Don Blackmailed Over Gay Sex

A male prostitute has been banged up for 30 months after pleading guilty to blackmailing a married Cambridge Don, threatening to tell his wife about their cottaging activities.

Druggy Philip Ellis, 26, met the naughty professor in the aptly named Paradise Woods over a year ago, after the two met at a popular gay cruising spot near Newnham.

Last Thursday, Cambridge Crown Court heard how the senior science academic from Cambridge University paid homeless Ellis a tenner for a ‘sex act’, and a couple of weeks later was back for more, paying £40 for full sex.

But afterwards, the ‘penniless and destitute’ Ellis demanded a whopping £4,000. The uni drop-out said he knew who the Don’s wife and son were, and would tell them everything.

Philip Ellis

Even after the unknown academic coughed up, Cambridge resident Ellis wanted more. He told the prof that he had recorded what they’d been doing in the bushes on his mobile. This ‘planned, devious’ move earned him another two grand.

But it still wasn’t enough. Rentboy Ellis turned up two months later at the academic’s family home, prompting the Don to collapse and confess everything to his family.

Mr Ellis was finally arrested for getting in a fight with a college gardener on Manhatten Drive, and pleaded guilty to blackmail, assault and bizarrely, to possession of £200 worth of an illegal worming drug.

In court last Thursday, the Cambridge cottager’s lawyer said Ellis’s life had been spiralling out of control since his brother died four years ago. He had nowhere to live, no money, was taking drugs, and ‘struggling to come to terms with his sexual identity.’ He was in a ‘desperate state’.

The current status of the prof’s private life is unknown. CUSU LGBT pres Anthony Woodman said: “If this is a case of someone repressing their sexual orientation, then it only underscores the importance of a society in which no one need hide their sexuality.”

Cambridge Cricket Blue Phil Hughes said: “The fact that he’s a Cambridge Don doesn’t matter, it’s his life, he can do what he wants with it. The really sad thing is that he has a wife and family that he’s cheating on.”

Sarah Steele, Director of Studies in Law at Christ’s, said “Exchanging money for sex from a drug addicted, homeless, gay youth was also exploitative and violent, evidence of a social system failing to assist and support its most vulnerable. Leaving prison Mr Ellis will face many of the same factors -stigma, loss of employment opportunities, inability to find accommodation- that led to the crime itself.”

Cambridge University last night declined to comment on whether action would be taken against the Don.