Cecilia Cheung and Edison Chen Sex Scandal Photos: Hong Kong's Biggest Story Of The Year

Gillian Chung, Cecilia Cheung and Edison Chen Sex Scandal Photos: Hong Kong's Biggest Story Of The Year

If you had to select one single cause that brings Hong Kong people together, what would it be? Hope of full democracy by 2012? A plunging stock market? South China Morning Post closing its Chinese publishing house? Well, you'll be damned. The number one blog/news story emerging out of Hong Kong as of late yesterday is probably the city's worst sex scandal to date. Since Sunday, photos of some of Hong Kong's most prominent young artistes, including now Edison Chen, Gillian Chung (of Twins fame), Bobo Chan and Cecilia Cheung have surfaced unmercifully on internet forums. Emperor Entertainment Group (EEG), one of Hong Kong's leading record labels and some of the artistes' agent, seek to file lawsuits against those who doctored the pictures, although whether the pictures were in fact doctored is still under dispute. For more, we turn to Day 3 reporting by EastSouthWestNorth and CoolSmurf.

Here is the low-down:

"27th January (Day 1)

8:30pm - Photos of Edison and Gillian bedroom antics posted
9:00pm - Posted message saying Bobo Chan and Cecilla Cheung sex photos coming soon

28th January (Day 2)
3:00pm - Bobo Chan & Edison oral sex photo published, poster says something big will happen tomorrow afternoon at 4pm

29th January (Day 3)
12:30am - Photo of Cecilia touching herself published
3:30pm - 5 screencaps of Edison and Gillian in a sexual act published and is believed to be identical to the initially published photo

6:00pm - Photo of Cecilia exposing her butt published. Many posts on various forum promised that a sex clip believed to be Edison and Gillian will be next."

The photographs was reportedly first seen at an overseas internet forum (bcoms.net), but became widely circulated when it reached Hong Kong Golden Forum and Hong Kong Discussion Forum, two of the largest internet forums in Hong Kong. Within a period of five hours, more than 2,000 people have posted comments to the photos. In fact, so many netizens from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China who were eagerly waiting all day and night on these forums led to significant slowdown and bandwidth overload (certain forums were unreachable on Day 2). A post at China's Tianya forum drew as many as 2,500,000 page views and more than 13,000 comments covering 72 pages before being taken down by moderators.

Hong Kong's leading Chinese newspapers, including Oriental Daily, The Sun, Apple Daily, AM 730, Headline Daily, Ming Pao and Sing Pao, were quick to capture the story and printed cropped versions of the pictures, descriptions, in-depth comparisons. In fact, this story was front page for two consecutive days, making the event more important than New Year festivities.

A lot of thought and reasoning has been put to determine whether the photos in question are real or a hoax. Initially, many news outlets claimed the hard position that these photos were all doctored, but have soften their positions as evidence points to the contary. Netizens have compared the background of one of the first photos with Gillian and Edison to the background of a YouTube video in which Edison was interviewed at his home sitting his bed. Uncanny similarities? Yes. Also, experts, such as experienced photographers and Photoshop gurus, pointed out that the sex photos were hard to fake, largely due to the grainy noise background and everyone's inability to find the "original image," from which the head is (if the photos are really doctored) purportedly cut and pasted onto the fake body photo.

In a counter argument, Gillian's fans noted that one of the photos contain the same head shot as one of her old movies. Some people even claim that the photos were originally high-resolution hoaxs that were then glazed over by white noise as to make them authentic. But that doesn't seem likely. At best, some of the photos were doctored, especially the later higher resolution pictures of Cecilia that emerged, but the majority of them are real. Their origin? Possibly from Edison's phone, which was lost and may have been picked up by the person releasing the images. It is said that the original poster may have initially visited major Hong Kong newspapers in hopes of selling the images but was rejected.

Anyhow, EEG has issued a statement that read as follows: "We are chasing the source of the circulation, the circulator and the downloader. Any distribution, downloading, transference or publication of the image is illegal. We have already passed the case to lawyers to follow up. If the distributor or upload person [of the image] is confirmed, we will seek court action." The chase got so intense that Hong Kong Police had to enlist the help of Interpol to track down the identity of the initial poster who used a computer terminal in an unspecified Southeast Asian country. Sounds like bit of a drama, as did last time when semi-nude pictures of Gillian Chung surfaced from a Malaysian magazine in 2006 (an EEG employee later admitted that that was in fact a marketing ploy).

What do you make of all this? Definitely the biggest story of 2008 in Hong Kong. A final question you may ask: where are the pictures that you are talking about? Hint: try foreign blogs/forums (certain Xanga sites), as all Hong Kong ones are "harmonized."

Cecilia Cheung-Sex Scandal on Broken Computer

Photos purportedly showing a Hong Kong actor partially nude with several starlets were copied from his computer when it was serviced last year and later distributed over the Internet, police said Monday. The photographs, allegedly of actor and singer Edison Chen in bed with singer Gillian Chung along with suggestive images of actress Cecilia Cheung, were recently posted online, sparking a media frenzy. While Chung's company, Emperor Entertainment Group, initially said the photographs of the normally squeaky-clean star was a digital fake, Hong Kong police said some 1,300 private shots of celebrities had been stolen from a faulty personal computer belonging to an individual who took it to a computer shop for servicing. "A person had taken his computer to be fixed, but during the maintenance period, someone used dishonest means to take some information from the computer and distributed this information indiscriminately to others," assistant police commissioner Wong Fook-chuen said. While the police gave no specific names, Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper reported the photographs belonged to Edison Chen, 27. "A person in the shop found hidden inside (Chen's) computer, confidential nude pictures of naked female stars which were then secretly copied," Ming Pao reported, quoting an anonymous source. The computer shop was subsequently raided by police officers in a widening investigation across the special administrative region which has led to eight arrests for infringing obscene material laws and the seizure of over 1,000 explicit images including those of six women, four of whom were public figures, the police said. In a statement on his blog over the weekend, Chen criticized some of the recent media coverage and widespread publishing of the images. "I would like for you to respect the situation that everyone is in and report the truth to the fullest," he wrote. He didn't clarify whether the images had been faked or stolen, but his manager said Chen would cooperate with the police investigation. Hong Kong's police commissioner, Tang King-shing, said the case was being treated seriously and warned the possession and distribution of such images might be illegal.

Cecilia Cheung-quit smoking

Ceci has also begun to quit smoking. "Smoking is bad for your lungs and also gives you wrinkles. I'm trying to quit right now. Back then, I use to smoke 10 cigarettes a day. Now I'm down to 5. It's hard to quit everything all at once. When I see others smoke during work, I'm tempted to do it too."

A magazine recently reported that Ceci buys alot of expensive furniture for her pets. To this, Ceci says:" That magazine is crazy. They only want to pick on me. Everyone has furniture at home. My dogs and cats sleep and pee on my sofa, and despite the fact that I've tried to clean it everytime it happens, it's still dirty, so I've decided to change it. No one sleeps on one bed for their entire life. After a while, it's time to change it."

Cecilia Cheung - Scandal

Cecilia Cheung is a Hong Kong actress and Cantopop singer. She is wife of Nicholas Tse thus the daughter-in-law of Patrick Tse (謝賢) and Deborah Li. She and Nicholas have a son, Lucas

Biography

Cheung was born in Hong Kong to a Chinese father and a half Chinese-half British mother. Her parents divorced when she was just a child after which she was sent to Australia to live with her aunt at the age of fourteen. Cheung has an elder half-sister Dai Pek Chi, an airline pilot, two younger brothers and also a younger half-brother from her father's side.

In 1998, while helping a hair stylist friend at a catwalk show, she was offered to appear in a TV commercial advertising lemon tea. Later, Cheung made her film debut as a young nightclub hostess in Stephen Chow's The King of Comedy (1999), followed soon after by Fly Me to Polaris (1999). The latter role earned her the award for Best Newcomer at the Hong Kong Film Awards. In the same year, Cheung launched her singing career with her first Cantopop album Any Weather (1999).

For Derek Yee's romantic drama Lost in Time (2003), Cheung won Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards. She played a young woman who lost her fiancé to a traffic accident which left her as a grieving single mother struggling to make ends meet.