Nigella Lawson’s husband and soon-to-be ex sent a scathing and blame-filled letter to a British news outlet, announcing that he’d been left with no choice but to divorce his wife after she allowed herself to be photographed with his hand around her throat. (Women, can’t live with them, can’t choke them without people getting all sensitive about it.)
Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson have been married for a decade, but he says Nigella’s failure to explain away the shocking images is clearly a violation of the love and trust on which their union is based. (Paraphrasing.)
The letter to Nigella Lawson pulled no punches on placing the blame for the media firestorm on the TV chef and her inability or unwillingness to defend her spouse, and Saatchi somewhat passive-aggressively claims he has no choice but to leave her after such a clearly abusive incident. For him.
Saatchi fumed :
I am sorry to announce that Nigella Lawson and I are getting divorced. I feel that I have clearly been a disappointment to Nigella during the last year or so, and I am disappointed that she was advised to make no public comment to explain that I abhor violence of any kind against women, and have never abused her physically in any way.
I mean seriously, where does Nigella Lawson get off? Saatchi later said:
“I must stress again my actions were not violent. We are instinctively tactile people. Yes, my hands were around her neck and they had been touching her arm … Difficult as it may be to believe, for those who have seen the pictures, there was no pressure applied to her. In fact it was merely a gesture – one to which a still photograph gives a wholly different and incorrect implication.”
He also said:
The row photographed at Scott’s Restaurant could equally have been Nigella grasping my neck to hold my attention — as indeed she has done in the past.
Nigella Lawson was also snapped tearfully fleeing the restaurant after the altercation.
