‘It wasn’t long until he asked me if I’d ever had sex before’: David Walliams accused of preying on young women for sex

Comedian and former Britain’s Got Talent judge alleged to have groomed fans he met when they were as young as 15 and harassed women in the workplace over a number of years. He denies the allegations

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.”

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.

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?

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.”

Alex sent an email about a gig she was planning to go to in London and Walliams replied, late at night.

How are you? How old are you now? What are you up to? Are you still writing?

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.

How much school have you got left? Is this your final year?

well i dont go to school anymore i go to college… and yeah final year which is nice

Those pictures are really lovely by the way.

Alex obliged, sending pictures of her with classic 00s poker-straight hair and dark eyeliner.

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:

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.”

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.”

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.

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?”