A once-top weekly U.K. tabloid, News of the World, is being accused of paying women to sleep with celebrities to get scoops about their sexual lives and performances.  

Singer James Blunt — who more than a decade ago settled a legal dispute with the defunct tabloid’s publisher, News International, over the tabloid’s hacking of his voicemails — said authorities had shared emails with him disclosing that women were on the tabloid’s payroll “to go out and shag celebrities,” the Guardian reports. 

Mr. Blunt was asked about the emails while speaking during the Hay Festival in Wales, the outlet notes, which began on May 23 and will conclude this Sunday. The emails were noted in Mr. Blunt’s 2023 book, which was titled “Loosely Based On A Made-Up Story: A Non-Memoir.”

In the book, which he describes as inspired by true events” but “not a biography,” Mr. Blunt writes that two women were “on the News of the World’s payroll to go out and f— celebrities.”

“The girls would bring the men back to [a] studio flat in Notting Hill, which had a fold-down bed, film the encounter, and then hand it over to the paper,” he wrote. “The girls were hot, and I’d met them, and sure enough, I’d done the deed.” 

The emails portrayed the editor of the tabloid at the time, Andy Coulson, debating how best to “portray my orgasm,” Mr. Blunt said, the Guardian notes. The Sun has reached out to Mr. Coulson’s representatives for comment. 

Mr. Blunt also spoke at the literary festival about pressure actress Carrie Fisher felt “to be thin” as a result of being cast in a new “Star Wars” film and that the late actress was “mistreating her body” before her 2016 death as a result. 

“I was with her the day before she died, when she came down to my house,” Mr. Blunt told the crowd, per the Independent. “And she’d been really mistreating her body, and she’d just got the job again of being Princess Leia in a new Star Wars movie.”

An autopsy report for Fisher in 2017 said that drugs including cocaine, methadone, and opiates were present in her system at the time of her death, though coroners weren’t able to conclude whether or not those caused her death, ultimately noting that “sleep apnea and other undetermined factors” contributed. 

“She spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry, how men are allowed to grow old, and women are certainly not in film and TV,” Mr. Blunt said at the festival. “And she really put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs again and by the time she got on the plane, she had effectively killed herself.” 

The Sun reached out to Lucasfilm, the producer of the 2017 film “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” for comment.