According to Page Six, David Walliams, the 55-year-old Little Britain comedian and children's book author, was named Tuesday as the anonymous British celebrity who tried, and failed, to use a court injunction to keep his identity out of a joint Guardian and ITV News investigation into sexual misconduct.
The mechanism is the celebrity injunction, and it's worth spelling out because it is the only legal strategy ever invented whose entire job is to make the news worse later. Walliams was the "anonymous celebrity" for about a month while a three-year investigation dried out. His lawyers told a judge their client had made two suicide attempts and would try again if his name ran. The judge said no. He then had a week to appeal. The deadline passed, the name ran, and the paper that ran it is the same one the injunction was aimed at.
The statement, via The Hollywood Reporter, is a genre masterpiece. "Looking back, I realize that at times I behaved thoughtlessly towards other people I had casual sexual relationships with." Thoughtless. A 32-year-old telling a 15-year-old fan she is a "very attractive lady" is a thoughtfulness issue only if you own a thesaurus. Then the money line: "And whilst a power imbalance is inevitable when one party is famous, abusing that power is something else entirely and it is something I never did." That is a man naming the exact mechanism the investigation exists to document, on the record, in his own words, as the defense.
Meanwhile TMZ reports a second British male celebrity has now secured his own anonymity injunction, so the UK's anonymous scandal factory is fully staffed. HarperCollins quietly dropped his entire backlist last year. The court just finished the job.
YOUR TURN: Rank the apology verbs. Is "thoughtlessly" a step up from "regret," or just a more expensive one?
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