A model who grew up in Washington D.C. has been fired from her high-paying job as the face of a German telecom company after boasting of her "passionate" affair with a son of the late Libyan dictator Moammar Khaddafy.
Vanessa Hessler, 23, was sacked by Telefonica after dishing to Italian magazine Diva e Donna about her four-year fling with Mutassim Khaddafy, which she described as a "very beautiful love story."
The younger Khaddafy was 34 when he died with his infamous father outside the city of Sirte Oct. 21.
Hessler, who was born in Italy, said she had not been in contact with her paramour after the country descended into a civil war that resulted in the end of Khaddafy's 42-year reign.
"I didn't have any contact with him since the uprising broke out, but our relationship was one of passion," she said.
But she said the desert-dwelling dictator's brutal clan wasn't as bad as the rest of the world believes.
"The Khaddafy family is not how they are being depicted, they are normal people," she told the magazine.
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Mutassim was dispatched to his maker under murky circumstances. Rebel leaders initially said he was killed in a gun battle, but he was later shown in video alive and held captive. Then, photos emerged of him dead, apparently of gunshot wounds.
A spokesman for Telefonica tweeted confirmation that Hessler's love story got her canned.
"Vanessa Hessler’s relationships are private business," he said. "However we cannot accept her comments on the Libya conflict."
Hessler, who moved to Washington when she was eight, is a well-known figure in Germany, where she appears on billboards and TV commercials for Telefonica's Internet service.
She wasn't the only model girlfriend of Mutassim Khaddafy, who once told a lover he spent $2 million a month on partying, according to the Daily Mail.
