The accident resulted in the amputation of her left leg below the knee, but she continued to model using a prosthetic limb and later sold her story to the tabloid journal News of the World.

[5] He was very fond of animals (working for the RSPCA for a time), and Heather remembered her family always having a dog and a cat, as well as once having a pet goose and a white nanny goat that was allowed to roam the house owned by Mark's parents in Libanus, near Brecon.

[12] Although having received a letter from Heather offering £10,000 to stop a court case, Ambler complained that the story had caused her deep discomfort by bringing the incident to national attention, so she sued for breach of privacy, accepting an out-of-court settlement of £5,000 in compensation and £54,000 legal costs.

[5] Fiona said: "Our family were always short of money and our father demanded that we find food and clothes so we turned to shoplifting, learnt to hide from the bailiffs and became experts at domestic duties.

"[7] John disputed his daughters' allegations that he was violent towards them, later releasing home movies of family holidays in Wales, showing Mills playing happily.

[15] When Heather's father was jailed for 18 months after being convicted of fraud, she left home with her sister Fiona to live with their mother and her partner in Clapham, south London.

[11] In 1987, Mills went to live in Paris,[20] telling Karmal that a cosmetics company had given her a modelling contract, but instead she became the mistress of millionaire Lebanese businessman George Kazan for two years[21] and took part in a nude photo session for a stills-only German sex education manual called Die Freuden der Liebe (The Joys of Love).

She drove to deliver donations to Croatia, taking modelling assignments in Austria on the way to pay for the trip,[11] later saying that she "worked on the front line in a war zone in the former Yugoslavia for two years where there were mines everywhere that weren't marked.

[29] Mills suffered crushed ribs, a punctured lung, and the loss of her left leg 6 inches (15 cm) below the knee; a metal plate was later attached to her pelvis.

[34] Mills booked herself into the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida,[35] which put her on a raw food vegan diet,[16] using wheat grass and garlic poultices to heal her wound.

[41] With the help of ghostwriter Pamela Cockerill, Mills wrote a book about her experience, entitled Out on a Limb (1995), which was republished in the United States as A Single Step (2002).

[47] Terrill had once told Mills that he had been interviewed by the intelligence services when he was thinking of a career with the Foreign Office, but later said: "I soon realised that Heather had a somewhat elastic relationship with the truth, which she was able to stretch impressively sometimes.

[76] Mills appeared on other television programmes, such as BBC One's Question Time and ITV's GMTV, and persuaded McCartney to join her on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

[10] After dismissing Anthony Julius, a Mishcon de Reya lawyer, Mills stated she would represent herself in the upcoming divorce hearing,[79] with help from her sister Fiona, David Rosen, a solicitor-advocate, and Michael Shilub, an American attorney.

[20]Mr Justice Bennett said in his ruling that there was no evidence of Mills's "charitable giving" in her tax returns, ridiculed her claim to have been McCartney's business partner as "make-believe" and said she was a "volatile and explosive" personality who could be her "own worst enemy".

Mills frequently accused the press of misquoting her and of using material out of context to give a negative impression of her, telling the Evening Standard that the claims that she had married McCartney for his money were more hurtful than losing her leg.

British journalist Jasper Gerard, to whom Mills made the claims, also says she told him that she had cancelled a meeting with US president Bill Clinton in case her endorsement affected a US election outcome.

[107] The Sun, which regularly refers to Mills as "Mucca" – a play on McCartney's nickname "Macca" – responded by asking her to "tick the boxes" on a series of allegations the newspaper had made, stating: "It is not clear what exactly she plans to sue us about".

[118] In 2008, a survey commissioned by Marketing magazine showed Mills as one of the top-four most-hated celebrity women, along with Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona.

[121] In 2002, Mills accepted damages of £50,000 plus costs from the Sunday Mirror after a false report that the Charity Commission had investigated her about the money she raised for the Indian Earthquake Victims Appeal in 2001.

[122][123] The extent and nature of the British press coverage of Mills has been criticised, as in May 2003, when The Guardian columnist Matt Seaton wrote a piece declaring: "There is little that is edifying in the symbolic lynching of Heather.

"[24] Publicist Mark Borkowski wrote in The Independent on Sunday, on 23 March 2008: "Not since the cult of Myra Hindley have we encountered so much vitriol aimed at one woman.

[127] The Daily Mirror ran the headline "Macca marriage to Heather was mistake of the decade", following an interview that McCartney gave to Q magazine.

McCartney immediately moved to deny this statement, and then went on to publicly print the original transcript on his official website to prove that the article in the Daily Mirror was false.

[128] Celia Larkin, writing on 12 February 2012 in the Irish Sunday Independent, wrote: "There was something very satisfying about Heather Mills finally having her voice heard above the roar of the Red Tops.

She didn't lie down under the weight of McCartney's fame and wealth, she continued to plough her own furrow, campaigning for her charities, maintaining a strong individuality.

And if that wasn't enough, Carole Malone of the Sunday Mirror, one of the papers that was relentless in its attacks on Mills, accused her of staging an act on live television, in order to further her cause in the upcoming divorce hearing.

"[129] On 5 May 2011, The Guardian reported that Mills had met with officers from the London Metropolitan Police who showed her evidence, seized from private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, which could form the basis of a claim against the News of The World for breach of privacy over alleged phone-hacking.

This was not, in any sense at all, a convincing answer", adding "what it does, however, clearly prove is that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it".

[143][144] In 2008, an old video surfaced of Mills wearing a mink coat that she had owned in 1989, but explained to reporters that she had bought it years before becoming involved in animal rights organisations or vegetarianism.