Don't really care about MC being whore or not. But you must have a different dictionary. May I ask in which part of the game she was so intelligent? I am asking because she has been humiliated by almost every character in the game and I've never seen a scene I thought "wow, she is so intelligent that she must be proud of herself."
Let's go in order. The presence of intelligence in Monica and the presence of humiliation do not contradict each other. Monica is initially (in episode 1) shown as a smart enough woman with excellent business acumen, who knows what she wants out of life, who knows how to run a multi-million dollar big business (a profitable Fashion Business magazine), who knows how to manipulate men, who knows how to achieve her goals. So let's proceed from the fact that by default - Monica is smart enough to do all the things I've described.
Now for what happened to her later. As promised, we are given a wayward, proud, beautiful and quite intelligent woman who pays the price for her "sins", her lousy bitch character, for her disregard and contempt for the people around her еtc.
You write that she was humiliated. Yes, she was. Humiliation and blackmail are the two main "fetishes" of this game. But anyone can be humiliated, especially when their life circumstances are the way they are for Monica. She is humiliated not because she's not smart, but because she has no choice.
It's not easy to do when you are disenfranchised, when you have no papers, when you have been "erased" and you are nobody (that she is the same Monica Buckfett, only a few people know). So I don't see a contradiction here. The world of two-faced scoundrels around her is exactly that, all ready to eat each other up and hers included.
She doesn't consider herself a whore, although she does have to (at the player's desicion) do the same prostitution in the Slums or/and VIP-Escort. Monica is still not broken, she is a strong person with an inner core who keeps fighting for her life and her rights. For now, the pendulum is still on the side of further humiliating the clever and beautiful Monica. After all, humiliating a broken-down fool who has resigned herself to her unenviable fate would not be interesting, so we have what we have.