Unrepentant: Deidre Clark was sacked from a top law firm after writing a semi-autobiographical erotic novel
What sort of woman gets to be a hot-shot international lawyer on a six-figure salary, taking on assignments that involve travelling with a bodyguard as well as a briefcase?
A fearless one, one assumes. Until last year, Deidre Clark was that woman.
At 43, she had what many in the legal profession would regard as a plum job, working for the British company Allen & Overy, one of the world's largest, and most respected, law firms.
She was posted to their Moscow office and proved herself smart, sassy and streetwise (a requirement in a city where it's not unheard of for a lawyer to be killed for their job).
Deidre says herself that there was something quite macho about her 'work hard, play hard' lifestyle, but she was proud of that.
Then she was fired.
Why? Well, here's where her detractors would add 'stupid', 'reckless' and - some would say - 'professionally suicidal' to the list of adjectives one could hurl in her direction.
Having always fancied herself as a creative type, Deidre started to write an online novel in her spare time.
Unfortunately, it was a novel that also drew on some of her less socially acceptable character traits - a penchant for casual sex and binge-drinking, to be precise.
In fact, Expat was an erotic novel, detailing the debauched sex-and-drugs lifestyle of Moscow's expat professionals. Eyebrow-raising stuff in any boardroom, of course. But with Deidre, it got worse.
She has always admitted that the character of the heroine, highly promiscuous Dasha was, to some extent anyway, autobiographical. To underline this, however, she also posted pictures of herself in lingerie online.
Unsurprisingly, her bosses were horrified and sacked her. She - equally outraged, somehow - sued them for unfair dismissal, claiming an astonishing £3.5 million and alleging that it wasn't her fictional 'sexploits' that had caused boardroom splutterings, but a real-life relationship tangle with a boss who was 'sexually obsessed' with her.
Today, in Britain for an employment tribunal that has the legal profession agog, the American-born brunette concedes that her determination to fight her sacking has opened up a very unedifying can of worms.
She is, of course, not the first high-flying woman to fall out with her boss and then demand a multi-million-pound payout.
Only this month, Jordan Wimmer, a City executive, lost her claim for almost the same amount Deidre is after - in her case, £4 million - after making several allegations about sexual shenanigans surrounding her boss. So will Deidre fare any better?
While she may have a valid complaint - and that's for the tribunal to decide - it's hard to imagine anyone coming out of this tussle looking particularly good.
For Allen & Overy - an esteemed member of the so- called 'Magic Circle' of law firms - all the associations with debauched behaviour are a huge embarrassment.
Deidre, in turn, faces professional ruin. One might argue that her actions since her dismissal - she agreed to become a sex columnist for a Moscow newspaper - would call into doubt her commitment to clearing her name, but she denies that vigorously.
Yet should she have been so surprised to be fired after posing in her underwear, and openly talking to colleagues (not to mention clients) about her erotic sideline? How could she be 'owed' £3.5 million as a result?
'I'm the one who has been treated unfairly here,' Deidre counters. 'It was fiction, written in my own time. It wasn't even set in a legal firm, for goodness sake.
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Diedre Clark set up a website called deidredare.comhttp://deidredare.com/Expat.html which has some pics of her scantily clad and on which she publishes a sex novel. Now her bosses have ordered her to stop posting the story. Which is a bit daft because that's drawn attention to the current chapters, and the pics. Her latest comment was "The author has been forbidden from publishing further chapters for the time being. She will resume if and when she is allowed to."
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