Vanessa Perroncel and John Terry

It's been an exceptional year for sex scandals. From Tiger to Terry to Vernon Kaye's texts. From Ronan Keating's dancer to Mark Owen's dancer to Peter Crouch's £800 hooker. No Sunday has been complete without another newspaper revelation. Sex scandals are Max Clifford's forte, his gift to contemporary British culture. All the best sex scandals are stage-managed by Clifford.

"Although these days," he says "my job is much more about protection than promotion. It's 90% protecting people like Vanessa. For every story I broker, there's 10 I stop from coming out, because I know they [the individual] can't handle it. I'll tell them they can't handle it."

Vanessa Perroncel – the woman at the centre of the sex scandal that lost footballer John Terry the captaincy of the England team and kick-started a bumper year of celebrity infidelity splashes – has always denied the affair.

There is no reason not to believe Perroncel. Evidence for the affair comes from journalists with a vested interest in it being true, from a number of nameless, faceless and unsubstantiated sources (ah, the unimpeachable credibility of the anonymous "close friend").

We know Perroncel did not "tout her story round Fleet Street – for a figure in excess of £250,000" (Daily Mail, 4 February). No Perroncel-authored tabloid "tell all" ever ran. We also know Terry did not buy Perroncel's silence for figures estimated to be anything from £400,000 (Times) to £800,000 (Evening Standard). We know this because she's agreed to talk to the Observer, for a sum of precisely £0. So Vanessa Perroncel is the girl who didn't kiss and didn't tell – and got trashed in the tabloids anyway.

"Vanessa Perroncel is a she-devil in John Terry's dirty game," Sue Carroll wrote in the Mirror on 23 February. She was a "maneater", a "football groupie". She was "money-hungry" and "gagging for it". Claims that Perroncel had slept with five members of Chelsea surfaced; one red-top paper printed a team photograph and circled the men concerned in marker pen. "Maybe she'll make it a full 11 by the weekend?" the Mail wondered. When anyone reported Perroncel's denials of relationships with anyone other than Bridge – which occasionally, they did – those anonymous sources piped up. "To say she's a Chelsea girl is a bit of an understatement. By the time she got to John Terry, she'd achieved her own five-a-side football team,'" said one particular unidentified "close friend", choosing to speak in a tabloid-ready soundbite.

TODAYS "JOUNALISTS" GET AWAY BEING LAZY , AND UNPROFESSIONAL ...... IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE THESE HACKS ARE IN THE SAME BUSINESS THAT GAVE US EDWARD R MURROW ....... I DONT BUY THE REDTOPS ANYMORE .