A ROMANIAN model who claimed to have auctioned her virginity for $3.7 million to a Hong Kong businessman now says the whole thing was a publicity stunt that has “ruined my life”.

Aleexandra Khefren, who first made global headlines in 2016 with an appearance on UK morning TV and last year said the deal had been done, told pornography website Sugarcookie the “virgin auctions” were just a marketing tool used by controversial website Cinderella Escorts.

“It never happened,” Ms Khefren said in a video interview with Sugarcookie founder Harriet Sugarcookie released this month. “Like, [there] was no bidder. I didn’t sell my virginity.”

She said she first got involved after being contacted by Cinderella Escorts on social media, and that the website offered her a “marketing proposal”.

“The plan was that ... I would kind of become famous with my modelling career, become a celebrity and all that stuff, and they will get so much publicity on their escort site,” Ms Kefren said.

She said she was “promised what happened in the UK would stay in the UK” and that nobody from her home country would find out, but “it went global in like one or two hours” and has “ruined my life forever since then”.

“I thought, I’m just going to this TV show, I’m just going to tell some lies,” Ms Khefren said. “He wrote me two pages just to learn and memorise, they wanted to create a story about myself to make people feel sorry for me.

“They told me that they would not give my real name and my real country. When I got back home I tried every day to drive my parents out of the house to a restaurant or something so they could not watch the news.”

She said she did take a “virginity test” at a Romanian hospital even though it was a publicity stunt, because “when they contacted the news” they were told, “How can we know she’s a virgin? We need a certificate.”

With Ms Khefren’s appearance on UK TV making national headlines in Romania, her parents finally found out when a reporter from the BBC contacted her uncle.

“I got a lot of hate, the media was attacking me,” she said. “They were really, really hard on me. I felt attacked, bullied, and I didn’t expect that, even from my friends, classmates. They called me a liar.”

Ms Khefren said she had lost her family and friends, fallen into depression and attempted suicide “multiple times” since. She said she felt guilty for being a “bad influence” on other women. “Many, many girls wrote to me, ‘Hey Alex, how was using Cinderella Escorts, should I sell my virginity?’,” she said.

“I got hundreds of messages from girls asking how to contact the agency and work for them. Cinderella Escorts told me to send them to them.”

She said she didn’t forward any of their numbers, but gave them the link to the website. Ms Khefren said even it if weren’t a publicity stunt, she wouldn’t have sold her virginity. “I wouldn’t do it even for a billion dollars,” she said.

News.com.au contacted Ms Khefren for comment but she requested €500 ($800) for a phone interview.

Sugarcookie alleges Cinderella Escorts’ founder is not German man Jan Zakobielski, as named and photographed in local media, but a Greek man who uses the publicity from the “virgin auctions” to lure women to work in seedy Athens brothels.

Sugarcookie alleges Mr Zakobielski is only an employee. In an email, Cinderella Escorts denied the allegations, saying Harriet Sugarcookie was a “porn producer who try to make her porn fame with this claims”.

The website said that it dropped Ms Khefren “just a few days before meeting the client” after discovering through her Instagram that she had a boyfriend, a Romanian rapper, and had appeared in his music video.

“Cinderella Escorts is owned and operated by me, Jan Zakobielski,” he said when asked whether he was using an alias, attaching a photograph of a German ID card.

“Any responsible journalist would be able to discover this very quickly by looking at the company documents filed in Germany. I need to inform you that pushing this wrong claims will have legal consequences.”

He said the Greek man named by the porn website was Ms Khefren’s “ex-boyfriend”. “He sent us the screenshots of Aleexandra’s Instagram when he found out she had a new boyfriend,” he said. “We told her who informed us. That’s why she is against him and claims he is working for Cinderella Escorts. This is absolutely not true.

“We got a client for Aleexandra, over £2 million. Our security system to protect our clients was successful and we found out that she had pictures of her and a Romanian rapper, her boyfriend on Instagram.

“Not very smart. We contacted her with it and finally kicked her out. I think it was hard enough for her, to get kicked out and lose £2 million just a few days before meeting the client.

“She was very angry with us. She started a campaign against us in Romanian newspapers with a lot of lies that this was all a marketing strategy. As you can understand, losing £2 million because of our decision make her hating us and try to make dirty campaigns.”