And the Asian beauty defiantly claims that selling her body for up to £1,000 a time provides her with a far more glamorous life than she ever dreamt of when she went to Oxford University aged just 13.
"My clients love the fact that I can stimulate their minds AND their bodies," she boasts in a shockingly frank interview with the News of the World.
"And I don’t believe my education has been wasted—in fact I usually take problem sheets with me to solve before appointments."
HAVE YOUR SAY HERE
Sufiah decided to CONFESS ALL after we revealed how the former child prodigy was working as a £130-an-hour prostitute while studying for a masters in economics.
It is the latest heartbreaking twist to a life that seemed so full of promise—but went tragically wrong when she cracked under the pressure of her bullying father’s cruel academic regime and fled university at 15.
Eight years on, he is now in jail for sexually assaulting two girl pupils and Sufiah has somehow convinced herself that her seedy new career is the answer to all her problems.
"People think escorting is sleazy and terrible but I don’t see it like that," she says. "I’ve always had a high sex drive—and now I’m getting all the sex I want—and guys are much better in bed with an escort than a girlfriend.
"I have men who are thrilled about my passion for mathematics. In fact one made me recite equations while he pleasured me, then I gave him oral sex while he chatted about algebra. It drove him wild."
And brainbox Sufiah has worked out that subtracting your respectability to become a prostitute can equal big money.
Peeling
"I have a nice life and I am in control," she says. "I hate this stereotype society has of escorts being exploited. It is so far from the truth.
"My clients treat me like a princess. One guy I see in London took me shopping on Bond Street. He bought me a beautiful black Gucci dress for £700 and then took me to Selfridges and told me to pick any handbag I liked."
She chose a £600 Gucci clutch. "I’m a Primark and Topshop girl normally! I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
"Later that night we went for dinner. I wore my Gucci dress and sexy lingerie and took great pleasure in peeling it off for him later on back at his hotel."
Sufiah was working as an administrative assistant earning £ 16,000 a year in Manchester when an escort agency boss approached her in a bar four months ago. She’d run up debts of £3,500 in rent arrears and credit cards.
And she was still haunted by her hellish childhood—subjected to her father Farooq’s Accelerated Learning Technique where she studied maths day in day out in rooms kept freezing cold to improve her concentration.
So the big rewards the agency boss promised seemed more than tempting. "I have studied so intensely for so many years I wanted to have fun," she says.
She can’t see the sordid side of prostitution—and instead likens herself to Belle De Jour—the saucy hooker played by Billie Piper in the TV drama.
"I’d read Belle De Jour’s Diary of a London Call Girl and was fascinated," she said. "When this immaculate lady in a designer suit asked if I had ever considered escorting, I found it appealing.
"I went home, researched agencies on the internet and found one I thought looked professional. I sent them photographs and they put me on their site." A couple of days later Sufiah was offered her first client. She recalls: "I felt quite nervous but excited too. I slipped on some black lace underwear and stockings and suspenders and a dress, and just though, ‘Wow, this is thrilling.’
"He was waiting for me at the bar of the Hilton. I expected him to be older but when I saw him he was lovely.
"He was only in his late 20s, tall and handsome. I thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to have sex with this man.’
"I’d have been thrilled if he chatted me up in a bar. We had a drink then went upstairs to his room and had fantastic sex. I left that night feeling totally elated having had an amazing time with £250 in my purse." Since then, she has built up a base of regular rich clients and sees between five and ten men each week. Her sugar daddies have treated her to fabulous clothes, designer bags, trips on yachts and even helicopter rides.
Sufiah, whose interview can be seen on video at notw.co.uk, brags that she can earn more than £1,000 in a night by having diner with a client and staying over. "It’s like they want to rescue me. One man asked me how much I earned a year. I said £60,000. He told me, ‘I’ll pay that amount straight into your bank and buy you a flat and you can be my mistress.’
"But I don’t want that because I’m happy doing what I do. Now I wonder if I could go back to a normal relationship, where you watch EastEnders and have boring sex. I’ve got used to being treated like a princess."
It is as if she has run away from reality—just as she ran away from university and her father’s dominance at 15.
Sufiah becomes solemn and subdued when she talks of her upbringing. "As I grew older I began to clash with my father," she says. "He was violent on occasions. Because he pushed me so far academically, I became more confident for a girl of my age. I grew up too quickly.
"From 11, I was studying maths all the time. I didn’t have any friends. I wasn’t in the Brownies. My father said they didn’t teach Muslim values. I hardly ever played with other children."
She passed her maths A level aged 12 and started at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. "It was an amazing place but I was too young. By the time I was 15 I wanted to be in control of my life. I fought back."
Sufiah sparked a two week nationwide police hunt when she ran away instead of going home at the end of term, saying she’d "had enough of 15 years of physical and emotional abuse". Her father claimed she had been kidnapped and brainwashed by members of a socialist organisation.
But now, speaking about it for the first time, Sufiah says: "I couldn’t bear the thought of going home so I ran away. I’d saved up £200 and found a hostel in London for £14 per night. After a week I moved to a hostel in Bournemouth. I knew I could survive on my own."
When she was found in an internet cafe, Sufiah refused to go home and was placed in foster care by Bournemouth social services. She says: "I stayed with two families who were very good to me. My mum and dad would call me and ask me to go home—but I didn’t want to."
Rich
Her 50-year-old father is now in jail for 18 months after being convicted of sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls he taught at his home in Coventry.
When Sufiah reached 18 she returned to Oxford to continue her studies—and fell in love with fellow student Jonathan Marshall. They married a year later but it barely lasted a year.
"At the time I thought we would be together forever, but we married too young and grew apart," she says.
After the split she moved back to London where she taught maths in the evenings to make ends meet. Then six months ago she moved to Manchester—and stumbled across her new career. "I’m still only young and I can’t decide what I want to do," she says. "My escort work provides me with a fabulous life.
"I still enjoy learning and I find it puts me in the right frame of mind for an intelligent conversation with my clients." But she admits not all her sexual encounters work out. "At the end of the day you don’t have to sleep with a client if you don’t want to. I’ve done that twice now. Both men were young and very nervous. I just left.
"The dullest client I’ve ever had was a rich man who talked about cars all night. It was really, really boring."
Sufiah is well aware she could easily find a job in the City where she could match her £60,000 a year sex earnings.
But she said: "I don’t want to take anything away from people who do jobs like that but it’s not for me. I have a nice life. I don’t want for anything."
Her mother Halimahton is now divorcing jailed Farooq and is desperate for her daughter to get in touch with her. "I was shaking when I found out what had become of her," she says.
But talking about her bitter split with her parents, Sufiah says: "I would describe our relationship as estranged.
"I have contact with them occasionally but I couldn’t speculate on what they will make of my new life.
"I don’t have any regrets. I’ve never felt more confident about my body and I’ve had some of the best sex of my life."
About Sufiah Yusof
Halimahton is a Malaysian citizen living in the UK. Born in Muar, she went to a Singaporean primary school for six years and returned to Malaysia at the age of 14. At 17, she was accepted to Tunku Kurshiah College and subsequently won a scholarship to receive further education in the UK. While studying for her doctorate in organometallic chemistry at the University of Hull, she was regarded as one of the best experimentalists in the department, but she decided to discontinue her PhD in favour of spending time with her four young children until they reached school age. Though Halimahton knew she was good with children (and especially at striking a rapport with them), she didn’t exactly expect to bring up four (and now five) prodigies!
Halimahton now teaches many other children with a wide range of abilities and ages, varying from five-year-olds to GCSE students. She is also writing a book on her teaching philosophy and methods.
Zuleikha received a grade A in A-level maths at age nine. She is now 14, with straight As in A-level maths, further maths, and physics, and has successfully completed courses from the Open University in biology and physics. With her exams behind her, Zuleikha is now in the enviable position of being able to explore whatever topics she likes in the next two years or so before going to university; at the moment, she is spending her time on programming, art, and creative writing, as well as occasionally dipping into higher-level maths. She wants to be a game designer when she grows up, you see.
Most of Zuleikha’s time is taken up by her hobbies, which include reading fantasy novels, listening to her iPod Nano, athletics, tennis, playing games on the PSP, Wii, Xbox 360 and PC (did I say she wanted to be a game designer?), travelling, following the US presidential elections, scaring people, and insisting that her name be spelt with an ‘h’ (even though her birth certificate begs to differ).
At the age of 15, Iskander graduated with a First from the University of Warwick’s four-year MMath programme after having started his degree at 12. Shortly afterwards, he received an MSc in Computer Science from Imperial College London, winning the Group Project Prize with several other teammates for his work in iris recognition. He now works in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and spends his spare time on at least 25,000 other projects. If only there were more than 24 hours in a day.
When he was seven years old, Abraham was selected for national tennis training and was the youngest person to receive such training. At 13, he was ranked as the 4th best player in the country for the 14-and-under age group and received funding and training from the Rover Junior Tennis Initiative for top UK junior tennis players. After he suffered a wrist injury at 14, he decided to pursue other interests, studying from 18-22 years old and then working in direct-response marketing.
Aisha’s first degree was in exactly the same subject, taken at exactly the same university, and completed at exactly the same time as Iskander’s Warwick degree. Coincidence? No, they went to Warwick together — she was aged 15 to Iskander’s 12 when they entered university. She subsequently completed a Masters in Mathematics Education and is currently putting the finishing touches to a PhD in the same area; in addition, she holds a job in the energy industry and is happily married. Busy woman.
Corrections of Misconceptions
April 8th, 2008
Much has been written in the press about Sufiah’s current occupation, but to be perfectly frank, the vast majority of news articles out there are completely misleading on a number of crucial points regarding the family history. Sadly, it seems that most journalists would rather entertain their readers than focus on writing factually accurate articles; it’s not entirely their fault, though, as Farooq often talked nonsense to journalists and sometimes seemed to be actively trying to cultivate the appearance of eccentricity. Most of the family were embarrassed whenever he gave an interview to the press. In any case, let’s clear up some of those inaccuracies right now.
Misconception 1: All the Yusof children were taught via Farooq’s “accelerated learning methods” — a tortuous regime involving studying in the freezing cold, punishments for answering questions incorrectly, and “stretching and breathing exercises”.
Actually, Farooq wasn’t even responsible for the majority of the teaching! For most of the Yusof children’s early life, Halimahton was practically a single parent as Farooq was in prison (having been convicted of mortgage fraud) or on the run for six years — he only returned to the household when Iskander, the youngest at the time, was seven years old. By this stage, the Yusof children were already prodigies and were also anything from three to seven years ahead in most academic subjects, in spite of the fact that they spent most of their time engaged in less bookish activities (such as tennis or playing with other children).
So who really taught the Yusof children? Why, Halimahton of course! That said, she never intended to “create prodigies”, hothouse/homeschool her children, or in fact do anything other than bring up her children as well as she could under difficult circumstances. But even though she was on her own, Halimahton had a unique skillset that made her ideally suited to the role of caregiver, teacher, and provider for four young children. She quickly recognised that all babies are naturally curious and enthusiastic about learning, so it made perfect sense to not waste the early years of a child’s life by failing to give them any mental stimulation. And in a nutshell, this is why all the Yusof children became prodigies — Halimahton was able to develop a special bond with each of her children that made it very easy for them to learn from her.
Eventually, when Zuleikha was born, Halimahton realised that she had developed something resembling a “method” without really meaning to, but rather than being comprised of a strict set of rules, her techniques were flexible and varied depending on the personality, interests, and mood of the child. She didn’t call it an “accelerated learning method” because she believed it was foolhardy to try to teach a child faster than they were already willing to learn, and there is considerable evidence to suggest that in the long run this only hinders a person’s memory and understanding. In fact, Halimahton wouldn’t even try to teach any of her children unless they were in a good mood and interested in what she had to say, because she felt it was important that her children associate the act of learning with pleasant emotions.
The end result was that by the time the Yusof children were old enough for school, they were already many years ahead of their peers, but like most parents Halimahton decided to enroll them at the local Northampton school anyway — she had no intention of trying to homeschool her kids. Unfortunately, at that point in time (around 1989) most UK schools made absolutely no serious provision for highly able students who were so far ahead. While the school did make an effort to provide resources so that the Yusof children could keep themselves occupied, all that happened in practice was that they were left to study on their own and Halimahton invariably needed to supplement their schoolwork at home. In the end, Sufiah said that she no longer wanted to go to school and wanted her mother to teach her at home; Halimahton was dubious, as she was a single parent with limited finances and she knew that homeschooling would require a substantial commitment of time and effort. But after a long discussion with all her children, it became clear that they were all adamant about the fact that they would rather learn at home, and Halimahton enjoyed teaching (and learning with!) her kids so much that she eventually agreed.
After this decision was made, Halimahton resumed teaching her children; essentially, she just taught them according to her own comprehensive curriculum at whatever rate at which the children wanted to learn. There was never any need to try to get them to learn particularly quickly, as they were already many years ahead. All the “prodigy stuff” had been done in the first five years — the kids just worked for one or two hours per day, and that was it as far as formal schoolwork was concerned.
Unfortunately, everything changed when Farooq returned home in 1993. The children were initially very enthusiastic about his returning home — aside from just being happy to see him, they all wanted to show him what they were capable of. Halimahton had considered divorcing him, but her children’s excitement about their dad being back home made her feel that it was not worth proceeding with a messy divorce, as long as he learnt from his mistakes and avoided any criminal activities in the future. But things quickly took a turn for the worse. Farooq’s conviction made it difficult for him to find a job, so he decided to stay at home to “help” Halimahton raise the kids, and this was the beginning of all the problems.
Farooq’s ego proved to be the biggest problem — he believed himself to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than his wife, so he took over the children’s tennis coaching from her (but their academic work continued as normal). Unlike Halimahton, Farooq knew nothing about how to relate to children and he frequently grew impatient because he could not get them to do what he wanted them to do; the public nature of tennis would also often hurt his pride, as he would feel personally embarrassed whenever they didn’t perform. This would lead to outbursts on the tennis court where he would shout at the children and occasionally smack them. Again, Halimahton considered divorce but because of her precarious financial situation and the fact that she was pregnant with Zuleikha, she decided to try reasoning with him instead to persuade him that his behaviour was wrong. In retrospect, this was clearly a bad decision but at the time it seemed like divorce would only have lead to extreme hardship and an uncertain future.
While Farooq was coaching the children in tennis, their academic work was still progressing (independently and with Halimahton) and eventually they were ready to start working on their A-levels (apart from Iskander, who was much younger than the others and preferred to study for his GCSEs with his mother). Most of the childrens’ A-level work was undertaken independently; Farooq did not spend much time teaching them except when their exams were near. He was just as bad at teaching maths as he was at tennis coaching, and his inability to relate the material to his children caused the same kinds of outbursts as on the tennis court. Fortunately, the work Halimahton had done with the children previously had given them the ability to work very effectively on their own, so in spite of Farooq’s poor behaviour they still performed very well in their A-levels.
In summary, Farooq contributed very little to the children’s education and academic achievements before university — probably about 75% of their education was with Halimahton when they were still young, and the rest was due to their own independent work. Without him, the Yusof children would have done things just as early but without any of the scandals that he so often created for himself.
Misconception 2: The Yusof children only became prodigies because they were forced to work unreasonably hard and/or were homeschooled.
False. Halimahton never worked with them for two hours per day, and during their A-levels the kids studied as much or as little as they wanted to.
As explained above, the children were only homeschooled because they were already prodigies by the time they enrolled at their local school and it was unable to provide for them. Today, though it depends to a certain extent on the area, many good schools are better-equipped to handle such highly able children.
The children were not born prodigies, but Halimahton’s ability to figure out lots of ways to stimulate and encourage their natural love of learning helped them achieve the potential that she believes is innate in every child.
Misconception 3: TV and pop music were banned in the household.
This isn’t even remotely true. All the children regularly watched many TV series like Fawlty Towers, the X-Files, and Star Trek, in addition to the usual movies, sports, and so on. Their tastes have changed a lot since then, though!
Pop music certainly wasn’t banned either — everyone in the family likes music and it was common to hear anything from rap to classical all over the household. Halimahton actually considers music, singing and dancing (not to mention acting) to be an excellent way to relate things to young children.
Misconception 4: The Yusof parents put tremendous pressure on their kids to succeed.
Untrue, because they didn’t need to — high achievers naturally tend to have correspondingly high expectations and thus they put a lot of pressure on themselves to do well. Most of the truly ridiculous expectations were held by people outside the family, who often seemed to believe that a prodigy should be perfect at absolutely everything; in reality, prodigies fail just as often as anyone else, which isn’t actually a bad thing as eventually everyone needs to learn to cope with failure in a sensible manner.
Misconception 5: Sufiah’s abilities were unique, even within the family.
Not really — while she was very good, she’s just been in the media spotlight much more than the others because of what happened after she went to Oxford. Iskander was a year younger when he went to university and Zuleikha was considerably younger than either when she completed her A-levels (although she already has the qualifications, Zuleikha has not yet applied to university as she wants to explore many of her interests and further develop as an individual before entering uni). Of course, the media like to portray Sufiah as a unique case because it makes for a better story.
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