On Friday 29 January, in a courtroom in London, Vanessa Perroncel's life changed. She wasn't in court. She had nobody there to speak for her. But when Mr Justice Tugendhat decided that the then England football captain, John Terry, had no right to suppress a story about his alleged sex life, Perroncel found herself being hurled out into the public domain alongside him.
Until then, she was simply the little-known former partner of another England player, Wayne Bridge. But over the next few weeks she appeared in hundreds of stories. Newspapers ransacked her sexual history for a series of increasingly wild allegations – and followed up with a satellite picture of her home and a detailed map of how to find her. They published an account of a supposed pregnancy and abortion; told tales of her childhood, her parents' divorce and her father's death; and claimed to expose her negotiations for child maintenance with her former partner.
Perroncel's alleged affair with Terry, after she had split from Bridge, became one of the biggest tabloid scandals of the year, resulting in Terry becoming, for a short time, a pariah; and in Wayne Bridge stepping down from the England World Cup team.
Along the way, Perroncel committed one of the worst sins in Fleet Street: she refused to talk to the press. So fantasy took over. She became a fictional object on whom journalists projected classic stereotypes: the beautiful woman who was "gagging for it", as the News of the World put it; "shameless", a "maneater", a "football groupie" in the words of the other papers; the "gold digger" who was "money hungry", seducing men for their wallets.
As Perroncel says: "They made out that I'm some kind of prostitute. That's really what they're saying. And the stories are untrue. They have gone mad." And then she asks the question which is so obvious and so easily forgotten: "Who are they to do this?"
Perroncel's experience in the last two months goes to the heart of a considerable confusion about journalistic ethics and media law. Fleet Street claims that its facts are sacred, but there is no effective mechanism to prevent its recurrent indifference to the truth. How do you regulate a free press? And even when the facts are clear, the rules on privacy are vague. Should newspapers drag out and humiliate anybody who has an affair, or visits a prostitute, or who is gay? The tabloids say they are acting in the public interest. Critics say it's all about commercial interest.
Vanessa Perroncel, 34, is a model. She grew up in France but she has lived in England for 11 years. In 2005, she became the partner of a Premier League footballer, Wayne Bridge, and in 2006, she showed up in pictures of the Wags, the wives and girlfriends of the England team, at the World Cup in Germany. Last year, she separated from Bridge. They have a three-year-old son. That much certainly is true. That much was public before Mr Justice Tugendhat in effect removed her privacy.
Her story – told to the Guardian without any suggestion that she be paid – is very different from the stories that followed. Some of it is still missing: she can't correct some intimate falsehoods without going even further into her own private life. And she insists that she and Bridge have never breached their own privacy.
"When we were together, we were offered money to do stories, and we didn't follow it up. We could have had fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. Wayne was uncomfortable about it. I was a model but suddenly I couldn't work any more because I was also a Wag. Wayne thought I would look ridiculous. We became quite private. We were just happy being happy. We were still photographed turning up at events, for awards or a charity event, but that doesn't make us "non-private". I didn't want to make myself famous."
Nevertheless, she had a few bad experiences with the press. "There was a reporter who came to the door when I was still with Wayne, and he said he had a story about me sleeping with somebody else. I said: 'It's ridiculous, not true.' He said he could prove it. I said: 'OK – if you print this, I will sue you.' "
She says the reporter went away but returned half an hour later with a suggestion from his editor that they would drop the original allegation if she agreed to say that the England and Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard had made a pass at her. "I said 'You're crazy' and shut the door, and they didn't print anything."
But she couldn't handle the story about her alleged affair with Terry. A reporter got to her just before Mr Justice Tugendhat's ruling. "I said: 'I don't want to talk to you.' She said she had information for me. I said: 'I'm not interested.' She started telling me about the court case and what was happening in court. I listened to her and I told her why I couldn't talk to her." Which was a mistake: her reasons for not talking were rapidly presented as an exclusive interview. And then the mob descended on her home in Surrey.
"Masses of journalists are outside my door. And they ring the bell, and I say No, and they keep doing it and doing it. They're putting notes through the letter box, offering me money and then more money. I have my three-year-old son, he keeps asking who are these bad men taking pictures. I just tried to go on as if nothing was happening. I told him not to look at them."
Eventually, in an effort to control them, she hired Max Clifford. That worked: the reporters left her doorstep and dealt with Clifford. But it also backfired, by provoking speculation that she wanted to sell her story. "I never asked him to sell my story. I never wanted to sell my story. Max said: 'People are offering money – £200,000, £250,000.' I don't want it."
Six days into the scandal, she put out a statement and clearly signalled that she was not selling. That was when things got really nasty.
The same newspapers who had seen her reject their vast offers of cash now flipped the story around and accused her of selling her silence to John Terry for even more. The Times said she had taken £400,000. The News of the World said it was £750,000 ("Wily Vanessa teamed up with PR to the stars Max Clifford and the pound signs began rolling in her eyes," its reporter claimed). The Sunday Times adopted both figures. The Evening Standard beat them all, claiming it was £800,000. The reality was that she had not sold her silence at all – and her ability to talk to the Guardian proves it.
Back before the story broke, as John Terry's lawyers headed for court, his agent had got her to sign an agreement that she would not discuss his private life and, as a technical requirement, he undertook to pay her £1. As it happened, the agreement was legally invalid. "And they never even paid me the one pound. I haven't had a penny off John Terry."
None of which stopped the gold-digger stories, which went through a highly hostile chapter when she and Bridge had a court hearing about child maintenance. Newspapers confidently reported that she was demanding £10,000 a month, £15,000 a month, £20,000 a month. "Nothing was true. All made up."
It was during this period that she and her close friend, Antonia Graham, found signs of telephone interception, which are now the subject of an inquiry by the Information Commissioner's Office.
In the meantime, the tabloids had also started on their sex-mad theme. The Sun told the world in some detail that she had slept with a total of five Chelsea players and included a quote from an anonymous source, who conveniently spoke in the style of a tabloid journalist: "To say she's a Chelsea girl is a bit of an understatement. By the time she got to John Terry, she'd achieved her own five-a-side football team." Other newspapers piled in, throwing in more footballers to feed their fantasy of her sexual appetite until she had a total of eight from Chelsea alone.
The News of the World then passed her around the entire Premier League, explaining that "Serial Wag Vanessa Perroncel was last night branded a voracious football maneater who hunted down her lovers using a Premier League fixture list." Perroncel was aghast: "This is sick. It felt horrible. I have a three-year-old son, a child that is going to read about this. I'm lucky he isn't older. My family have been horrified. It is all made up. But you can't compete. What can you do?"
In the background, John Terry's camp succeeded in planting a series of stories and photos that portrayed him as a happy family man, taking his wife out to the theatre and showing her how to fish while the tabloids rummaged in Perroncel's family history – her parents' divorce, her father's suicide, her supposed lack of money as a child (implying a current obsession). "I didn't grow up with money troubles. It's just not true. My father did commit suicide but they wrote the wrong method. But how is this their business?"
With Clifford's help, she released statements attempting to stop the worst of the fictions. "No one cared. They don't want to print that their stories are not true. What they wanted to hear was that I had all this sex with all these people. They really didn't want to hear that it wasn't true. I didn't give them what they wanted, so then I had to be punished. Vilified."
Readers will notice that this Guardian interview discloses no new detail about her sexual activities or personal life, with or without John Terry or anybody else, male or female. That's private.