Edison Chen (陳冠希) was shocked when he found his own sex photos posted on the Internet, the Chinese-Canadian pop star told a Vancouver court on Monday.
The Chinese-Canadian film star in a racy scandal over photos that showed him in bed with eight of Hong Kong and China’s best-known actresses and singers testified against Sze Ho-chun, a computer technician accused of accessing his private laptop, which held the images.
The scandal dominated Hong Kong headlines for weeks last year, and the Chinese government censured the country’s top Internet search engine for allegedly helping spread the photos of the stars apparently performing sex acts or in sexually suggestive poses.
PHOTO: AP/THE CANADIAN PRESS
Sze faces three counts of obtaining access to a computer with illegal intent and his trial is taking place in Hong Kong. Chen refused to return to the territory for the case but he agreed to a deposition in Canada.
The Hong Kong Department of Justice flew a legal team, including Hong Kong Chief Magistrate Tong Man (唐文), to Vancouver. The hearing was scheduled for a week but wrapped up in just a day.
The Hong Kong judiciary is allowed to take testimony in Canada under a mutual legal assistance treaty and Chen’s testimony will be presented in the Hong Kong case as a deposition.
Chen, 27, told the unusual hearing the photos were his, but that they had been on a personal laptop computer that had gone missing last year. He said that the computer was taken for repairs in the summer of 2006. He said he thought he had deleted the images from the computer.
He said he believed they were released by “some foul play” in a computer store he used.
“I’m quite a private person,” he said. “This was never meant for anyone else to see.”
On Jan. 29 last year he said his friends started contacting him about the images circulating on the Internet.
“This was a very huge shock to me,” Chen told the court.
A month later, a police inspector showed him a compact disk of photographs.
“Of course, I had seen these pictures. I took these pictures. They were in my personal computer,” he said.
He said the images were released in spurts.
“It was more of an attack, a well-planned attack in the way these images were released,” he said.
Chen called the theft of the photos an “invasion of privacy.”
“Everything was consensual,” he said.
He told the judges that he would not answer questions about the women.
“I am determined to protect their innocence,” he said. “They have suffered enough.”
A reluctant Chen was ordered by the Canadian judge to confirm the identities of some women in the pictures. They are actress Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝), actor-singer Gillian Chung (鍾欣桐), former actress Bobo Chan (陳文媛) and model-actress Rachel Ngan (顏穎思).
Chen, a Vancouver native of Portuguese-Chinese parents, returned to Canada last year in the face of intense public anger in China.
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
Cozy knits, sparkly bobbles and Santa hats were all the canine rage on Sunday, as hundreds of sausage dogs and their owners converged on central London for an annual parade and get-together. The dachshunds’ gathering in London’s Hyde Park came after a previous “Sausage Walk” planned for Halloween had to be postponed, because it had become so popular organizers needed to apply for an events licence. “It was going to be too much fun so they canceled it,” laughed Nicky Bailey, the owner of three sausage dogs: Una and her two 19-week-old puppies Ember and Finnegan, wearing matching red coats and silver
RSS