Images of female starlets circulated via internet

HONG Kong's entertainment industry is in turmoil after one of its top stars was forced to quit after hundreds of pornographic pictures he took of some of the city's movie starlets ended up on the internet.

The scandal has left actor and singer Edison Chen reportedly needing police protection amid allegations that Triad gangsters have been contracted to hack off one of his hands because of the damage he has done to their business by ruining the wholesome public images of the women he photographed.

The explicit pictures first appeared more than a month ago when, police say, Chen took his laptop to a shop for repairs but forgot to remove the offending images from its hard drive. The arrest then followed of a computer repair shop man and others under colonial-era obscenity laws. Chen fled to the US and an intense debate was sparked at the top levels of government over what is and what isn't indecent.

The issue dominated the front pages of the city's voracious newspapers; Donald Tsang, Hong Kong's chief executive, voiced his concern, and mainland Chinese police were forced to crack down on street hawkers who were selling DVDs of the pictures.

Last Thursday, Vancouver-born Chen, 27, known for his bad-boy hip-hop image, returned under heavy police protection from the US. He apologised and announced he was quitting showbusiness to do charity work. He said: "These photos were very private and have not been shown to people and were never intended to be shown to anyone. I have failed as a role model."

Several of Hong Kong's tabloid newspapers have reproduced highly explicit photos leaving little to the imagination but, bizarrely given the police arrests elsewhere, have escaped punishment from Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal, which ruled the images not to be indecent. The tribunal has a chequered past - most notably in 1995, when it ruled a statue of Michaelangelo's David had to be covered up as it was indecent.

Chen - who starred in the Hong Kong gangland movie Infernal Affairs, on which Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed was based - has denied persistent rumours that the pictures had previously been shown to showbiz pals as a badge of honour.

One movie industry insider said: "He must now wish he had never taken them, because his career is in tatters and he had angered a lot of powerful people because of the damage he has done to some of the business's biggest money-making female stars."

Among the women he photographed was his present girlfriend, Vincy Yeung, the niece of the Emperor Entertainment Group mogul Albert Yeung Sau-Shing, from whose stable most of the female artists come. Chen's fall from grace has also thrown into serious doubt a list of lucrative marketing deals with Pepsi, China having already removed advertising billboards bearing his image.

Hong Kong society has been outraged, either by the pictures themselves or by the fact that the authorities have cracked down so heavily because some of the territory's top entertainment figures are involved.

One of Chen's former girlfriends whose naked image has flashed across the internet, is Gillian Chung, half of the "girl-next-door" pop duo Twins. Last week she made her first TV appearance since the scandal broke, and producers were inundated with complaints from viewers saying she was a bad role model for youngsters.

In a video appeal released in a failed attempt to stop the flow of pictures on to the net, Chen pleaded: "If you've ever downloaded any of these images, please do not forward then to anyone I urge you to destroy them immediately." But the photos continued to flow, leading to suggestions that he and others in the higher reaches of the entertainment industry were being blackmailed.

The police, who have assigned a team of 19 detectives to the investigation, declined to comment on the blackmail claims. Nor would they confirm that Chen is under the city's witness protection programme.

Bey Logan, a former Hong Kong film actor and now the vice-president (Asia-Pacific) of the Harvey Weinstein Group, said: "I know Gillian Chung and the other women. I really feel for them, this could seriously damage them. You have to ask yourself, did they do anything wrong? Naive, stupid, maybe, but not wrong."