Cecilia Cheung Gets Ball Gagged

Hong Kong star Cecilia Chung in a ballgag and some ropes.

Cecilia Cheung is a Chinese movie star of the sort who plays the lead in romantic comedies, sort of a Katherine Heigl equivalent. You see her here bound and ball gagged, an image which got pasted all over Chinese tabloids. The interesting thing about this particular sex scandal is that it's one of those crouching scandal/hidden photos things.

Her career never really took off until she was involved in the Edison Chen sex photos scandal, in which a series of photos of Chen having sex with several actresses of the time were stolen from Chen and pasted across the Internet back in 2008. (Google "Cecilia Cheung nude" with the safe search filters turned off to see the images, there are a LOT of them and they'll be right up at the top, including images of Cheung with cock in her face and pulling her labia apart ... apparently, it was a hell of a sex session.) People went to jail for it, as the photos were in fact outright stolen from Chen's camera. Worked for Connie Cheung, as the notoriety got her noticed.

Flash forward to 2011 and suddenly these pics of Cheung in bondage pop up. Everybody is scandalized. But there's a catch: these were not stolen or illicit images at all. They are actually scenes from a short film called "Captive" that Cheung made in the beginning of her career when she was a relatively unknown actress, that was publicly exhibited. This site has an excellent summary of how things went down plus more photos.

Since practically no one saw the short film and Cheung was a nobody at the time, it sort of passed under the bridge until somebody found the photos and realized a new sex scandal was in the making.

The pictures also had a dark undercurrent because Cheung's father was a member of a Triad, the notorious Mafia-gang-equivalents of China, and a "misunderstanding" he got into with a rival gang led to death threats and rape threats against Cheung early in her career.

All-in-all it was the equivalent of a Sandra Bullock "Fire on the Amazon" thing. (Bullock was a relative unknown when she made "Fire on the Amazon" nobody paid any attention to the film until she became an established star) except it was bondage instead of softcore sex, and except for the fact that no one here seems to give a flip about "Fire On The Amazon" -- quite appropriately, I think.

I do have a caveat, I'm looking at this Chinese scandal from a strictly American perspective, I don't know how much of a scandal it really was. In Japan, for example, many mainstream anime producers have also done echhi and hentai (adult anime) with no one really caring about it, and major film studios (Universal Pictures equivalents) have done softcore bondage porn (Wife to be Sacrificed, for example). So, I could have read this all wrong. But based on what I've read from the Chinese media, I think I'm fairly close.