a candid moment.

'And because I'm in a committed relationship with Jess, it isn't really possible for me to have a boyfriend. I suppose I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.'

Rosie's story begins in January this year, once again in her student bedroom, when she was entertaining two fellow students and Jess, who works in a warehouse.

'We were complaining about being broke and wondering what we could flog on eBay that wouldn't cost us anything,' says Rosie.

'We started off thinking about selling traffic cones and then it came to me that I could sell my virginity. We had a bit to drink and I ended up posting a notice on the website. It was just a laugh at that stage.'

The next day Rosie clicked on the site. 'I had several bids, up to £2,000. I could hardly believe it. That's when we talked it through seriously and I decided to do it for real,' she says.

'After three days, my message had been e-mailed around the world and become famous.

'EBay said I was bringing them into disrepute and cancelled my post. So Jess and I built a website and carried on the auction ourselves.

'In the end, Jess spoke to the two final bidders on the telephone. We picked Tom because he seemed more normal and was keen to use a condom.'

And so, in March this year, Rosie and Jess travelled up to London to meet the 44-year-old divorcee who works in the telecommunications industry.

He chose the venue, and the only safety precaution for Rosie (apart from the compulsory use of a condom) was that Jess was nearby at all times.

After the money had exchanged hands, the trio went back to Tom's hotel. Before Rosie went off with Tom, she and Jess had a brief conversation.

'I asked Jess if she minded what I was doing. She said she would support me if I wanted to go through with it,' says Rosie.

We both agreed he seemed a decent guy and that he could be trusted. Jess was staying down the hall and she made me promise to ring her mobile if it turned nasty in any way.

'And so I got changed and Tom and I went out for dinner. He was in a really
smart, pinstripe suit and I wore a lowcut top and jeans.

'It was a bit weird because he's about the same age as my Dad and he was kind of uncle-y,' says Rosie with a sense of detachment.

'It wasn't a flirtatious meal. We talked about India because he'd just been there and about vintage motorbikes because I used to have a BSA Bantam until it got smashed up in an accident.

He struck me as the sort of guy who was going through a mid-life crisis - he's also just taken up skydiving. He probably was good-looking, once, but now he's got a bit of middle-aged spread. He's divorced with two children.

'I've no idea how he could have afforded to spend so much on having sex with me, but he was wearing very expensive clothes so I suppose he's quite wealthy.'

Three hours later, this oddly matched couple returned to the hotel for sex.

'We went to his room and, I must admit, I felt really awkward. I just didn't know how to get from standing up, fully dressed, to actually having sex with him,' says Rosie.

'Luckily, he took control and suggested I had a shower and then offered to give me a massage. It helped me get to the stage of being in bed with him, naked.'

Rosie then proceeded to have sex with Tom twice.

'The first time I felt really awful, as though I was a piece of meat. It wasn't painful but I felt powerless and overwhelmed,' she says. So - remarkably - Rosie insisted that, an hour later, he should try again.

'I didn't want to have bad memories of the encounter, so I was determined to give it another try. This time I felt more in control. I enjoyed it much more,' she says, without a hint of embarrassment.

The couple then slept the night in the same bed. In the morning they got up, hugged, shook hands and parted. Tom has not been heard from since.

'I got the impression that Tom was very satisfied with our night together. He had always wanted to sleep with a virgin and the fact that I was so young and a lesbian was a real fetish of his,' says Rosie.

She is convinced there will be no long-term fallout from her soulless encounter.

'I'm fine in my head about it. I know how I feel and I think I did the right thing. I don't think it will affect my life or career prospects at all.

'Everyone will have forgotten about it by the time I look for a job as a police officer,' she says. One doubts it - particularly as prostitution is not only immoral but illegal.

But then, prostitution is a word that Rosie refuses to use, preferring to think of it as a 'business transaction'.

She also likes to claim that her parents are indifferent to what happened. Her father Alasdair, 49, an ear, nose and throat specialist, and her mother, Jen, 48, a nurse, who live in London, certainly knew about the auction and did nothing to stop it.

My parents are pretty cool about it. They were just a bit worried I'd get hurt either emotionally or physically. But they can see I'm fine. They make a joke of it now,' she says.

Rosie has a younger brother, 13, and sister, 15, who both, she claims, see her exploits as 'funny'.

But Jess is far more candid, admitting that this is not the whole story.

'Her mum and dad were actually very hurt,' she confides. 'So am I, really. I just wish I could have given Rosie the £8,000 myself.

'At the time it seemed like a quick fix to her financial situation - an easy way out. Now I'm not so sure.

'Rosie is much more confident and sure of herself now but I don't know how she will feel in the long run.

'We've got to live with it though and move on.'

Rosie remains unconcerned about hurting anyone else's feelings through her actions. 'I honestly don't think it has made any difference to me or the people around me,' she says with all the naivety and, dare one say it, selfishness of youth.

But again, she is not telling the full story. As she describes her childhood there emerges a picture of a young girl who lacks guidance from her parents and is deeply confused about her sexuality and morals.

At school Rosie was, she says, 'a geek' and one can easily imagine that her early teens were not easy years. Her parents sent her to the Haberdashers' Aske's School in South-East London.

There, Rosie's straight-A GCSE results and two As and a B at A-level were, she says, 'the norm'.

But this shy, clever, somewhat plain girl did not make friends easily. Instead, she turned to her father's sister Ali, 44, for company and advice.

Ali leads what can only be described as an 'alternative' lifestyle. She has three sons conceived while she was in a ten-year relationship with a woman, which has now broken up.

She runs an alternative health clinic and has, says Rosie, a 'fantastic, really interesting group of friends'.

Whether they were the best possible influence on a lonely 14-year-old misfit is open to doubt.

'I came home from one visit and thought to myself: "Wouldn't it be great if I was gay like Ali and her friends?'' ' says Rosie.

'Then I thought: "Hey, I am a lesbian." '

When she 'came out' to her parents shortly afterwards, her father was, understandably, upset.

'I lifted the phone upstairs and heard him yelling at my aunt for influencing me,' remembers Rosie.

'He then said to me that I was too young to make such a decision and should wait until I'd had more experience of life.'

Unfortunately for Rosie's father, his increasingly wayward daughter took him at his word. At the age of just 15, she had a sexual relationship with a woman of 19.

'I joined a gay and lesbian youth group which was held on Sunday afternoons. Through the people I met there, I got into the whole lesbian scene. Pretty soon all my friends were gay or lesbian and I had two or three relationships.'

At 16, Rosie met Jess, through the youth group, and had a brief fling with her. The pair got back together about a year ago and are now, says Rosie, 'fully committed and sexually faithful - except for with Tom, of course'.

'Jess wants to get a mortgage and have babies and all that. I'm only 19 and I'm not sure if I'm ready for it,' she admits.

'But we love each other, so we'll make it work, one way or another.'

One cannot but suspect that, in the face of Jess's obvious devotion, Rosie has landed herself in a situation that is too pressured and emotionally complicated for a girl of her age.

And what of her parents? Rosie sent a text message to her father the day before she had sex with

Tom. He wrote back: 'I admire your courage but deplore your judgment.'

And then, astonishingly, he seems to have left her to get on with it.

They may, by Jess's admission, have been hurt by Rosie's actions, but why didn't they do more to stop her degrading herself in this way? Surely any parent who could possibly afford to would pay any amount of money to stop their child selling their own body?

'They used to give me £200 a month towards my living costs and I had taken out the full £3,000 student loan,' explains Rosie.

'But I have to pay £2,100 a year for accommodation and £1,125 in fees.

'I just couldn't make ends meet and I didn't want to blackmail my parents into paying more. They wanted to help but I didn't feel I could let them,' she offers as justification.

Since she met Jess she says she rarely goes home and stays instead at Jess's house in the university vacations. Perhaps the key lies in Rosie's own assessment of her family. 'They're very liberal parents. They pretty much have the same morals and outlook that I do,' she says.

It has been left to Bristol University to perform the parental role and warn Rosie of the foolishness of her actions.

Her tutors there are the only people to come out of this sorry tale with any dignity.

'I was summoned to a meeting with the dean and two tutors,' says Rosie. 'They said all the usual stuff about it coming back to haunt me in the future and that I was degrading myself. I listened to them but it made no difference. I'm sure they've got it wrong.

'I'm having a great time now. I used to have to work three nights a week until 1am as a waitress, earning £4.50 an hour.

'It was boring and exhausting. Now I can just enjoy myself, see friends, go out and get on with my degree.

'By the time I've graduated everyone will have forgotten all about how I afforded it. Including me.'

One can only hope, for Rosie's sake, that this is indeed the case. But sadly, one doubts it.