SHE was known to her clients as Bruna the Surfer Girl, a chic São Paolo prostitute who fled her middle-class home at the age of 17 to sell herself to up to five men a day. Then Bruna took to the internet, and her racy accounts of life as a high-class Brazilian call girl have earned her international fame.

Six months after she gave up prostitution to turn her blog into a bestselling book, Bruna — whose real name is Raquel Pacheco — has become an improbable sex symbol in Brazil and a potential goldmine for publishers and film-makers around the world.

Pacheco, now 21, has sold the film rights to The Scorpion’s Sweet Venom, an intriguing mixture of autobiography and advice on sexual technique. With her shapely figure, streaked blonde hair and huge brown eyes she has become a Brazilian media darling who chats merrily about having sex with both men and women.

The book has sold 100,000 copies since it was published last year. It has also been translated from Portuguese into Spanish, and American publishers are considering an English version.

“Once I started reading her blog I was hooked,” said Marcelo Duarte, the book’s Brazilian publisher. “It had all the ingredients of a good soap opera — family drama, love stories and lots of sex.”

It was the sex that first drew tens of thousands of Brazilians to Pacheco’s blog, as she described in startlingly matter-of-fact terms her daily professional encounters; from the young man who needed her to be quick because he had to meet his girlfriend, to the couples who wanted three-in-a-bed encounters and the eight men she once serviced at an orgy.

Yet her readers were also intrigued by accounts of her relationship with her boyfriend Pedro, a divorced 30-year-old businessman and former customer. “It is different when you are in bed with a man only because of his money and when you are in bed with one you love, when you feel real pleasure and it doesn’t matter if you receive a cent afterwards,” she wrote.

Pacheco is also seeking a reconciliation with her middle-class adoptive parents, who once threatened to have her jailed and were appalled to learn she had become a prostitute. When the film of her life is finished, she wrote recently on her blog, “I want to share this moment . . . with them looking at my life with other eyes. And when the film ends they’ll say: ‘Our daughter was the worst daughter in the world, she prostituted herself, but she succeeded in turning her life around and today is happy’.”

Pacheco freely admits she was a troubled teenager who ran wild when she learnt her parents had adopted her as a baby. She took drugs, suffered from bulimia and started stealing from her parents.

After furious rows she fled and became what the Brazilians call a “programme girl” — a call girl operating from her own flat. She claims to have slept with 1,000 men in her three years as a prostitute.

“Today I can say that there’s no fantasy that scares me because I’ve seen and done everything,” Pacheco writes.

“I liked what I did, I can’t deny it. I felt desired like I never had been before.” But once she gave up to write her book she felt “like a little bird who has fled the cage”.

Her blog was read mainly by men — among them clients keen to see how she rated their performance — but her publishers were surprised when the follow-up book proved a major hit with women.

One survey found that up to 80% of her readers were women aged between 13 and 35. Both Pacheco and her editors believe her unexpected success owes much to a false image — much fostered in the media by pictures of revealing costumes at Rio de Janeiro’s carnival — of Brazilian women as sexually uninhibited.

In reality, Pacheco and other researchers believe, many Brazilian women are unhappy with their sex lives and with Brazil’s machismo culture. Most of Pacheco’s female readers are reported to have bought her book in the hope of picking up tips.

She has become a regular guest on television talk shows and appears to delight in breaking taboos by discussing the specifics of sexual preference.

“I learnt lots in these past few years,” she said. “Things most people spend all their lives learning.”

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