Edison Chen, a Hong Kong pop star who fell into disgrace last year after his sexually explicit photographs were published on the internet, has told a court he was the victim of "foul play".
Edison Chen sex tape scandal broke out last year when over 1,000 photographs of Mr Chen, 28, entertaining a variety of Hong Kong's female celebrities (
Gillian Chung,
Bobo Chan,
Maggie Q and
Cecilia Cheung) were leaked onto the web in January last year, causing a sensation in China.
At the height of the scandal, the photographs were viewed around 20 million times a day, according to the South China Morning Post. Mr Chen was forced to flee Hong Kong and return to Canada, where he was born.
In the face of intense public anger, Mr Chen announced his retirement from the entertainment industry and said he would work for charity.
His notoriety, however, has not faded. He topped the most-searched-for lists in Asia last year, according to Google, and stores and restaurants associated with him are regularly boycotted. Mr Chen was the runner-up to Barack Obama in the Hong Kong Person of 2008 poll by the government-run RTHK radio station.
Mr Chen, who had a bit part in the Batman movie, Dark Knight, gave evidence to a court in Hong Kong via video-link from Vancouver after refusing to return to Hong Kong.
A computer technician named Ho-Chun Sze has been charged with stealing the photographs from Mr Chen's computer while servicing the machine and releasing them.
He told the court that the photographs were his, but that they had been on a personal computer which went missing. He said he believed they were released by "some foul play" in a computer store he used. "I'm quite a private person," he said. "This was never meant for anyone else to see.
This was a huge shock to me."
He refused to disclose any details about the women in the photographs to the court. "I'm determined to protect their innocence. They have suffered enough," he said. "I believe it is wrong to them, for me to state facts that I believe are irrelevant to this case."
Mr Chen told the court he believes the photos, which were stored on his computer, were copied when he took it to a shop for repairs. He added that the computer was protected by a password.
He said he thought he had erased the photographs before the machine was taken to the repair shop by placing them in the deleted folder. "I did not know about encrypted data or securing the trash. In my opinion, when you deleted a file and put it in the trash bin, it was deleted," he said. "They invaded my privacy and stole my things in a very direct way," Mr Chen said.