Disgraced celebrity Edison Chen Koon-hei told his first serious girlfriend about the collection of salacious pictures taken of himself engaging in sex acts with various female starlets about six months before the scandal broke last year.
Speaking publicly for the first time about the controversy with Anjali Rao on CNN's Talk Asia programme, Chen admitted that he 'went a little too overboard' in taking the photos more than four years ago. But he said he deleted all the pictures.
'When you're a teenager, and when you're young and when you're a celebrity, and you have this and that, I think maybe you go overboard a little bit. And I think that maybe, you know, I just went a little too overboard, a little too wild I guess.
'I had actually told her that some of these things had happened before. She was quite upset and she actually told me to delete them.'
Chen did not identify the girlfriend in the interview, but she is understood to be Vincy Yeung Wing-ching, niece of entertainment tycoon Albert Yeung Sau-shing.
Some of the photos were leaked on the internet after Chen's laptop had to be serviced. He was asleep when someone called him about the photos. 'I was shocked. I was in disbelief. I don't even know how to put that feeling in words. It was like everything just got sucked out of me.'