It's been a hard day's fortnight for Heather Mills McCartney.
Weeks after her high-profile split from her iconic hubby, lawyers for Paul McCartney's estranged wife are in full damage-control mode, issuing a statement Tuesday announcing plans to sue Britain's News of the World tabloid after it claimed the onetime model was a high-priced hooker in her early twenties.
"Heather is very distressed by this article," her legal team said regarding the allegations, noting that she considered the article "untrue and highly defamatory."
Per the statement, the rumors have taken a tremendous toll on Mills McCartney, who's recovering from follow-up surgery on her leg that was amputated below the knee after 1993 accident with a police motorcycle.
"She has suffered weight loss, anxiety and sleeping problems as a result of the stress and anxiety of the break-up of her marriage," the statement continued.
Word of a lawsuit comes just a day after Mills McCartney's attorneys blasted the story as pure conjecture and suspiciously arriving just a few weeks after she and the former Beatle initiated their highly publicized, yet amicable split.
"These are not new stories and were refuted by her lawyers four years ago when first raised," her legal team says in a statement. "The sources clearly are a variety of unreliable persons who have been paid. The timing of the article is clearly designed to cause maximum hurt to Heather, her husband and family at this sensitive time."
In its Sunday edition--coinciding with what would have been the McCartneys' four-year wedding anniversary--News of the World's featured a four-page spread in which several people are quoted identifying Mills McCartney as former call girl.
Two of the women are identified in the article as former prostitutes: Petrina Montrose says Mills participated in a threesome with her and a Saudi prince who paid Mills $10,000 for one night; Denise Hewitt says Mills engaged in a lesbian tryst with her. Another interviewee, Abdul Khoury, said to be a secretary for a billionaire arms dealer named Adnan Khashoggi, told the paper Mills was paid $12,000 by his boss.
"One of my duties was to look after Mr. Khashoggi's guests, which would include looking after vice girls who were invited to see him," Khoury is quoted. "One was Heather Mills, who had sex with him on a number of occasions in return for money."
McCartney, 63, announced last month that he and Mills McCartney, 38, were filing for divorce. In recent weeks, the couple's reps have been shooting down various tabloid stories, including reports that Mills McCartney was awarded full custody of the couple's two-year-old daughter, Beatrice.
As for the prostitution rumor-mongering, one of Mills McCartney's lawyers, Stephen Taylor, told Britain's Guardian that stories of her being an escort surfaced four years ago and were unfounded.
"We threatened legal action and that stopped it," he said.
The Guardian also quoted an unnamed former executive at News International, which owns both the Sun tabloid and News of the World, suggesting the McCartneys' divorce has made Mills McCartney an unsympathetic figure in the eyes of the public and an easy target for the tabs.
Last week, the Sun printed salacious photos of her in sexually explicit poses with a man--a far cry from her current image as a charity do-gooder who campaigns for animal rights and the banning land mines.
The photos were from a 1988 photo shoot for a German publication. Mills McCartney denied the images were pornographic, insisting they were for an instructional sex guide that was tastefully done. But the man featured in the book with her disputed those assertions in subsequent tabloid interviews.
In recent weeks she's also been called labeled a "publicity seeker," "gold digger" and a bad influence on Sir Paul, purportedly forcing him to dye his hair, get plastic surgery and seek to reverse the Lennon-McCartney songwriting credits on the Beatle classic "Yesterday."
The sniping reached such a crescendo that both the McCartney set up a "Fact and Fiction" section on her Website, heathermillsmccartney.com, in which they jointly dispute several of the allegations.
Her lawyers indicated that Mills McCartney will hold off filing her defamation suit against News of the World until after she and Paul iron out the details of their divorce settlement.
The McCartneys, who have blamed the challenges of living in the spotlight as the reason for their split, are in the middle of hashing out custody of their daughter along with figuring out how much of his estate she'll end up keeping.
Because they aren't believed to have had a prenuptial agreement, Mills McCartney may be entitled to as much as one-quarter of Paul McCartney's estimated $1.5 billion fortune.