Butler at sea in New York on tide of tabloid hostility

He had dodged the press for 36 hours, but yesterday the Buck House Butler came out of the cocoon of his room at the Millennium Hotel in New York and shovelled some morsels the way of the panting press. First there was a brief, if obviously self-serving, statement, and then, in good royal tradition, a walkabout.

Dapper in a suit and colourfully striped tie, Paul Burrell was stinging from a weekend of salacious accusations in the British media. He wanted us to know: he had decided after his acquittal at his theft trial to sell his story to the Daily Mirror because he needed the money to stave off "financial ruination". And he was here in America further to spill the beans to the ABC TV network simply to tell "my side of the story".

If he wanted attention in America, he was getting it. His lawyer in the States, Richard Greene, implored us to leave alone him, his wife, Maria, and their two sons, Alex and Nicholas, as they spent three more days in Manhattan. Just as quickly he then invited us outside to take pictures and told us where else the besieged family would be heading: Central Park, the Empire State Building and ground zero. The "blabbermouth", as The Sun – doubtless doubled up with envy at the Mirror's coup – has taken to calling Mr Burrell, said not a word during the 10-minute outing to Times Square. But he and his wife, in pinstripe jacket and trousers, wore fixed smiles even as they struggled to keep their footing against a surging scrum of cameramen and reporters. Only the two boys looked resolutely miserable.

"Maria, Maria! A kiss, please!" implored one photographer as husband and wife posed on a small traffic island overlooked by the studios of ABC and MTV. Mrs Burrell heard the call but demurred, quietly shaking her head. Reports of the couple loudly feuding in the hotel room at the weekend were possibly exaggerated. But she was not about to play lovey-dovey with her man for the cameras.

Traffic was clogging and tourists were running to the scene hoping for a celebrity sighting when the burly minders accompanying the Burrell family – provided, the rest of us assumed, by the Mirror – abruptly decided that feeding time was over. A yellow cab was hailed to stop at the island and the Butler, wife and sons were roughly shoved into its seats.

Mr Burrell's appearance on ABC will be aired next Monday. But yesterday's statement was aimed at the British audience and at The Sun and any other UK newspaper with new allegations, whether about his sexuality in the past or about claims of gay rape involving a former member of the palace staff.

Saying he had foreseen a backlash after dealing exclusively with the Mirror, Mr Burrell said he never expected it to "be so vicious and personal". He continued: "Newspapers waging the campaign of vilification are the same people who pretended to be my friends for years and offered me vast sums of money to tell my story."