I think there is a genuine UK "celebrity" Lolcow in CJ de Mooi.
He used to be on the Eggheads tv quiz show as one of the panel of professional quizzers that competitors had to try and beat. He wasn't actually a pro quizzer, but got the job based on his tantrum after being voted off The Weakest Link. Here he's in the middle of the panel.
His story basically goes (warning: unreliable narrator)
- hated his home life, parents were unsupportive and abusive
- ran away to London then Amsterdam (more on that later)
- became a model after a scout "spotted" him begging for money outside a nightclub
- changed his name from Joseph Connaugh to CJ de Mooi which means "CJ the beautiful"
He eventually quit Eggheads to "concentrate on acting":
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
As this article alludes to, he also loves fishing for attention. In his autobiography he claimed to have possibly killed a man who tried to mug him when he was homeless in Amsterdam, necessitating the Politie to open a new case while rolling their eyes. It also basically buried his career despite being a pull for attention. (This is on Wikipedia as the actual reason he was fired from Eggheads, not the "acting career".)
Also alluded to in that HuffPo article is when he claimed the UK version of Dancing With The Stars refused to let him dance with a same-sex partner (yes he's one of
those gays) so he wasn't able to be in the 2015 series. It turns out
he was never asked to participate. He's pulled the same shit at the English Chess Federation of all places, of which he was once the President. He kicked up a stink about not being allowed to wear a Stonewall t-shirt on stage to present an award, but he'd never actually asked anyone if he could or not. Drama over nothing is CJ all over.
And then there was 4 years of quiet while he concentrating on his "acting career in South Africa" until ....
Surprise! It's AIDS!
CJ claims he contracted AIDS as an 18 year old
rent boy after running away from those horrible parents, and he's mad at the other panelists on Eggheads for
not offering sympathy to his dubious claims.
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GoFundMe has since been set up to help him with legal fees after a younger man accused him of sexual assault. It's almost uncanny how he flogged his sympathy "dying of AIDS" story to the press just as this was on the verge of becoming public knowledge. What are the odds?
Oh and those sad and gaunt "homeless" pictures in the
HOMELESS AND DYING OF AIDS tabloid articles? They're from a charity stunt he did while still on Eggheads:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/eggheads-star-cj-de-mooi-10478427
He also likes to put companies on blast publicly via his Twitter account instead of settling it privately:
I am absolutely sure there's more dirt on this guy, he's a narcissistic pathological liar.