Helen’s tell all interview, autobiography released June 3rd
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Helen Wood's life follows an unremarkable path these days. Not that she minds.
She lives anonymously in the suburbs, caring for her ailing mother and raising her teenage son.
'It can be hard at times but I think I've found a form of contentment,' she says. Because it wasn't always like this.
A decade ago Helen, the middle-class daughter of teachers, was a restless soul, emotionally adrift at the heart of the fashionable Manchester party scene, her striking looks attracting interest from celebrities and footballers alike.
Then, over the course of 24 hours in July 2009, her life changed in the most dramatic fashion.
It was revealed she and a friend, Jenny Thompson – who had both moved into escort work to pay off debts – had been paid £1,000 by England footballer Wayne Rooney for sex at Manchester's five-star Lowry Hotel.
Shockingly, Rooney's wife Coleen was five months pregnant with the couple's eldest son Kai at the time. Suddenly Helen found herself under the full glare of the media spotlight, something she insists was unwelcome and uninvited.
It was Miss Thompson, she points out, who ran to the tabloids, naming Helen and in doing so leaving her with little choice, she says, but to go public with her own account of what had happened.
That said, Helen's notoriety did secure her a place on Celebrity Big Brother and £100,000 when she won the TV reality show. Rather incongruously, she also appeared on BBC2's Newsnight to discuss privacy and the media with actor Hugh Grant.
But when the furore finally cooled, Helen, now 32, was determined to build a new existence. Abandoning her party friends, she retreated to the city's fringes where, until now, she has tried to bury the past.
Her life is certainly different now ('My days of wearing little skirts and hotpants are long gone') but her 12-minute encounter with Rooney has cast a long shadow.
Her notoriety, she says, has made new relationships near impossible. 'Every time I meet a man, they ask about Wayne,' she says bluntly. Her son has endured teasing and abuse. 'It's just so difficult to escape the whole Wayne thing,' she adds.
All of this, however, is difficult to square with her decision to revisit the life-changing episode in a book due to be published next month. Helen concedes that she is full of contradictions, claiming that her memoir – A Man's World – began as a 'therapeutic' exercise, and that after she had finished writing, it had given her 'closure'.
Cathartic for her perhaps, but likely to strike a chill in the hearts of the famous family men who used her services.
Many people, of course, will have little sympathy for those men and scant regard for women such as Helen who not only had sex for money but have now chosen to profit further from her escapades by writing a book.
It explores her life on the tawdry Manchester escort scene, her encounters with celebrities and other clients – and, of course, the threesome with Rooney.
They first met at Manchester's Living Room nightclub. He invited Helen and Miss Thompson to a party at a nearby casino where they mixed with Rooney's Manchester United teammates Rio Ferdinand and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Days later, Helen and Jenny were dining at an Italian restaurant when Miss Thompson received a text message from Rooney asking if she would go to the Lowry. She said she was with Helen, so he invited her too.
Speaking of what happened next, Helen says the book will reveal how Rooney fought back tears as he was overcome with remorse after sex and afterwards even showed her a scan of his unborn child.
'I will never forget the look on Wayne's face as we were lying in bed together. The colour drained from him and he was close to crying,' she says.
'After we had sex he brought up the fact that he was going to become a dad soon. I asked him if he was all right, and he replied, 'I don't know why I've just done that.'
'He told me not to tell anyone or I would get hurt. I told him he didn't have to speak to me like that, that he wasn't the only one who had things to lose. He then told me Coleen was pregnant. I told him I had a son and that our encounter couldn't get out.
'Then Jenny, who was still in the room, said in front of us that she was going to call the papers. I could hear the seriousness of that in her voice.
'At that point, I feared for me and Wayne. Jenny and I had gone into that room as a force, two women together going to see a man. When I heard that comment, that wasn't the case any longer.'
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