Cyber hacks and legal woes have taken the role of unveiling celebrities' bad behaviour

​For 15 years, the gossip newsletter Popbitch has held stars to account for their bad behaviour. Now, cyber hacks and legal woes are taking their toll

Here’s lookin’ at you: Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall were strung up by Popbitch (Getty Images)

In the early years after Camilla Wright founded Popbitch in 2000, she was frequently feted, alongside Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com, as one of Britain’s pioneering internet entrepreneurs.

Lane Fox cashed out in 2013, making around £13m, and is now Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, a Government digital champion. As a source of scurrilous entertainment gossip, Popbitch did not have the acquisition appeal of lastminute but it has been a great survivor in Britain’s online landscape.

Until now. Fifteen years of insider scuttlebutt, delivered by weekly emailed newsletter, online message board and magazine, is under threat. In an appeal to newsletter subscribers this week, Popbitch has asked its supporters to raise £20,000 to help keep at bay a wave of attacks from celebrity lawyers and cyber hackers. “Our site and email servers are being continually bombarded by malicious computer attacks, mainly from China,” it complains. “They’re trying to overwhelm the systems, stop our service from running and close us down. We don’t know how or why, but we’ve already fought off eight attempts this year alone.”


 Insider scuttlebutt: the popbitch website

Equally pernicious are the legal threats it receives on behalf of the stars which it mercilessly writes about. Recent Popbitch hits include the inside track on Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear punch-up, Rupert Murdoch’s dalliance with Jerry Hall, and the end of the Xfm radio brand.

Its most recent mailout included the claim that a celebrity legal battle between Katie Price and Peter Andre would be settled out of court and the observation that Donald Trump was an anagram of Damp Old Runt. The potty-mouthed Popbitch also confided that a “celebrity husband” had been “knobbing the help again”.

In a personal aside, Wright – who was a freelance writer for style magazine The Face when she founded Popbitch with her then boyfriend Neil Stevenson – has written about her teenage years in Plymouth, when she thought that the 1980s pop star Colonel Abrams was “impossibly cool” in his “gold-trimed military outfit on TOTP”. She has sad news of the Colonel. “He’s ill and homeless and friends have set up a crowd-funding campaign.”

Popbitch’s own condition doesn’t seem much healthier. “To help us keep sticking it to the rich, powerful and obnoxious, we need to raise £20,000 to upgrade our tech systems before the cyber attackers (or, worse, the lawyers) win.”

Britain’s celebrity lawyers are a notoriously ruthless crew. Among gossip writers, entertainment lawyers are regarded as “ambulance chasers”, scanning gossip sites for potential business and then splitting their fees among celebrities and agents in concerted attempts to close outlets down.

“We’ve had more threats to hush us up over stories in the last six months than in the previous three years,” says Popbitch in its missive. “Privacy letters are flying around and – on a couple of occasions – rich and badly behaved people who have got wind of us sniffing around have got their expensive lawyers on to us right away.”

It’s tough being an online gossip. Earlier this year, Nick Denton, the British co-founder of snarky New York site Gawker, said that he was considering toning things down as it faced a potentially crippling $100m-legal claim from the wrestling star Hulk Hogan. The British gossip site Holy Moly, which set up as a rival to Popbitch in 2002, closed this year after it became financially unsustainable.

Jamie East, founder of Holy Moly, says that Popbitch had an important role because, like the satirical title Private Eye, it stands apart from the rest of the media. “They hold people to account in a way that the paid entertainment magazines don’t,” he says.