In a 1989 libel case, Lady Dudley testified that she had an affair in the early 1950s with Stephen Ward, the osteopath and Artist who was one of the central figures in the 1963 Profumo affair. They became friends when he was commissioned to draw her portrait in 1953 — 10 years before the Profumo scandal. From the 1989 court case, Lady Dudley won "substantial" damages from the publishers of Honeytrap: the Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward by Anthony Summer and Stephen Dorril, in which the authors suggested that she had been one of the "popsies" whom Ward had procured for his influential friends. In 2002, the Countess of Dudley again accepted substantial libel damages from the publishers of Christine Keeler: The Truth At Last, Keeler's own account of the events surrounding her notorious affair with the former war minister John Profumo, in which she referred to Lady Dudley as having been "one of Stephen’s girls".