Photographer guilty of assault on Heather Mills

A PHOTOGRAPHER was last night found guilty of assaulting Heather Mills-McCartney in a subway as he tried to take her picture.

Jay Kaycappa, 32, grabbed the estranged wife of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney by her right shoulder in order to swing her round and take her photograph.

Brighton Magistrates Court heard during a three-day trial that the incident took place in a subway in the seaside resort on July 5 last year.

Father-of-three Kaycappa, of The Hurdles, Fareham, Hampshire, was also convicted of assaulting Ms Mills-McCartney’s friend Mark Payne the following evening.

The freelance photographer shook his head in the dock after magistrates convicted him of both assault charges.

Ms Mills-McCartney was not in court to hear the verdicts.

Chair of the bench Juliet Smith said Kaycappa’s evidence had been “confused and contradictory” while Ms Mills-McCartney had been a “credible’ prosecution witness.

Magistrates heard the assault took place as she cycled to Brighton from her seafront home on the exclusive Western Esplanade in Hove, East Sussex.

She was accompanied by her personal trainer Ben Amigoni, 23, and a gay American couple, Mark Payne and Michael Shilub.

The 39-year-old former model and anti-landmine campaigner told the court she ducked into the subway to avoid the paparazzi but was alarmed when she spotted a photographer at the subway’s exit.

She told Kaycappa’s defence lawyer Anya Lewis: “I panicked and thought I’ll go back the other way and that’s when I turned round and saw Mr Kaycappa.

“I felt concerned because I had one there and one there and I felt like a trapped animal so I turned into the wall to get on my phone.”

During the trial, prosecutor Dale Sullivan accused Kaycappa and the other photographer of hunting Ms Mills-McCartney “like a pack of animals”.