Jessica Brown Findlay's former boyfriend speaks out about nude photograph leaks

Publish date: 2024-06-27

- Downton Abbey: Latest news

After Jessica Brown Findlay was targeted in the celebrity phone hacking this month, leaked footage of her with an unidentified man appeared online.

Now her ex-boyfriend Thomas Campbell has spoken out in support of the former Downton Abbey actress. “It was a huge invasion of privacy, I feel really sorry for her,” the artist, who courted Jessica for two years, tells me at the Phototaxis Cob Gallery at Blacks. “The video was nothing to do with me, I haven’t even seen it. But I do hope that anybody who sees it understands that grown adults do stuff for them that they don’t expect the world to see.”

"Anyone's private love messages whether they are visual or just text is always embarrassing if a third party sees or reads it. You don't even want your best mate to see your girlfriend in that way."

The pair met while they were both students at Central St Martins College of Art.

Lost in translation

My disclosure that Scotland's Yes camp were irked by the BBC’s ill-timed Dad’s Army episode at the weekend, which showed Frazer taking over the platoon with disastrous results, has given Ian Lavender food for thought.

“Of course David Croft had the foresight to write the episode, which he wrote 40 years ago, to be used before the referendum,” Lavender, who played Private Frank Pike, joshes. “Does the sense of humour go with the vote?”

Boris is in bloom

When Boris Johnson accompanied Matthew Barzun, the US ambassador, to visit the site of his new embassy in Battersea, the Mayor of London boasted that not only would Barzun have the Chinese ambassador nearby, he would also be able to count Joanna Lumley as a neighbour. Happily, Johnson’s appreciation for the Absolutely Fabulous actress is reciprocated. According to the mayor’s latest declaration of gifts, Lumley sent him a bouquet of flowers in June to celebrate his 50th birthday.

Blowin’ in the wind

With a new generation of “uglier” turbines being made by EDF, even eco-campaigner Vivienne Westwood has little nice to say about wind farms. “If they are a good idea then I don’t mind them; if they are a bad idea then I don’t like them,” she says at the Trillion Fund “Off the Grid” Solar party.

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