Kristin Davis after a court appearance in New York City in 2013.Louis Lanzano/AP
Last week, a mini-scoop on Radar triggered titters within the political media world: The once notorious “Manhattan Madam,” who ran a high-end escort service in New York City, has been working as an adviser to a political action committee supporting independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The gossip website did not go into details about what the former call-girl ringmaster was doing to help RFK Jr. And, it turns out, the full story is far more interesting than what Radar reported, for Kristin Davis, that former prostitution entrepreneur, has made at least $215,000 since May 2023 working for the Common Sense PAC overseeing an artificial intelligence-driven project to find voters likely to support the anti-vax conspiracy theorist.
Davis, who served four months in 2008 on charges related to her prostitution business and then 18 months in the mid 2010s for selling prescription pills to an FBI cooperating witness, has been involved in politics for years. She ran a protest campaign for New York governor in 2010—an effort managed by longtime right-wing dirty trickster Roger Stone. And since 2008, she has operated a public relations firm called Think Right, which has represented Stone and other conservative figures. In 2012, she was a fundraiser for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson. On her LinkedIn page, she says she also “designed proprietary software platform to disseminate issue-based messaging on various platforms such as email blasts, Twitter and Facebook.” She is doing her work for Common Sense through a firm she set up called Buzzify PR.
After Davis recently returned to the headlines due to her pro-RFK Jr. endeavors, I spoke with her about her work for the Democratic scion. She says that she had been advising Common Sense since it started up in mid-2023. The PAC, she notes, was founded by actress Sofia Karstens, Nate Porter, who owns a healthcare staffing company, and “a few other guys who are tech guys who don’t want to be named.” (Karstens and Porter had a falling out, and she left the PAC.)
The group, according to the Federal Election Commission, has raised nearly $2 million through the end of June. Its biggest donations have included $500,000 contributed in July 2023 from Planeta Management, a company tied to Nicole Shanahan, who Kennedy named as his running mate in March, and $300,000 from Aubrey and Joyce Chernick. Aubrey is a Canadian-born billionaire tech entrepreneur and philanthropist. He runs a cybersecurity firm called Celerium, and he and his wife in recent years have been generous donors to Republicans and pro-Trump political action committees. Other large donations have come from Big Lie advocate and ardent conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne ($100,000) and billionaire venture capitalist and Trump fundraiser Chamath Palihapitiya ($90,000).
Porter did not reply to a request for comment.
According to Davis, Common Sense was created “to utilize AI technology to create custom messaging and personalized marketing campaigns working off mobile advertiser ID numbers.” A mobile advertising ID (or MAID) is a unique identifier that is assigned to each mobile device. As Davis explains it, “Everything you do on your cell phone is monitored by the provider—what you read, what you listen to, what you purchase. There are companies that take that data and use AI to create profiles of the users. They know your attitudes, values, and beliefs based on data from your cell phone provider, for instance what Facebook groups you are part of.”
In her telling, Common Sense did not want “any notoriety.” Its goal was to use this AI-organized data to “take out really great ads” to help Kennedy. The PAC invested in expensive technology to assemble custom audiences of people—say, voters who don’t care for Donald Trump but who strongly support gun rights. Davis could then create email, text, website, or social media ads targeting these people with messages emphasizing Kennedy’s support for gun rights. “These companies are monitoring what you’re listening to and what you’re buying tickets to,” she adds. “They know if your top channel is Fox News or the House and Garden Network.”
Davis says a big part of the job is monitoring the effectiveness of the PAC’s messaging. If it is sending out ads to 500,000 people who have been identified as anti-Trump but pro-guns, it will hit 2,000 or so of those people with ads that seek to have them click through to a website with different messages about Kennedy and guns and track how these pages affect the attitudes of these voters. “This is real-time polling,” she explains, which allows her to figure out what ads “moved them into liking Bobby.”
Davis is overseeing what sounds like a sophisticated targeting project exploiting Big Data—the sort of operation certainly being run by other campaigns. “We’ve reached over 10 million people,” she says. “It took us a few months to get the AI to where we need it.” She adds, “AI is very good at sorting out groups. The company we use has like 14,000 data points on each person. It knows everything.” This firm, she adds, has “asked us not to talk about them.”
The two vendors that have received the most money from Common Sense, according to its FEC filings, are companies that have scant footprints on the internet. One is called Cinnected, which on the PAC’s filings is listed as being based in Miami, though it appears to have been incorporated in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It has been paid over $500,000 for “advertising expenses.” The other, the Parte Company, registered at a four-bedroom home in Duarte, California, has received at least $200,000 for “social media, brand management consulting services.” Cinnected, Davis acknowledges, “is one of the companies we get data from.”
Asked how this AI-propelled data and targeting project has been going, Davis replies, “It’s definitely been a challenge. The race has been upended so many times, between Bobby switching from a Democratic to an independent run, and Joe Biden dropping out. It’s hard to keep up with changes in real time. Maybe we’re reaching people and then something happens and the whole political universe changes.” Data Davis compiled for the PAC originally indicated that 49.8 million voters could be up for grabs, including 16.9 million who were considering voting for a third-party candidate. With Biden’s withdrawal, she says, that data needs to be updated, which means retargeting 187 million voters. That could take up to six weeks.
Davis notes that the PAC is running low on money but that it has already paid for ads in advance. So she’s not worried on that front. But the recent change with the Democratic ticket has thrown her project for a loop. “Unfortunately,” she says, “some of the people who were voting for RFK because they didn’t like Biden or were concerned about his age have switched back to Kamala Harris. That’s what some of the data shows. I hope we can make an impact still.”
Without much hope that Kennedy can win the race, Davis notes another desirable outcome would be for RFK Jr. to cut the deal he has reportedly discussed with Trump: an endorsement of Trump in return for being named head of the Department of Health and Human Services. (Kennedy also sought a meeting last week with Democratic presidential nominee Harris to discuss the possibility of scoring a position in her administration, should he endorse her and she wins. The Harris camp showed no interest in the offer.)
As for the recent headlines about her and her past, Davis muses, “I will forever be notorious for something from 16 years ago. I have done a lot of campaigns and stayed in the background because I realized most of the time it hurts a candidate. In 2022, I posted a pic and said I was so happy to have been hired to do an event for Rudy Giuliani, and he got criticized. As if hiring me makes them dumb. I’ve gone through a scandal, a government investigation, and I’ve been slammed by the media. Who better than me to represent all theses people? But I don’t personally want to be the focus of anything. I’ve been successfully behind the scenes for many things for a long time.” She also points out that she worked at a hedge fund before becoming a madam.
Davis says that she no longer is in contact with Roger Stone and that he has not been involved with Common Sense. “I stopped talking to him last September,” she says. “It’s probably not wise to say why. Sometimes people don’t treat you very well.”
Davis insists it was not hard to switch fields: “I’ve been working in politics for 15 years. My former business was far more honest. You knew what was involved in the transaction. In politics, everyone is for sale and you don’t know what the price is.”
