Gareth Thomas suffered serious intrusion and abuse at the hands of a British newspaper. Noone should be blackmailed into revealing private details of their health in a newspaper, while living in fear that those details could be published without their consent on any day.The willingness of a newspaper to blackmail Mr Thomas for this information suggests that, had Mr Thomas not called them out, any subsequent coverage would have been aggressive and contributed to stigmatisation of HIV.Gareth Thomas' story must be told, yet he is unlikely to find many newspapers prepared to engage and investigate. While some newspaper editors viciously pursue stories about the private health details of sportspersons, they rarely show the same interest in public interest investigations into serious press misconduct.