On a hot August afternoon, aspiring pop star Wafah Dufour walks into the media lunch hub Michael's, in Midtown Manhattan. Accompanied by her publicist, Richard Valvo, the slender, exotic young woman with long dark hair in a high ponytail à la I Dream of Jeannie is dressed in a white tank top, green love beads, lacy miniskirt, and backless pumps. Conversations continue as heads look up to check her out.

Ms. Dufour passes by Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who is lunching with designer Isaac Mizrahi, then stops at the next table to meet former Sony Music chairman Tommy Mottola and NBC head Jeff Zucker.

"You know Wafah bin Ladin?" Valvo asks the men loudly.

"Wafah Dufour," she snaps, shooting him a look that's more pleading than hostile.

The niece of the man who orchestrated the destruction of the World Trade Center seventy-eight blocks to the south has a point. After September 11, the name bin Laden (which is how it's spelled when referring to Osama) turned radioactive, borderline satanic-by-association. It made her feel cursed, presumed guilty—made her wonder if it might keep her from ever getting a record deal. So she took her mother's maiden name, Dufour, which makes for a better first impression, even though the bin Laden taint is always there.

Ms. Dufour, who's vague about her age but almost certainly younger than 30, sits down at a good corner table and thanks me for helping her tell her story. "It's really important for me," she says with a French accent. "I was born in the States, and I want people to know I'm American, and I want people here to understand that I'm like anyone in New York. For me, it's home.

"It's really tough that I have to always explain myself," she continues in a soft, husky voice. "It's like every time I meet someone, I have to move a huge mountain that's in front of me, and sometimes I get tired."

The face is alluring (big dark eyes, long lashes, plump lips, caramel skin), but she looks wounded. And there's something else. At first I can't quite figure it out, but then it hits me: She looks a little like her uncle, albeit a waify ninety-eight-pound tiny-footed version. Sexy Osama! I hold that thought while I listen to her explain that she's his half niece and one of hundreds of bin Ladens, most of whom are in Saudi Arabia, where she hasn't been since she was 10. She has no contact with most of her relatives, including her father, doesn't speak Arabic, has an American passport… The list goes on. "At the end of the day, I believe that the American people understand things and they have compassion and they see what's fair," she says. "They're very fair, and that's why I love America, and that's why my mom loves America."

Her mother, Carmen bin Ladin, is the author of Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia, a memoir about her fifteen years with Yeslam bin Ladin, Osama's older half brother. It is a devastating insider's look at Saudi society. The 2004 best-seller reads like a thriller, with Carmen gradually realizing that she is trapped in a culture where women are brainwashed into accepting their role as pets. She endured nine years of virtual confinement inside the bin Laden family compound, broken occasionally by a family vacation. In 1985, at the end of one such summer abroad, the apparently hypochondriacal Yeslam complained of a weak heart and lungs and of stomach pains, delaying the family's return to Jeddah. Carmen seized the opportunity to enroll her daughters in a school outside Geneva. They never went back to Saudi Arabia.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ms. Dufour was with her mother in Geneva, where she had spent the summer after getting her master's degree in law from Columbia University. They were in a car when a friend called Carmen's cell phone and told her of the first plane hitting the tower. Once home, they turned on CNN and saw the rest. Then bin Laden's name started popping up. Wafah had planned to return to her SoHo apartment on the fifteenth but instead stayed in seclusion at her mother's for the next six months before moving to London, where she was hounded by the press. In the fall of 2004, she returned to New York to pursue a career in music.

Ms. Dufour thought she was lying sufficiently low—not going out much, just focusing on songwriting and guitar lessons. But she eventually wound up in the New York Post, in a story that claimed she was living it up on the social scene. It refers to her as a "pushy spoiled brat," a "wannabe" who "wants to be a pop star but no record company will have her," according to "a pal."

The experience shook Ms. Dufour so much she hired veteran publicist Richard Valvo, who told her she couldn't hide anymore. "I was telling Richard it's not about the name, it's about the music," she says. "For me that's the only thing that's important. And he said, 'You have no choice. Everybody knows who you are, and now you have to explain yourself.' I didn't know how to explain. To explain what? I never met…him."

Valvo, 52, is slick, with a close-cropped hairdo and an Armani suit. His dream is to play a gay Mafia hit man on The Sopranos who gets to whack Tony. "At ïfirst Wafah was very afraid of the press," he says in a Brooklyn accent. "Otherwise, I would have done a lot more from the beginning. We were slow to get her story out."