After McCartney Split, Mills Fights Tabloid Porn Claims
LONDON, June 14, 2006 — -- "Bisexual Heather sold her body to Arabs for years," screams the headline in a trashy British newspaper.
If you believe tabloid-newspaper News of the World, Heather McCartney Mills was once a high-class hooker.
It's been a difficult couple of months for Mills. She split from her husband, Sir Paul McCartney, the aging Beatle. She underwent more surgery on her partially amputated leg. Then came the smut.
Photos of a young Mills cavorting naked with a cheesy-looking male model were splashed across the pages of various scurrilous newspapers. The shots came from a German book called "Die Freuden der Liebe" -- "The Joy of Love."
The papers called it a "hard core porn book." Mills has described it as a lover's manual. Displaying wonderful faux sensitivity, The Sun explained, "Many of the images are too explicit to print in a family newspaper."
Now the News of the World alleges that, among other things, in the 1980's Mills had sex with Arab princes and businessmen, sometimes had sex with other women in front of her clients, and could command fees of up to $18,500 for a night.
Heather has crusaded against landmines after losing a leg when she was hit by a police motorcycle in 1993. In the past few years she's expanded her activisim to protest seal clubbing. She married Sir Paul in 2002 and the couple have a baby daughter, Beatrice.
Mills' lawyers say the claims in the News of the World are "untrue and highly defamatory." Apparently Mills plans to sue the paper as soon as her divorce from McCartney is complete. We're told she's "very distressed" by the News of the World article.
"These are not new stories and were refuted by her lawyers four years ago when first raised," Mills' lawyers' said in a statement. "The sources clearly are a variety of unreliable persons who have been paid for these stories."
Back then newspapers decided not to print the allegations. In the meantime, while Mills was married to McCartney, the British papers considered her pretty much off-limits. McCartney is a hugely popular figure in Britain, and the populist papers knew better than to bash the bride of a national institution.
