Premier League player 'targeted by blackmailer'

An unnamed Premier League footballer is said to have been targeted by a blackmailer after having a one-night stand.

According to the Sun on Sunday, the defender spent the night with a woman in her 30s who he met at a party near his home. He then sent her explicit photos and videos of himself.

"It may have been a brief encounter but it left them both exhausted," a source told the paper. "This was pure animal passion. His wife would be horrified if she ever found out the full details."

But later, says the paper, the 30-year-old woman approached the player's club after discovering that he was married. She threatened to go public with the images unless the club paid her £100,000 - which it has refused to do.

The Sun says it knows the name of both the woman and the player, but isn't revealing them for legal reasons. So far, the pictures and videos haven't been leaked.

Footballers are particularly obvious blackmail targets, given their massive earnings - and an unfortunate tendency to play away from home.

In 2011, another Premier League player was reported to be the target of a blackmail attempt after apparently taking part in an orgy with three Swedish blondes in a Las Vegas hotel room.

In 2013, there was a similar attempt to blackmail a footballer who had allegedly sent intimate messages to a woman. But the player denied having sent the messages, and a man was later arrested for blackmail.

And former policewoman Helen Jones was recently convicted of taking part in an attempt to blackmail Liverpool FC captain Steven Gerrard. She'd seized bank CCTV footage of a street brawl involving Gerrard in August 2013 and handed it over to blackmailers.

But when Ryan Giggs accused former Big Brother star Imogen Thomas of blackmail over an alleged affair between the two, he later retracted his allegations, saying he accepted there was no basis for his accusations.

However, you don't have to be a footballer to be the target of a blackmail attempt. Last summer, a number of innocent men in the UK were horrified to receive letters saying that they'd be subjected to a 'smear campaign' accusing them of paedophilia unless they paid up.

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