Tulisa Contostavlos is not done fighting. More than a decade after a tabloid sting operation by the Sun on Sunday sent her career into freefall, the N-Dubz singer and former X Factor judge is pushing hard for tougher press regulation in England, and she wants people to understand this is not about revenge.
‘This isn’t some vendetta,’ she says plainly. ‘I just think what happened to me was wrong, and if I can stop it happening to someone else, then I have to try.’
Contostavlos, now 38, has had a lot of time to think about what went wrong and what she wants to do about it. Late last year, fresh from the end of a relationship and facing down her late thirties, she made a decision to take stock. She wrote out a list of what her ‘greatest self’ looked like. Where she would go. How she would think. What she would actually do with her life. Then she started working through it.
She quit smoking. She started therapy for the first time. She travelled to Egypt to see the pyramids and flew to Peru to visit Machu Picchu, ticking off experiences she had never made time for when fame came crashing in during her early twenties. ‘I found that through doing all of that, you just become her,’ she says of the version of herself she was chasing. ‘It is actually that simple. It just takes effort and discipline.’
That process of rebuilding also brought her back to the legal and press scandals that derailed everything. ‘I was like, right, let’s try to do something,’ she says.
Contostavlos first broke through as part of N-Dubz, the London hip-hop group that became one of the UK’s biggest acts in the late 2000s. By 24 she was sitting alongside Gary Barlow and Nicole Scherzinger as a judge on X Factor, one of the most watched shows on British television. It was a remarkable rise. Then came the collapse.
A sting operation by the Sun on Sunday led to a criminal trial that dominated headlines and dragged her name through the mud. A sex tape was leaked without her consent. The coverage was relentless and, she argues, deeply unfair. The case eventually fell apart, but the damage to her reputation and career had already been done. Bookings dried up. Her public profile shifted from pop star to tabloid target.
What followed was years of trying to claw back some sense of normality. She has spoken before about the shame she felt, not because she had done anything wrong, but because of how the story was told and retold in the press. That shame, she says now, was something she had to actively work through.
But Contostavlos is not just talking about her own experience for the sake of it. She is actively campaigning for stronger press regulation, arguing that the current system in England does not do enough to protect people from the kind of treatment she received. The Sun on Sunday sting, the leaked tape, the coverage that followed, she believes all of it points to a media culture that still lacks proper accountability.
Press regulation has been a long-running and deeply contested issue in England since the Leveson Inquiry, which was launched in the wake of the phone hacking scandal and reported back in 2012. The inquiry recommended a new independent regulator backed by royal charter. What emerged instead was IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, which critics have long argued is too close to the industry it is supposed to oversee. A second part of the Leveson Inquiry, which was meant to look at the relationships between press, police and politicians, was shelved by the government in 2018.
For campaigners like Contostavlos, that unfinished business matters. She is not alone in pushing for change. Hacked Off, the campaign group set up in the aftermath of the phone hacking revelations, has long argued that full implementation of Leveson’s recommendations remains necessary. High-profile figures from actors to politicians have backed calls for a more robust system.
Contostavlos is aware that some people will dismiss her campaign as self-interest. She gets that. But she pushes back on it firmly. ‘I’ve done my thinking,’ she says. ‘I know why I’m doing this and it’s not about me getting some kind of payback.’
She also reflects on the life she might have had without fame arriving so early. She thinks she might have become an archaeologist, given her obsession with ancient history. There is something fitting about that, perhaps, in the way she is now digging back into the past to try and change what comes next.
Her greatest self, she says, is a person of action. Someone who turns lemons into lemon cake. Right now, she is baking.