What happens when you tell a big star to be honest to a journalist about her side of a controversial personal episode, off the record of course, to build “background and a relationship”. And the next day it’s a Page 1 story. What if the said star reads it, and in a fit of panic, falls sick. What if the journalist in question now says, she did nothing out of turn. 

A public relations professional we speak to says she was only 22 when she made this faux pas, and it haunted her for the next few years to come. She decided to eventually quit PR. “Things were not good after that. And after a while, I was asked to leave. I was young and naive. But what was done was done, and it took time to get out of that slump,” she admits, requesting anonymity for this article.