Haskell secretly filmed his friend having sex with a girl (Picture: ITV/REX)

This week we saw I’m A Celebrity contestant James Haskell get into a debate with co-star Kate Garrawayabout chivalry, with the former rugby player saying that he felt ‘more comfortable… with women going first’. Yet this week, news has resurfaced that while still at school, Haskell secretly filmed his friend having sex with a 17-year-old girl, without her knowing.

Together with fellow former rugby player Paul Doran-Jones, Haskell, who was 18-years-old at the time, set up a camera in a cupboard to film Doran-Jones having sex with the schoolgirl. The two boys, who were both students at Wellington College boarding school, showed the video to their friends, which led to Haskell getting suspended and Doran-Jones’ expulsion. The schoolgirl was also suspended for having sex on campus.



What’s more, an interview with men’s website JOE has also been shared, showing Haskell discussing this sexual assault so casually that he appears to not understand the gravitas of his actions. In the interview, Haskell jokes that he and Doran-Jones ‘tried to set up a home video club and it just went horribly wrong’.

The way Haskell has trivialised this act, with no self-reflection or regret, is haunting but unsurprising. So-called ‘revenge porn’ was not recognised as a crime in the UK until as recently as 2015, and the law is so full of loopholes that although reports of revenge porn are going up, conviction rates in recent years have gone down.


The idea of sexual consent extending to images we or others make of us has not been fully grasped by society yet. Although most of us would condemn ‘traditional’ forms of sexual assault, many people don’t extend that same condemnation to what happens in the digital space. It’s almost as though people think what happens on their smartphones occurs in an alternate universe.

James Haskell and Paul Doran Jones were both students at Wellington College boarding school (Picture: Getty)

As someone who works with victims of image-based sexual abuse, James Haskell’s story is more common than you might think. I started the #NotYourPorn campaign to highlight the phenomenon of people who profit from non-consensual pornography, after a friend of mine found an incredibly intimate video of herself trending on Pornhub following the hacking of her iCloud.

After investigating further, I quickly realised her experience wasn’t a one-off and that this was a massive societal issue that was being monetised by the commercial porn industry.

Two months ago, a woman called Catherine* called me one evening to tell me her story and ask for help. Someone had found a video of her on Pornhub after her ex-boyfriend had secretly filmed her having sex with him. Catherine told me that she had no idea her ex had been filming her, and how completely invaded and disgusting she felt in the weeks that followed.

The lack of control she felt over her own body at this time was akin to experiencing a physical sexual assault – she had not consented to being filmed in such an intimate state and yet had been viewed by strangers for their own sexual pleasure.



The lasting effects that revenge porn has on survivors is profound. ‘This event has scarred me for life, I am incredibly untrusting of humans now,’ Catherine told me. ‘Not just because of what [my ex-boyfriend] did, but also because of the lack of humanity I have been shown during this. I already had severe issues with self-confidence and the way I look, and now it’s even worse. This will be a part of me for the rest of my life now, there is just no escaping it.’

The number of women and children coming forward to tell their stories of being filmed during sexual acts without their consent is disturbing. In 2018, 288 people across England and Wales appeared in court charged with disclosing sexual photographs and videos with the intent to cause distress.

But in a world where regulation of the porn industry isn’t fit for purpose, this type of sexual assault isn’t just about perpetrators humiliating survivors or boasting to their friends. Some porn websites actively encourage users to upload ‘leaked sex tapes’ or ‘stolen teen Snapchat videos’ with little-to-no moderation of the content. Users who upload the most popular content make a nice cash sum from websites like Pornhub – incentivising this sexual abuse even further.

We’ve allowed an entire industry to normalise and profit from offensive behaviour like that committed by Haskell. Is there any greater validation for perpetrators than that?

*name has been changed to hide the person’s true identity

MORE: Denying a woman an opinion is chauvinism, not chivalry


MORE: Kim Kardashian awkwardly addresses brother Rob’s revenge porn scandal with Blac Chyna

MORE: I’m A Celebrity’s James Haskell accused of mocking disabilities leaving viewers in shock