The singer Charlotte Church has called her portrayal in the media as a young woman a “travesty.” The 39-year-old, from Llandaff in Cardiff, previously said she had been targeted by the now-defunct News Of The World newspaper when she was just 16, and this resulted in an apology being issued by publishers News Group Newspapers and a large cash settlement for the young star.
The singer, who was dubbed the Voice of an Angel when she was at the peak of her fame, says that reading media stories at that time “was like a knife to your skin”. “The press intrusion was out of control, there was all kinds of deep stuff going on,” said Charlotte Church, who is part of the line-up for BBC One’s Celebrity Traitors this Wednesday.
The singer and presenter – who shot to fame at 11 – told The Big Issue: “I know a lot of teenagers think things aren’t fair, but the injustice I felt was so sharp.
“There were articles in the papers, everything he said got blown out of proportion and twisted into something sordid – when it wasn’t.
“There was so much shame being thrown at me, and the press wanted to do everything they could to turn me into someone that sinned; this idea of a ‘fallen angel’,” Charlotte Church said, who now operates her own wellness retreat in Powys.
The Crazy Internet Chick singer, who had reinvented herself as a pop star in 2005, got together with the Wales international rugby player Gavin Henson back in 2007, and despite attracting a lot of media interest from the start of their relationship (with one newspaper branding them ‘the Welsh Posh and Becks’), they managed to keep it going for four years.
The couple had two children together but split in 2010, a few weeks after announcing their engagement. In the course of a landmark legal action — which was ultimately settled in 2012, at huge financial cost to News Group Newspapers — it emerged that Charlotte Church had been placed under surveillance by journalists from the company and that her medical records had been illegally accessed.
Charlotte Church also said her anger and defiance about the situation helped her survive both media scrutiny and exposure, and “kept me from ever really getting dragged down”. “If I had taken that shame on, allowed that to come inside of me, swallowed it or prayed it away, well, my life might have been very different,” she said.
