The News of the World, once Britain's top weekly tabloid, has been accused of paying women to sleep with celebrities in order to get scoops about their sex lives and performances.
Singer James Blunt settled a legal battle more than a decade ago over defunct tabloid publisher News International hacking into his answering machine, but authorities told him they shared emails exposing women who were on the tabloid's payroll and “went on to f**k celebrities,” The Guardian reported.
According to the outlet, Blunt was asked about the emails while speaking at Wales' Hay Festival, which began on May 23 and ends this Sunday. The emails were included in a book Blunt plans to publish in 2023, titled “Loosely Based On A Made-Up Story: A Non-Memoir.”
Blunt described the book as “inspired by true stories but not a biography”, in which the two women “were paid by the News of the World to go and fap to celebrities”.
“The girls bring the guys back [a] “I stayed in a studio apartment in Notting Hill and filmed myself having sex in a room with a rollaway bed and gave the footage to the newspaper,” he wrote. “The girls were attractive, I met them and, sure enough, we did it.”
According to The Guardian, Brunt said the emails depicted him and the tabloid's then-editor-in-chief Andy Coulson discussing “how best to describe my orgasm.” The Sun has contacted Coulson's representatives for comment.
Blunt also spoke at the festival about how actress Carrie Fisher felt pressured to lose weight after starring in the new Star Wars films, and how the late actress “mistreated her body” as a result, before her death in 2016.
“I was with her the day before she died when she came over to my house,” Blunt told the crowd, according to The Independent. “She had been pushing her body really hard and had just returned to work playing Princess Leia in the new Star Wars movies.”
A 2017 autopsy report on Fisher stated she had cocaine, methadone and opiates in her system at the time of her death, but the coroner was unable to determine whether these drugs were responsible for her death, ultimately noting that “sleep apnea and other unknown factors” were the cause of her death.
“She spoke about the challenges women have in the industry, how men are allowed to age but women never do in film or television,” Blunt said at the festival. “She put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs again and was essentially suicidal by the time she got on the plane.”
The Sun has reached out to Lucasfilm, the production company behind the 2017 film “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” for comment.
