The photographs of art dealer Charles Saatchi with his hands around the
neck of his wife, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, look as startling now
as when they were published last month. But what has happened since has
been, in its way, equally unsettling.
First, the cascade of commentary and counter-commentary from politicians, editorial writers, columnists, women's groups, unnamed supposed friends of the couple and random others with opinions on abuse, relationships and media intrusion. Then, the steady stream of more paparazzi photographs that, as always, make the subjects look like hunted prey: a wedding-ring-less Lawson, scurrying down the street, head ducked; Saatchi getting into a car, blank-faced.
The incident in question, captured in a series of pictures by a freelance photographer and published first in Sunday People, a tabloid, took place while the couple ate lunch at Scott's, a Mayfair restaurant. According to fellow diners quoted by the newspaper, the two began arguing, with Lawson becoming fearful and weepy while Saatchi became increasingly angry. On four occasions, the newspaper reported, he put his hands around her neck in what looked like a menacing way.The photographs provoked a loud public debate about domestic violence here, with discussions in the House of Lords and even a stray intervention from Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Like it or not, Lawson has become, for some, a symbol of the insidious nature of spousal abuse, an example, in their eyes, of the victim who does not realize she is a victim until outsiders frame her situation that way.
"Many women do not tell anyone, because they feel embarrassed or ashamed," said Polly Neate, the chief executive of Women's Aid, a charity representing victims of domestic violence. "Having this story in the news is likely to resonate with many women currently living with abuse, and it is important to remind everyone that there is help and support out there."
Just as doctors reported an increase in women seeking breast cancer screening after Angelina Jolie's mastectomy, so groups representing victims of spousal abuse here have experienced a surge of interest since the Saatchi-Lawson photographs were made public.
"If anything positive is to come of this incident, it is that there has been a massive public response which has generated a nationwide discussion about domestic violence," said Sandra Horley, the chief executive of Refuge, a domestic-violence charity. The day the photographs were published, the group said, four times as many people visited its website than usually do.
What happens next? A spokesman for Lawson, 53, said she would make no comment. Saatchi, 70, has offered various explanations, some of them verging on the unpleasant. Discussing why, in addition to mock-strangling his wife during the incident, he had also shoved her finger up her nose, he said: "Even domestic goddesses sometimes have a bit of snot in their nose. I was trying to fish it out." (He was alluding to Lawson's cookbook "How to be a Domestic Goddess," a title that has been applied to her ever since the book came out, in 2000.)
A van was recently photographed removing boxes filled with Lawson's possessions (including, The Daily Mail reported, cookbooks and kitchen equipment) from the couple's house in Chelsea. Lawson has told unnamed friends, according to newspapers, that she is considering leaving Britain earlier than planned for Los Angeles, where she is to film the next season of "The Taste," a competitive cooking program on ABC.
Lawson, a deeply private person who nonetheless has capitalized on an illusion of intimacy through television shows and cookbooks that focus on family rituals, is said to be mortified by what has happened, and horrified at having her marital problems exposed.
She has been slowly developing a profile in the United States, a profile raised considerably by her presence as a judge on "The Taste." (She also wrote a column for The New York Times.)
But she has long been a bona fide celebrity in Britain, where she is known simply by her first name.
Her fame has received an assist from her voluptuous good looks, verbal playfulness and flirtatious style, which she introduced in "Nigella Bites,"
her first television series, all but seducing the camera, licking batter from her finger and oozing double-entendre descriptions of her cooking techniques - "food porn," the critics called it, and not necessarily negatively.
Her fame is also linked to her family. Her father is Nigel Lawson, a chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher; her brother is the former Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson; and her first husband, John Diamond, was a journalist who wrote candidly and movingly about the cancer that eventually killed him.
And it is also because of Lawson's second marriage, 10 years ago, to Saatchi, a hugely successful advertising executive turned art collector. Saatchi is credited with making superstars of British artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, whose most notorious work, an unmade bed, he bought for 150,000 pounds in 2000.
He is known for being volatile, intense and brilliant, a man of uncompromising likes and dislikes who can be intoxicatingly charming but does not necessarily go out of his way to ingratiate himself with others. (He recently wrote a book titled "Be The Worst You Can Be: Life's Too Long for Patience And Virtue.")
His marriage to Lawson has been conducted in public, in its way, with each freely discussing the other in interviews. They have made a playful joke of their differences: she likes to go out; he doesn't, not even to his own parties. She prepares elaborate feasts; he prefers to sit in bed, eating cereal. They have not hidden the fact that they argue frequently. "I'll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness," Lawson once told an interviewer.
Significantly, the photographs of the mock-strangling incident were published a week after the events took place, and it was only then that Lawson moved out of the house.
So-called friends (again, quoted anonymously) said Lawson believes that her husband has anger management issues and needs to get help. It is possible that seeing evidence of Saatchi's behavior exposed so starkly in public has caused his wife to re-evaluate behavior that perhaps seemed normal to her before. It is also possible that she just feels embarrassed about how public the whole thing is.
"When you're called a domestic goddess, that's an awfully big title to live up to," a longtime friend of the couple said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The worst thing is the negative publicity - making her look like she's a victim, and also all these battered women who are now assuming she's going to be the patron saint of battered women. I can't imagine anything she would want less."
The friend added that she has known Saatchi for several decades and that while he is indeed difficult, he is not physically violent. "Everyone is talking about it as if it was so terrible," she said, referring to the incident at Scott's. "But if it was so dreadful, why didn't people go over and say something?"
Saatchi's public comments, though, have provided ample ammunition for detractors. When Lawson moved out of the house, he said that everything was fine and that he had simply "told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled."
Speaking to The Evening Standard, he dismissed the restaurant incident as "a playful tiff" stemming from "an intense argument about the children" (they have none together, but several from previous marriages). He said that he "held Nigella's neck repeatedly" while emphasizing his point, and that she was crying not because he was hurting her ("there was no grip") but because "we both hate arguing."
Summoned to a police station, Saatchi said he accepted a formal caution - a police warning given to someone who admits to a minor offense that is not likely to result in prosecution - because "it was better than having this hanging over all of us for months."
But the incident seems unlikely to go away soon, what with the daily tabloid updates. Writing in The Daily Mail, the columnist Carol Sarler recently urged the media and the public to stop, already.
"What began as graphic titillation," she said, "has started to smell altogether too much like a witch-hunt: a frenzy of speculation that is becoming as unseemly as it is unfair." Her editorial ran on the same day The Mail printed an article on the latest developments, with plenty of photos.
First, the cascade of commentary and counter-commentary from politicians, editorial writers, columnists, women's groups, unnamed supposed friends of the couple and random others with opinions on abuse, relationships and media intrusion. Then, the steady stream of more paparazzi photographs that, as always, make the subjects look like hunted prey: a wedding-ring-less Lawson, scurrying down the street, head ducked; Saatchi getting into a car, blank-faced.
The incident in question, captured in a series of pictures by a freelance photographer and published first in Sunday People, a tabloid, took place while the couple ate lunch at Scott's, a Mayfair restaurant. According to fellow diners quoted by the newspaper, the two began arguing, with Lawson becoming fearful and weepy while Saatchi became increasingly angry. On four occasions, the newspaper reported, he put his hands around her neck in what looked like a menacing way.The photographs provoked a loud public debate about domestic violence here, with discussions in the House of Lords and even a stray intervention from Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Like it or not, Lawson has become, for some, a symbol of the insidious nature of spousal abuse, an example, in their eyes, of the victim who does not realize she is a victim until outsiders frame her situation that way.
"Many women do not tell anyone, because they feel embarrassed or ashamed," said Polly Neate, the chief executive of Women's Aid, a charity representing victims of domestic violence. "Having this story in the news is likely to resonate with many women currently living with abuse, and it is important to remind everyone that there is help and support out there."
Just as doctors reported an increase in women seeking breast cancer screening after Angelina Jolie's mastectomy, so groups representing victims of spousal abuse here have experienced a surge of interest since the Saatchi-Lawson photographs were made public.
"If anything positive is to come of this incident, it is that there has been a massive public response which has generated a nationwide discussion about domestic violence," said Sandra Horley, the chief executive of Refuge, a domestic-violence charity. The day the photographs were published, the group said, four times as many people visited its website than usually do.
What happens next? A spokesman for Lawson, 53, said she would make no comment. Saatchi, 70, has offered various explanations, some of them verging on the unpleasant. Discussing why, in addition to mock-strangling his wife during the incident, he had also shoved her finger up her nose, he said: "Even domestic goddesses sometimes have a bit of snot in their nose. I was trying to fish it out." (He was alluding to Lawson's cookbook "How to be a Domestic Goddess," a title that has been applied to her ever since the book came out, in 2000.)
A van was recently photographed removing boxes filled with Lawson's possessions (including, The Daily Mail reported, cookbooks and kitchen equipment) from the couple's house in Chelsea. Lawson has told unnamed friends, according to newspapers, that she is considering leaving Britain earlier than planned for Los Angeles, where she is to film the next season of "The Taste," a competitive cooking program on ABC.
Lawson, a deeply private person who nonetheless has capitalized on an illusion of intimacy through television shows and cookbooks that focus on family rituals, is said to be mortified by what has happened, and horrified at having her marital problems exposed.
She has been slowly developing a profile in the United States, a profile raised considerably by her presence as a judge on "The Taste." (She also wrote a column for The New York Times.)
But she has long been a bona fide celebrity in Britain, where she is known simply by her first name.
Her fame has received an assist from her voluptuous good looks, verbal playfulness and flirtatious style, which she introduced in "Nigella Bites,"
her first television series, all but seducing the camera, licking batter from her finger and oozing double-entendre descriptions of her cooking techniques - "food porn," the critics called it, and not necessarily negatively.
Her fame is also linked to her family. Her father is Nigel Lawson, a chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher; her brother is the former Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson; and her first husband, John Diamond, was a journalist who wrote candidly and movingly about the cancer that eventually killed him.
And it is also because of Lawson's second marriage, 10 years ago, to Saatchi, a hugely successful advertising executive turned art collector. Saatchi is credited with making superstars of British artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, whose most notorious work, an unmade bed, he bought for 150,000 pounds in 2000.
He is known for being volatile, intense and brilliant, a man of uncompromising likes and dislikes who can be intoxicatingly charming but does not necessarily go out of his way to ingratiate himself with others. (He recently wrote a book titled "Be The Worst You Can Be: Life's Too Long for Patience And Virtue.")
His marriage to Lawson has been conducted in public, in its way, with each freely discussing the other in interviews. They have made a playful joke of their differences: she likes to go out; he doesn't, not even to his own parties. She prepares elaborate feasts; he prefers to sit in bed, eating cereal. They have not hidden the fact that they argue frequently. "I'll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness," Lawson once told an interviewer.
Significantly, the photographs of the mock-strangling incident were published a week after the events took place, and it was only then that Lawson moved out of the house.
So-called friends (again, quoted anonymously) said Lawson believes that her husband has anger management issues and needs to get help. It is possible that seeing evidence of Saatchi's behavior exposed so starkly in public has caused his wife to re-evaluate behavior that perhaps seemed normal to her before. It is also possible that she just feels embarrassed about how public the whole thing is.
"When you're called a domestic goddess, that's an awfully big title to live up to," a longtime friend of the couple said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The worst thing is the negative publicity - making her look like she's a victim, and also all these battered women who are now assuming she's going to be the patron saint of battered women. I can't imagine anything she would want less."
The friend added that she has known Saatchi for several decades and that while he is indeed difficult, he is not physically violent. "Everyone is talking about it as if it was so terrible," she said, referring to the incident at Scott's. "But if it was so dreadful, why didn't people go over and say something?"
Saatchi's public comments, though, have provided ample ammunition for detractors. When Lawson moved out of the house, he said that everything was fine and that he had simply "told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled."
Speaking to The Evening Standard, he dismissed the restaurant incident as "a playful tiff" stemming from "an intense argument about the children" (they have none together, but several from previous marriages). He said that he "held Nigella's neck repeatedly" while emphasizing his point, and that she was crying not because he was hurting her ("there was no grip") but because "we both hate arguing."
Summoned to a police station, Saatchi said he accepted a formal caution - a police warning given to someone who admits to a minor offense that is not likely to result in prosecution - because "it was better than having this hanging over all of us for months."
But the incident seems unlikely to go away soon, what with the daily tabloid updates. Writing in The Daily Mail, the columnist Carol Sarler recently urged the media and the public to stop, already.
"What began as graphic titillation," she said, "has started to smell altogether too much like a witch-hunt: a frenzy of speculation that is becoming as unseemly as it is unfair." Her editorial ran on the same day The Mail printed an article on the latest developments, with plenty of photos.
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