David Walliams accused of using celebrity status to prey on young women and teenagers
A joint Guardian and ITV News investigation, based on 30 first-hand sources, reports that David Walliams, 55, one of Britain’s best-known television personalities and a top-selling children’s author, has been accused by multiple women of using his celebrity and power to prey on young women and teenagers for sex. Two women, now in their 30s, say they first met him at 15 and were groomed, with effects lasting nearly two decades. He is also accused of abusing his position on Britain’s Got Talent and at his former publisher HarperCollins, where he had a sexual relationship with a junior staff member. Walliams denies any wrongdoing.
The allegations can be published after the high court rejected his bid for a lifelong injunction. Last week the court heard he had tried to take his own life twice after the outlets put the claims to him in May. His barrister, Sara Mansoori KC, said that was fear of public shame rooted in childhood trauma, not guilt, and argued that if the stories ran he would try again, so human-rights law required the court to stop publication — which would also stop the women telling their stories. The week before the hearing he was sectioned and remained in a psychiatric hospital when Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed the case last Tuesday. On Monday his lawyers said he would not appeal.
Nicklin accepted a genuine, grave suicide risk and a grave probable effect on Walliams’s teenage son, but held there was no duty to protect him from self-harm: he is detained under the Mental Health Act, receiving inpatient care that significantly reduces the likelihood of suicide. An injunction, he ruled, would be an exceptionally serious interference with press freedom and with sources communicating experiences about alleged serious wrongdoing by a prominent person, in a matter of substantial public interest.
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