Alex had just returned from school and was watching The Simpsons in her bedroom when the phone rang. She distinctly recalls the first thing he said. “Hi, it’s David Walliams. You know, off the telly!” It was January 2004. Alex was 15 and studying for her GCSEs. Walliams was 32 and a rising star with the comedy sketch show Little Britain.
A few days earlier, Alex had been to a fan event where Walliams had signed autographs as his character Lou. Wearing a frizzy wig and a black leather jacket, he looked up at Alex as her mother took a photograph. As she approached Walliams, Alex remembers him saying: “You’re a very attractive lady.”
With ambitions of becoming a comedy writer, Alex says she gave him some printouts of scripts she had written. She included a cover letter with her contact details, but she did not expect him to get in touch.
When he did, she was so excited that immediately after the call she made a record of the conversation in youthful scrawl across four sides of A4 paper. “David Walliams phoned me!!” she wrote. “He said he thought my scripts are VERY FUNNY!” She noted how Walliams had been surprised when she told him she was still at school, asking her: “Right, so you’re, what, 15, 16?”
The notes describe how they talked about her exams, as well as the enticing possibility of him getting tickets for her to watch a live performance of Little Britain. At the end of the call, he told her to stay in touch. He gave her his email address after she reassured him she would not pass it on to anyone. “He said that he trusts me,” she wrote.
Over the next two years, Alex says, she and Walliams spoke on the phone on a couple of occasions and exchanged multiple emails. She was amazed that a rising star of the comedy world was suggesting he could help her. By the time she was 17, she says, they were having sex.
Alex is one of multiple women who allege Walliams abused his power and position as a celebrity to prey on them for sexual purposes when they were teenagers or young women, an investigation by the Guardian and ITV News has found. Some, like Alex, say their interactions with Walliams were traumatising and have requested that pseudonyms be used to protect their anonymity.
Most say they were over 18 when they had interactions with Walliams. But a woman whom the Guardian is calling Jade alleges that, like Alex, she met him when she was 15. She says that weeks after he first made contact, he invited her to his house and initiated sexual contact.
The allegations extended to his conduct in the workplace, with several sources describing inappropriate behaviour towards women at both the prime-time show Britain’s Got Talent (BGT) and his publisher HarperCollins.
In September, HarperCollins announced it would no longer publish Walliams’ extensive back catalogue, having dropped its bestselling author last year. Few reasons were given for the seismic move. The Guardian and ITV News can now reveal that the publisher severed ties with the star author after concerns were raised about his behaviour over several years, including an allegation that he had inappropriate sexual relationship with a junior female employee and pursued another.
Walliams denies any wrongdoing. Earlier this year his lawyers took a case to the high court to try to stop the allegations being published. The case was dismissed, so now the women’s stories can be revealed.
In a letter addressed to journalists working on this investigation, Walliams wrote: “Looking back, I realise that at times I behaved thoughtlessly towards other people I had casual sexual relationships with.
“I realise I did not always take people’s feelings properly into account. That is something I regret. And whilst a power imbalance is inevitable when one party is famous, abusing that power is something else entirely and it is something that I never did.”
He added: “I am not a sexual predator. I have not broken the law, but I am devastated that some of the women I met 10 to 20 years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me.”
Journey to success
A multimillionaire and OBE recipient, Walliams, 55, is one of the most famous comedians and writers in the UK. He built a career on his cheeky, flamboyant persona, which has permeated his children’s books, comedy work and the decade he spent as a much-loved judge on BGT.
Back in 2004, Walliams was at the beginning of his journey to success. His big break had been Little Britain, the provocative sketch show he created for BBC Radio 4 with his comedy partner, Matt Lucas. The show, which later moved to television, featured now infamous characters including the perma-tracksuited Vicky Pollard and the interdependent duo Lou and Andy. In December 2004, it won the top accolade at the British Comedy Awards.
At the awards ceremony, Walliams was captured on film dressed in a black dinner jacket, seemingly utterly relaxed and enjoying himself. He threw his head back in laughter as the compere, the TV chatshow host Jonathan Ross, opened the show with a joke pointedly referencing him: “The comedy awards is 15 years old – 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.”
Ross, responding through lawyers, said he did not write the joke himself.
Alex says she remembers watching the show from her bedroom. Walliams had been in touch several times since the first, unexpected call 11 months earlier. In February 2004, he had sent a postcard. On the front, Walliams had drawn a love heart across a photo of himself and Lucas dressed as Little Britain characters. On the back, he had written: “Thanks for your email. Stay in touch. Good luck in your exams and keep writing. David x.”
Alex remembers another couple of calls in those early months and there were several emails.
From: David
To: Alex
17 Feb 2004 10:07:24
Alex,
It’s great to hear from you again. I hate typing so let’s speak. I’ve lost your number, please can you E-mail it to me?
David x
They discussed the possibility of her doing work experience, which she says fell through. Walliams continued to encourage her writing, she says. “I was excited,” she remembers. “I can see that he was probably trying to make me feel special.”
Then Walliams’ interest appears to have cooled. Emails over a period of 19 months into 2005 give the impression of a schoolgirl desperate for support with her aspiring career. But Walliams rarely responded, and when he did, the replies were brief, even curt.
Alex says this left her feeling confused: “He was the one spending hours on the phone to me, like telling me and promising me that I could do all this stuff. And then he shut it down. Which was confusing for me because he had been so approachable and chatty before and I just didn’t want to let a connection go.”
In October 2005, things changed.
Alex sent an email about a gig she was planning to go to in London and Walliams replied, late at night.
From: David
To: Alex
7 October 2005 00:36:14
How are you? How old are you now? What are you up to? Are you still writing?
David x
Alex, who by then was nearly 17 and a half, responded that she was “old enough to go drinking haha” and sent four closeup photos of her face. In two, she is smiling and looks relaxed. The others show her lying on her bed, staring flirtatiously into the camera. Walliams was 34.
The emails continued.
From: David
To: Alex
9 October 2005 18:08:22
How much school have you got left? Is this your final year?
From: Alex
To: David
9 October 2005 18:37:58
well i dont go to school anymore i go to college… and yeah final year which is nice
From: David
To: Alex
9 October 18:40:17
Those pictures are really lovely by the way.
From: David
To: Alex
9 October 19:20:53
Will you send me some more?
Alex obliged, sending pictures of her with classic 00s poker-straight hair and dark eyeliner.
From: David
To: Alex
9 October 2005 19:41:20
You are gorgeous
Alex thanked Walliams and told him he was “not so bad yourself”.
A few minutes later, she told him she was playing guitar and watching TV before having a bath. Walliams wrote:
From: David
To: Alex
9 October 2005 19:51:38
You in the bath is a nice thought.
Alex says that later that evening they spoke on the phone and that Walliams suggested meeting up for sex. She says: “The tone had massively become sexual.”
The next day, Walliams was interviewed on BBC Radio 1. The presenter Scott Mills brought up the comedian’s reputation as a womaniser and asked whether his friends worried about introducing their girlfriends to him. “What, I’m some sort of rabid animal?” Walliams replied. “No, I’m a gentleman, but no, I just, I love the company of women, you see.”
Over the following months, Alex says, she received calls and text messages from Walliams and he asked for more photographs. “At first, I just sent photos of my face,” she says. It progressed to photos of her in her underwear, she adds, then Walliams started “telling me how to pose”. One photo, sent in November 2005, shows the 17-year-old reflected in a mirror, provocatively pulling down the waistband of her black bikini. She says she took the photographs in her bedroom; in some she was naked.
“I hadn’t done that before,” Alex recalls. “I could really feel the imbalance at that point already, but equally I was young and there was an element of excitement, because of the context of who he was to me.”
Lawyers acting for Walliams say he understood her to be 18 when she got back in touch and that he does not recall, and does not believe, that he asked Alex to send him sexual pictures of herself. He does not deny that they met a few months later.
In spring 2006, Alex and Walliams were having sex.
Alex recalls going to Walliams’ flat in Belsize Park, north-west London, on three separate occasions. The first, she says, when she was 17.
She says she remembers being struck by his height as he let her in. At nearly 1.9 metres (6ft 2in), he seemed to fill the doorway. Soon after walking through, she recalls, “he just, like, shoved his tongue in my mouth”. She says sex quickly followed: “We went on his bed and yeah, we had sex.”
She says he did not use a condom. “I remember clocking it and feeling a bit like that’s not good but I was too young. I really didn’t, I really don’t think I would have had the ability to get the words out at that point to say ‘don’t do that’.”
On the second occasion they met, she says they had oral sex. She says all three encounters were consensual, but they were brief. On two of the instances they had sex, she says, he asked her to wait in a cafe and then called her to tell her to come.
“I just hadn’t ever experienced anything like that before. It felt very … pushy.” As soon as the sex was over, she says, she would leave. “I felt like a prostitute, essentially.”
Famous and feted
By mid-2006, Little Britain was a national sensation with an often sold-out live tour. Catchphrases from the show, which had drawn 10 million viewers for its third season, were being repeated across the country. In his autobiography, Walliams wrote about this period: “I became so well known that when I walked down the street every second person recognised me. Women threw themselves at me. And sometimes I caught them. Then I became rich.”
In July that year, Walliams was feted in the press for his 21-mile (34km) charity swim across the Channel. At the Pride of Britain awards that November, he was voted Britain’s most inspiring public figure.
But Alex was starting to question what was happening. She says she tried to break things off by refusing to meet him. Walliams did not seem to get the message and she says he would periodically contact her to ask for sex. Once, when she was 18, she says he drove up to a pub she was drinking in and begged her to come to his house for sex. When she refused, she says he suggested she give him oral sex in his Aston Martin instead. Again, she says, she refused.
Alex spoke about her experiences across several interviews over more than a year. Looking back, she is clear about what she feels happened. “I think I was groomed, 100%. We met when I was 15 and he was promising to help me and was a figure of authority and someone that I looked to for guidance and help. He used that power and abused that power the minute he felt he just about could and it was just about safe to.”
Walliams’ lawyers say the suggestion he groomed Alex is false and has caused him significant distress. They add that Walliams wrote to Alex when she was 15 to encourage her writing and that Walliams always tried to engage with fans, whatever age or gender, as he appreciated that such encouragement would mean a lot to them.
The lawyers say it was Alex who got back in touch with him later, and that Walliams believed she was 18 at this point. They say she did not raise, and he did not believe, that she had any concerns about the sex at the time. They say he believes he used a condom, as he did with any new partner. They add that Walliams denies he was “pushy”.
They say it was Alex who contacted Walliams from outside the pub and that he does not believe he made any proposal that they have sex.
The lawyers add that Walliams was mortified to learn that their brief, consensual relationship had caused her sadness.
Alex still gets emotional when she recalls the experience. “I want to vomit. I hate him. My body reacts when I think about it. It’s like a trauma response,” she says.
“I never said no,” she says, “but I felt unable to say anything or have any control in that situation once I was with him.
“OK, it’s legal to have sex when you’re 17, 18 – 16, even,” she adds, “but the context of who you’re having sex with – if that person is double your age, if that person has known you from a young age and promised you things and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, in stature and size, like, everything, I really don’t think that’s OK.”
Pursuing for sex
Like Alex, Lilly Creightmore was an avid comedy fan. In July 2003, she went with her mum to a filming of Little Britain. She remembers Walliams staring intently at her from the side of the stage.
She noticed him again when she went to see a show inside an Agent Provocateur store in London. Creightmore had been a model, appearing on the reality TV show Model Behaviour when she was 16.
Then a card arrived out of the blue. Sent to her mother’s house, it pictured a young girl, arms crossed, with feathered angel wings either side of her. It was from Walliams, asking her for a date. He wrote: “When I saw you in Agent Provocateur I so wanted to speak to you but amongst all those frilly knickers I couldn’t find the words.” She had no idea how Walliams had found her name or address.
Curious, Creightmore says she called the number he had provided in the card. She was 18. Walliams was 32. She agreed to meet him for dinner.
She says she explicitly told him she was interested only in friendship, but over the years she knew him he would constantly pester her for sex. Looking back, she feels he tried to coerce her into sleeping with him.
She had been trying to make it as a photographer and says Walliams offered to help, buying her books and offering to introduce her to artists she admired. He took her to celebrity-packed parties, where she remembers feeling awkwardly young and out of place. At one event she remembers, the guests included Jonathan Ross, Ricky Gervais and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who says he does not remember the occasion.
After Creightmore fell out with her mother, Walliams invited her to stay with him for a couple of weeks at the end of 2003. She slept on the sofa but recalls that every night Walliams “would plead with me to share a bed with him and, you know, paw at me”, she says. “At some point, he put his head in my lap and made me stroke his head.” She adds: “I didn’t feel safe there and it wasn’t a good situation, so I had to go stay somewhere else.”
Ben (not his real name), a friend of Walliams’ at the time, recalls seeing Creightmore at a house party Walliams threw in the days she was there. It was Ben who had helped Walliams track down her contact details through the producers of the modelling show she appeared on when she was 16.
Against the backdrop of the lad culture of the early 00s, Ben had thought of Walliams as something of an “old-fashioned romantic” in his pursuit of women. He had a pattern, Ben says: “See a woman, think she’s attractive, find out how to contact her, send her flowers via that contact asking her out to dinner. Take her out for dinner, invite her back to yours. If she doesn’t come, be sad. Phone her every day until she agrees that the next time she will come.”
Now Ben is concerned that women may have felt uncomfortable with Walliams’ attention. He and Walliams fell out years ago, but he recalls that Walliams told him he (Walliams) was a sex addict. It is something the comedian wrote about in his autobiography when describing mental health issues in the early 00s. “I thought sex could take away my sadness,” Walliams wrote. “However, it just made it worse. And I sank lower and lower into despair. I had become a sex addict.”
Looking back, Creightmore now considers Walliams’ behaviour “highly inappropriate” and says she feels he abused his power. “He was pursuing me, you know, at a vulnerable age and place in my life, for sexual gratification,” she says.
“Yeah, I was a young adult, but I was a vulnerable young adult. [He was] making me feel special, plying me with gifts and then sort of disregarding me when he wasn’t getting what he wanted.”
Lawyers for Walliams say he denies grooming Creightmore or behaving inappropriately. They add that he did not target her because she was vulnerable or young, nor did he manipulate or coerce her into sleeping with him. They say the gifts and offers to help her came with no expectations. Walliams, they say, has a passion for photography and he wanted to help her with this career.
They say he had understood their friendship, which lasted for about five years, to be special and that he was devastated by the account she had given to this investigation, which came as a complete surprise.
MySpace messages
In summer 2007, Jade clicked on to MySpace. She was 15 and says her date of birth was on her profile page. There in her inbox was a direct message from Walliams.
Jade was not exactly a fan of Little Britain, but she knew who Walliams was. Rumours about his love life featured regularly in the tabloid newspapers that her dad would leave lying around the house. In 2007 alone, the comedian appeared in hundreds of articles, often accompanied by photographs of him with a woman he was rumoured to be dating.
Jade recalls how, after she had posted on a comment thread below a photograph of Walliams, the comedian had sent her the private message. “I ignored it,” she says. “Why would he want to talk to me?” But about 10 minutes later, she remembers, she received another message. This time, she says, she replied and Walliams asked for her phone number.
Although it was late when her phone rang, she recalls walking out into the garden so she would not be in earshot of her parents, who were sitting in the lounge. She remembers how she felt cold as she chatted to Walliams about school and what she wanted to do in the future.
Jade had had a tough few years and was struggling with her mental health. Her abiding memory of the call, she says, was how she felt special. “You get this celebrity approaching you – that’s a whole different level of attention,” she says. “Then you think: oh, I must be a bit special in a way.”
Walliams gave the 15-year-old his email address – the same address he had used to message Alex when she was 15. Jade says she and Walliams started to write to each other; sometimes she used her school email account.
Excited, Jade says, she showed her two best friends the MySpace messages and emails. One of those friends recalls the two of them in their school uniforms giddily talking about the messages. The other friend remembers being with her in her bedroom and Jade saying: “Can you believe someone like him is messaging me?”
In August 2007, a few days after Walliams turned 36, Jade, who was then 15 and five months, says he arranged to meet her at Fresh & Wild, a high-end grocery store and cafe in Soho, central London. Jade was excited. “I think when you see someone on telly, you sort of feel like you know them,” she says. “You sort of feel – well, it’ll be fine, won’t it?”
Walliams was already at a table when she arrived, she recalls, and had ordered them coffees. “He got up and gave me a hug and just sort of said hello.” Not a fan of coffee, Jade says she tried to gulp it down, as she was keen to impress him. “I was very, very shy, so I was quite quiet. So it was a lot of him sort of asking questions and things. Again, it was a bit about school, but it wasn’t long until he asked me if I’d ever had sex before.”
Embarrassed, she says, she told Walliams she had not had sex, but disclosed that she had been a victim of sexual abuse as a child. “He was all sort of: ‘Oh, I’m sorry about that,’” she says.
Jade says that after they finished their coffees, Walliams offered to walk her towards the tube station. They were walking down a sidestreet when Walliams edged her into a corner. “That’s when he kissed me.” She says the kiss was forceful and came as a surprise. She remembers he used his tongue. “I let him. I obviously kissed him back. But again, when I’m in that sort of [situation], I shut off completely.”
After the kiss, Jade says, Walliams invited her back to his house. She remembers him leading her to the car park where he had left his Aston Martin, a brand she recognised as one her father liked.
She recalls that they drove to his house in near silence. “I think I was still naive to what he wanted to happen,” she says. “I didn’t think he would want sex, especially that quickly.”
Walliams, who by then lived in a grand, five-storey townhouse in Belsize Park known as Supernova Heights, led her into its open-plan living space. Jade remembers sitting nervously on a large L-shaped sofa while Walliams leaned on a kitchen island countertop. “I just went silent,” she says, until “he asked me to come over and gave me a hug. And that’s when he kissed me again.”
She says he then lifted up her T-shirt, pulled down her bra and sucked her breast. He took her hand and started to put it down his trousers. She says she was aware that he had an erection and she pulled away. “I wasn’t ready for sex. I didn’t want to do that with him or with anyone. I was very uncomfortable with my own body as well. And I didn’t – I didn’t want to be touched in that way at all. I mean, I was only a 15-year-old.”
Walliams agreed to stop. She recalls him saying “that we should wait until I’m 16 and then said to keep in contact … I remember him saying that. That comment will always stick out in my mind. That’s a very strange thing to say.”
Lawyers for Walliams say he never engaged in grooming young women, and he denies that he had any sexual contact with Jade. They say the allegations of serious criminal conduct are false.
In the months after, Jade and Walliams continued to email each other, but she started to get the sense that Walliams was cooling off. “I think he was just trying to keep me at arm’s length a bit, but also keep me around in a way,” she says.
In February 2008, Jade spotted an article in the News of the World that featured a 20-year-old Russian model called Elizaveta Osova, who claimed Walliams had contacted her out of the blue on Facebook and had been “using me for sex”.
Jade says she felt confused and hurt to realise she was not the only one Walliams was talking to online. “So I sent [the article] to him and I was like: ‘What’s up with this?!’ And I never got a response.”
Later, Jade took friends on two occasions to see Supernova Heights, the house where she says Walliams had taken her. On one occasion, she says, she rang the buzzer, planning to confront him, but then left scared when a voice on the other end of the intercom replied.
Now that she is older, Jade considers what she says happened to her to have been sexual assault. “It’s grooming, she adds. “It’s completely wrong in every way.”
Celebrity parties
Supernova Heights came with rock’n’roll credentials. Previously owned by Noel Gallagher at the height of Oasis mania, it had become a landmark for fans, who scrawled their names and devotion to the band on the front garden wall. In the tabloid press in the early 00s, it was the symbolic centre of a group of partying celebrities nicknamed the Primrose Hill set.
Walliams bought the house in 2005 for a reported £3.25m. Interviewed for Boyd Hilton’s book Inside Little Britain, Walliams said he was worried that the house was so big that he might get lonely. He then quipped that he would rename it “Superduper Heights”. The new name never stuck, but the house kept its status as the north London hub for salacious tabloid gossip columns, now with Walliams at the heart.
In January 2008, five months after Jade says she stepped through the door, Supernova Heights was the scene of the kind of VIP soiree that tabloid columnists loved to write about: a gathering, over drinks and cupcakes, that included the comedian David Baddiel, the singer Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys, and Jonathan Ross. Ella had been invited with a friend. She had just turned 20; Walliams was 36.
A few weeks earlier, Ella, who was then a student and a part-time model, says she had received a voicemail from Walliams out of the blue. Unbeknownst to her, Walliams had contacted her modelling agent and asked for her number. Lawyers say Walliams understood it had been provided with her knowledge and permission. They went for dinner and then Walliams sent Ella a huge bouquet of roses to her student flat. Soon after, she says, he invited her to the party.
Ella says she was not interested in Walliams romantically, but she was “dazzled to a good degree by his fame” and was intrigued to see how a celebrity lived.
She was also confused about why Walliams was showing her so much attention. “Honestly, I thought he was probably gay,” Ella says. His camp persona caused endless speculation in the press about his sexuality. In a now highly questionable feature, the Sun regularly printed a “gay-o-meter” ranking how gay or straight Walliams was considered to be that week.
Even so, Ella and her friend both recall that at the party she intentionally acted immaturely, as a way of putting Walliams off. Ella says she felt many of Walliams’ guests seemed uncomfortable that two young women were there. “One of the guests’ wives did pull me aside at one point,” she says, “and was like, you know: ‘You’re very young, be careful.’”
As the night wore on, Ella claims that Walliams wanted more of her attention and invited her for a tour of the house. He led her upstairs. In his bedroom, she says, he invited her to look at the view out of the window. “And I remember feeling him come up really close behind me. And the hairs going up from the back of my neck,” she says. “I turned round and his hands were placed at either side of the window, and he’s a big man, he’s quite intimidating, and he leaned in for a kiss, and I just remember going ‘ugh’ and ducking underneath his arm, running away.”
She recalls sitting on a sofa later that evening, when Walliams, lying down, put his head in her lap and begged her to stay the night with him. She says she felt vulnerable in the house and calls his behaviour “emotionally manipulative and inappropriate”.
Now a mother in her 30s, Ella says she feels that the way Walliams contacted her and then pursued her at a young age was an abuse of power.
“I felt vulnerable and I felt intimidated,” she says. “My overwhelming emotion is relief. I feel really lucky. I felt like I dodged a bullet and I think it could have been a very different story.”
Walliams’ lawyers say he was hoping Ella might want to have a serious relationship with him.
They say as far as he can recall he had invited her and her friend spontaneously to attend the gathering at his house and that they were the only women present.
His lawyers say Walliams made what was intended to be a comically clumsy pass at her in the style of Mr Bean, and that he denies putting his head in her lap. They say he had no intention of intimidating her or making her feel uncomfortable.
A year after inviting Ella to his party, Walliams was photographed with a new girlfriend, Lauren Budd, an 18-year-old model. Walliams was 37. He had reportedly sent a letter to her modelling agency asking her out.
It was a period in which Walliams was regularly linked to models. A woman who spoke to the Guardian claims that the frequency with which Walliams was known to message models was something of a joke among her colleagues. Many said they found his approaches strange. One woman said Walliams was a lovely man and she had only good things to say about him.
While his relationships were still making the headlines, Walliams was forging a new chapter in his career. In October 2008, he published his first children’s book, The Boy in the Dress. It became an overnight success and more followed.
In 2010, he married another model, Lara Stone. They later had a child. Now a family man and a successful children’s author, the once notorious Lothario was on his way to becoming a national treasure.
Behind the scenes
Walliams’ status as a family-friendly entertainer was burnished in 2012 when he became a judge on Britain’s Got Talent. His camp patter and constant ribbing of the head judge, Simon Cowell, made him a fan favourite. “I hate to admit it, but he is really, really good on the show,” Cowell told Jonathan Ross on his chatshow in early 2012.
Walliams was named most popular talent show judge four times at the National Television Awards. His children’s books featured for weeks at the top of the book charts.
While his career went from strength to strength, his family life ran into trouble and in 2015 he and Stone divorced.
Behind the scenes at BGT, in work messaging groups, concerns were being raised about Walliams’ behaviour. Production staff discussed how the star judge was messaging young female runners.
One 19-year-old showed her colleagues the messages she was receiving from Walliams. “You always put a smile on my face x,” Walliams wrote. He would refer to the runner as “gorgeous” and at one point wrote “Hot” under a photo posted on Instagram of her in a group of three other women and one man. The young runner sent a screenshot of the comment to colleagues. “Erm, David’s comment on my insta of us, WTF,” she wrote.
Concerns about this behaviour pinged around a group WhatsApp chat for young staff at BGT. “He’s weird af [as fuck],” one person wrote. “250% would not be like this if the judge runner was a guy.” A second person wrote: “He actually got in trouble a few years ago for messaging a runner. So be careful.”
A male former BGT staff member says a 21-year-old female runner showed him messages in which Walliams was asking her out. “She came up to me and said: ‘What shall I do? He’s David Walliams.’”
Another BGT insider, Amy, was 24 when she was assigned to work as Walliams’ runner for a day in 2017. She alleges Walliams stared at her chest in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. Later, she recalls, she overheard him refer to her as “the one with the arse”.
She says she felt his behaviour was “predatory”.
“It made me feel small and almost disembodied,” she says. “Like I was not a person, but just a body.”
Lawyers for Walliams say he does not recall making this remark, but agree that had he done so, it would have been hurtful. They add that he denies staring at her chest or being predatory.
Responding to allegations about his contacting of young runners, they say that viewed in context the Instagram comment was clearly meant as a joke and that the term “gorgeous” was commonly used in the entertainment industry. They say Walliams has never been warned or “got into trouble” for messaging runners and deny that he behaved inappropriately and harassed young women in the workplace.
It was not only Walliams’ behaviour towards female staff members that raised concerns. Several sources questioned why Walliams was hosting young fans in his dressing room. Abby Tomlinson was 17 and a fan of BGT when she received a message out of the blue on her Twitter (now X) account in 2015. It was an invitation from Walliams, she says, to come to watch the show being filmed. She took a 13-year-old girl along with her. When they arrived, they were shown backstage to Walliams’ dressing room, where two other girls, 16 and 17, were waiting.
Tomlinson says they were left alone with Walliams without another adult present, a claim his lawyers say is misleading.
Abby is adamant and says: “It was absolutely the case, the door was shut and we were alone with him.” She says she now feels that was inappropriate. “He’s the sort of person who had obviously a lot of access to young women, teenage girls.”
Representatives for the production companies Fremantle and Syco, which produce BGT, each say that neither company had any knowledge of any of the allegations levelled at Walliams and they had never received any complaints about him. In a statement, ITV, which broadcasts the show, said it was sorry to hear of the allegations but that Fremantle confirmed that “no complaint has ever been made to them about David Walliams’ behaviour”.
‘Come to my hotel’
Standing under the bright television lights, Sarah smiled as she posed next to the BGT judges. Walliams had spotted her 18-year-old friend in the crowd, a young woman he had been in touch with for more than a year. He had called her, Sarah and another friend up to the BGT judges’ table for a photograph.
It was February 2016 and 18-year-old Sarah was a fan of the show. “I grew up watching Britain’s Got Talent with my mum, my sister and my dad,” she says.
After the filming ended, Sarah was waiting for a train home when she says she received a direct message from Walliams on Instagram. He was inviting her and her friends back the next day, she recalls. “He was like: ‘Come to my hotel and we’ll get some food and then I’ll take you over to Britain’s Got Talent.’”
The friends met Walliams in his hotel room before the show. He ordered burgers, chips and ice-cream. Later, he took them in a taxi to the theatre where the show was being filmed. Sarah recalls feeling glamorous and excited to suddenly be inside the world of showbiz. “I was just like: ‘This is so cool,’” she says. “You know, I was 18 and I was like: ‘What the hell am I doing here?!’”
Walliams continued to message Sarah and soon after the filming he invited her to stay at his house as she was intending to come to London, where she was considering going to study. Excited to spend more time with a celebrity and curious to see how someone so rich lived, she accepted the invitation. “I said to him I’ll only come on the condition my friend also comes.” She says Walliams agreed.
Later that month, Walliams sent Sarah an email. He was 44. “Are you looking forward to next weekend…?” he wrote, signing off with a kiss. Sarah recalls thinking it would be a “fun little weekend. That was literally all I thought it was gonna be. I was so innocent.”
Sarah says Walliams booked the two 18-year-olds a spa day at the Bulgari hotel in Knightsbridge, central London. When the women checked the spa’s website, they found the prices eye-wateringly expensive.
Sarah remembers being equally impressed when they arrived at Supernova Heights. Walliams gave them the tour: the huge kitchen island, the grand bathtub in the bedroom and the awards in his office.
He made them pasta for lunch, she recalls. When Sarah got out her phone to check if there was food in her teeth, she says Walliams told her: “No photos.”
That evening, they ordered pizza, picked out some DVDs and the young women drank wine while they all stretched out on Walliams’ L-shaped sofa. Both women got progressively more drunk, Sarah says.
When she got up to go to the bathroom, Sarah remembers that Walliams followed her. She says he then put his hands around her waist and moved in to kiss her. “I had a boyfriend at the time, so I was just like: ‘Absolutely not.’” When she looked at him, she remembers thinking: “You’re the same age as my mum.”
At another point in the evening, she recalls Walliams stroking her lower leg while they were sprawled on the sofa.
The two women kept drinking. Sarah became so drunk, she says, that she struggled to walk. She alleges that Walliams took her by the arm and helped her up the stairs. The women had previously laid out their things in his two spare bedrooms. But as they passed the rooms, it became clear to Sarah that Walliams was leading her up more stairs, towards the top floor, his bedroom.
Sarah’s friend intervened, she says, and led her down the stairs to the spare room. Sarah says she remembers how, despite having drunk so much, she became suddenly on her guard. “When you’re in an environment like that and if something happens, you kind of automatically remember what’s going on.”
She believes Walliams had been taking her upstairs because he wanted something sexual to happen, despite her being inebriated and despite her having told him she was not interested. If it were not for her friend pulling her away, she believes, she would have ended up in Walliams’ bedroom.
Instead, the women slept in the spare rooms. Aged 18 and in a city they did not know, Sarah says she could not think of another option. “I could have run out the door and I wouldn’t have known where I was. I wouldn’t have known who to call. I wouldn’t have known what to do.”
In the morning, the two women started to discuss what had happened, but it felt odd to talk about it while they were in Walliams’ house. Before they left, Sarah and her friend wrote a note thanking Walliams for letting them stay and went to the Bulgari hotel spa, where she recalls an employee telling them that other female friends of Walliams had been sent there in the past.
Sarah recalls thinking at the time: “What a weird old man, like, trying his luck.”
Looking back now, at 29, she feels differently. “I think now I’m older I can realise how uncomfortable I actually was.”
She says: “If you have celebrity status, why can you not get women closer to your age range? … Is it, like, for manipulation? What do we have in common with a 44-year-old man?”
Walliams’ lawyers say he “refutes the suggestion that he got [Sarah] drunk to take advantage of her”. Although he recalls they drank wine together, they say, he does not recall anyone being drunk. They add that he did not force himself on to Sarah and that there was no sexual contact with her. Both women were friendly the next day and did not raise any issue with Walliams, they say.
The lawyers add that he denies targeting teenage women and using his celebrity status to manipulate them to have sex with him.
Threatening letter
Eight months after the incident in the house, Sarah was walking through a supermarket when she got a call from her friend with a startling development.
The friend had remained in touch with Walliams and been to watch more BGT shows. While there, she had met two other young women whom she saw go backstage. Later, she had contacted them to tell them about what had happened in his house. And then she had received a threatening letter from Walliams’ lawyers.
The letter was written by Jenny Afia, a renowned lawyer specialising in reputation management for the law firm Schillings. Afia is best known now for representing the Duchess of Sussex. She also acted for Walliams. Afia wrote to the young woman, who was 19 at the time: “You are at a significant risk of committing a serious civil offence should you disclose, to the press or any other third party, private information or purported private information concerning our client.”
A spokesperson for Schillings said they had been instructed to write the letter as they had understood that the woman was going to “sell her story”, which Walliams believed was “an untruthful account”. Walliams’ lawyers add that he was concerned about the impact such a story could have on his family.
The legal letter demanded a written undertaking within 24 hours that the woman would not talk about her experience with Walliams. She had no representation and Sarah says she was shaken by the threat.
“If that was me, I’d have freaked out,” Sarah says. Looking back, she wonders if such action had a chilling effect on other women speaking out. “I think all this should have come out a long time ago.”
Under fire
In October 2017, a year after the Schillings letter, Walliams was presented with an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to charity and the arts. “I remind myself every day how lucky I am to be working with incredible people,” he told reporters. “I don’t take any of it for granted, especially not today.”
He continued to entertain the public on BGT and his children’s books dominated the market. Many were developed into TV and stage shows. He sold Supernova Heights and moved to a grander property.
He continued to message young women on social media. The Guardian has spoken to seven other women who say Walliams contacted them on social media platforms around this time. One was an 18-year-old college student at the time. Six were models who were between 19 and 22 when he made contact. None had a sexual encounter with him, but all the women feel the approach was odd, given Walliams was so famous.
In the course of the investigation, the Guardian and ITV News contacted more than 100 people. A few spoke positively of their interactions with Walliams, saying he was always professional and pleasant, but many expressed concerns about his behaviour towards women.
By 2020, Walliams’ contributions to culture were starting to be reassessed. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, his work with Little Britain was attracting criticism. The sketch show was removed from various streaming platforms over concerns about Walliams’ and Lucas’s use of blackface, something for which both men apologised.
More criticism came when a clip from Little Britain’s Australian tour in 2007 resurfaced. It captured Walliams, in character as the washed-up TV presenter Des Kaye, pulling a 16-year-old boy on to the stage and proceeding to kiss him on the lips and pull down his trousers and underwear. Walliams had been aware that the act, also performed at other shows, was controversial even at the time. In a book documenting the UK tour of the same show, Walliams was quoted as saying: “If we did the show in America, I’d probably get lawsuits from everyone I molested, but in Bournemouth I can somehow get away with it.”
His children’s books came under fire, too. In July 2020, the activist and food writer Jack Monroe posted a viral thread on Twitter criticising them as “sneering classist fatshaming nonsense”.
The day after that post came a series of tweets from Sarah’s friend who had met Walliams backstage at BGT and stayed in his house. In the posts, which went viral, she wrote: “Why did I ever think it was ‘normal’ for a 44yr male to invite four girls aged 16/17 into his dressing room without any adults – just his PA, who would bring refreshments once in a while. And the fact that everyone at that TV production company would see it and say NOTHING.”
Dropped by publisher
Inside the offices of his then publisher, HarperCollins, the tweets from Monroe and Sarah’s friend were a cause for concern among staff. Several people remember managers reassuring them that the flurry of criticism on Twitter would pass.
Signed to HarperCollins in 2008, Walliams was one of the publisher’s biggest success stories. For years, his titles were the bestselling books in the publisher’s catalogue. He has sold more than 26m copies in the UK alone, worth £156m.
Several employees suggested this success protected him for years.
In 2017, Walliams was introduced to an intern in her mid-20s. They met at a promotional event at a school. Walliams was 45. The young woman was later sent to Walliams’ house alone and they began what Walliams’ lawyers describe a “consensual sexual” relationship. At one point, Walliams sent her flowers to the office.
The young woman later said that although consensual, looking back she felt the relationship was an “abuse of power”, according to multiple sources.
Around the office, women started to warn each other not to go to Walliams’ house alone.
Katie, a former employee, says she went to HR after a young colleague in her mid-20s showed her messages that Walliams had been sending her, in which he was asking her out.
He had met that young woman at a promotional event at a school for World Book Day, then had obtained her email address and invited her to dinner. The woman ignored the email. Months later, he tried again.
“It’s just not appropriate for an author to be messaging a member of staff like that. She definitely wasn’t pleased about it,” Katie says.
Lawyers for Walliams say he messaged the young woman at a time when he was “heartbroken and lonely after his divorce and was hoping to meet someone to spend time with”.
More concerns bounced around the HarperCollins’ office when, in 2022, the Guardian reported on derogatory and sexually explicit remarks that Walliams had made about contestants on BGT. The story caused a storm. Walliams apologised and said they were private conversations. Nevertheless, it was the first time the media had reported on his inappropriate conduct and it led to him being dropped as a judge after 10 years on the show.
Around the same time, the children’s section of HarperCollins brought in a new head, Cally Poplak. After hearing concerns about Walliams’ alleged inappropriate behaviour from staff members, Poplak initiated an inquiry in late 2023. At least five female members of staff discussed their experiences and managers were told about the sexual relationship Walliams had with the junior employee.
The investigation wrapped up in 2024 with no consequences for Walliams. For one woman who spoke to the inquiry, it was the end of her career at the company. She was reportedly given a five-figure payout and signed a separation agreement with a strict non-disclosure clause.
For nearly two years after the investigation concluded, the company continued to publish Walliams’ books, only dropping him in December last year after a change of management. He said at the time that the issues raised in the inquiry were never brought to his attention.
Then, in September, it was announced that it would no longer publish any of his works.
Lawyers for Walliams say he denies the allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour in the workplace.
At the time, a HarperCollins spokesperson said the company had decided not to publish any new titles by Walliams and that they took “employee wellbeing extremely seriously”. When approached for this investigation, they said they could add nothing further.
When news broke that Walliams had been dropped by his publisher, many of the women he had had encounters with held their breath. Some thought this would be the catalyst for detailed allegations to come out. But there was no moment of reckoning.
For some of the women who have encountered Walliams over the years, the silence left them angry.
Jade, who said she had met up with Walliams when she was 15, is now a mother. She has banned her younger children from bringing his books home from school. “And I look at my daughter, who’s not far off [being 15] now, and to think of a 36-year-old man being any way like that with her makes me feel sick,” she says.
“It angers me that he is still on the TV, as famous as he is. He used that fame to get women.”
Several names have been changed at the request of sources.
Additional reporting by Sirin Kale.
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Support for anyone affected by sexual abuse issues is available in the UK from Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. Other international helplines are available for people affected by sexual abuse, childhood abuse, and people in crisis.
