Adult Industry Tycoon Fires Theater Critic After Nude Pics From Two Decades Ago Surface

“Don’t pose for that photo,” they said. “It could affect your life and job years from now when you least expect it,” they said.

Mark Shenton (pictured), chief theater critic for U.K.’s Sunday Express, learned the hard way this week how those unsavory photos you posed for can come back to haunt you. The 51-year-old writer has worked for the paper since 2002, but was fired this week after nude images of himself were discovered on a gay paysite, reports The Guardian.

Just one problem: Shenton didn’t post the images online himself. In fact, he believes they were taken 22 years ago and remained safe in the hands of “a friend in San Francisco” ever since. In a blog post for The Stage, Shenton confirmed that the photos were of himself and were “entirely legal” albeit “private and personal.”

“[The photos were taken] long before I either worked for the paper or the internet had come of age,” he said, “so I never expected them to turn up on a website that didn’t exist then – or to find it still live now!”

You want the kicker now? The Express is owned by publisher Richard Desmond, a British billionaire who made his initial fortune in and still profits from the sale of straight pornography. His heavy interest in pornography even landed him in hot water back in 2005, when the Gambino crime family scammed him out of more than $650 million and threatened his life.

But that’s straight porn business, and the images depicting Mr. Shenton were clearly gay in nature. The paper’s editor Martin Townsend referred to them  as “embarrassing” in front of the head of Human Resources.

Shenton writes:

It is, of course, the prerogative of a newspaper editor to choose his own writers but there is a certain irony that a newspaper, now owned by proprietor Richard Desmond whose business interests once included the publication of Penthouse in the UK and Asian Babes – and which he continued to publish long after he acquired the Express group in 2000, until he sold the adult magazine business in 2004 – should be so affronted. (The company continues to own and operate Television X, a series of subscription adult television channels) It could be said that the only difference is that these are straight magazines and channels, whereas mine was defined as a gay one.

The Express, of course, maintains that Shenton was fired for “bringing the newspaper into disrepute because naked pictures of him were discovered.”