When Naomi Campbell gets cross, fireworks happen. And when it involves lawyers, they can be truly spectacular.
The supermodel has swapped catwalk for courtroom on a string of occasions that now occupy a special chapter in the annals of celebrity culture.
Two of the most high-profile involved her assaulting members of staff with mobile telephones. A third followed an ‘air rage’ incident at Heathrow that ended with her kicking and spitting at police officers.
Perhaps the most bizarre saw Campbell rock up at The Hague to give evidence in the war crimes trial of an old acquaintance: Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord accused of gifting her a collection of blood diamonds.
Other faintly surreal skirmishes jollify her CV. But few legal battles, in the 54-year-old fashion icon’s long and colourful career, promise to be quite so explosive as the one she’s about to join against the stern quangocrats of His Majesty’s Charity Commission.
I can reveal that Campbell is going into bat against the powerful organisation, which regulates the charities sector in England and Wales, after it published a highly critical inquiry into her glamorous fundraising organisation, Fashion For Relief.
The Commission recently announced that it had uncovered multiple instances of quite shocking misconduct and financial mismanagement by the non-profit, which staged a series of star-studded catwalk shows between 2016 and 2020.
A three-year probe established that a mere 8 per cent of the almost £4.8million raised at the events, attended by everyone from Beyonce and Kate Moss to Pierce Brosnan and Paris Hilton, ended up in the hands of good causes.
Naomi Campbell, 54, has swapped catwalk for courtroom on a string of occasions that now occupy a special chapter in the annals of celebrity culture, GUY ADAMS writes
The rest had largely been frittered away. Tens of thousands of pounds were splurged on extravagances such as private jet flights and a luxury hotel stay in Cannes enjoyed by Campbell – who charged spa visits and packets of cigarettes to her bill.
Another £290,572 was improperly paid in ‘consultancy fees’ to Naomi’s then-friend Bianka Hellmich, a Polish lawyer and socialite, who was one of the organisation’s trustees. This arrangement broke strict rules dictating that trustees should never financially benefit from their role.
Fashion For Relief has now been dissolved, while significant punishments were meted out to the various people deemed responsible.
They include a ban on Campbell from acting as a charity trustee for five years. Hellmich has been struck off for nine. A third trustee, a socialite named Veronica Chou, was blacklisted for four years.
The Commission’s findings, and these draconian sanctions, were announced in September. Not long afterwards, Campbell issued a statement saying that, while she regretted the affair, there was one mitigating factor – she was ‘not involved in the day-to-day running’ of Fashion For Relief.
Instead, she claimed to have ‘entrusted the legal and operational management to others’, adding: ‘I have instructed new advisers to undertake a detailed investigation of what transpired.’
That was a few weeks back. Campbell’s ‘detailed investigation’ remains ongoing, but has already made some startling discoveries. It’s being carried out by a London law firm named Joseph Hage Aaronson, who are poring over a tranche of documents and emails related to the scandal. Having read their initial findings, the supermodel has decided to launch a legal challenge to the Charity Commission’s sanctions against her.
This will, I can disclose, be no ordinary case. Campell’s litigation revolves around a quite extraordinary claim: that both she, and her now-defunct charity, have fallen victim to an elaborate fraud.
Details of the whole thing are laid out in an explosive, 12-page witness statement that was apparently filed on November 6 at the General Regulatory Chamber – a branch of the UK court system that settles disputes involving government regulators.
The document was signed by Campbell and outlines three reasons she intends to appeal against the outcome of the Commission’s inquiry. They are as follows.
Firstly: the catwalk star believes she’s been the victim of an audacious identity theft. She alleges that an unknown fraudster set up a fake email account in her name and then used it to impersonate her throughout the three years that the Charity Commission’s Inquiry ran, sharing false information with regulators in the process;
Secondly: Campbell claims that her signature was forged on a large number of legal documents and statements that were submitted to the inquiry, giving them a false impression of her involvement in the running of Fashion For Relief;
Thirdly: she insists that a one-page submission to the inquiry she authorised was then doctored, without her permission. When it was eventually submitted to the authorities deciding her fate, the whole thing instead ran to 20 pages. In other words, her witness statement suggests, unlawful evidence tampering took place.
Such claims – which involve forgery and fraud – are very serious indeed. And while it should be stressed that (for reasons we shall explore later) details are disputed by others involved in the case, Campbell is determined to seek what she sees as justice.
In fact, according to friends, she is hopping mad.
‘Naomi has initiated a thorough investigation into potential criminal activity, including identity theft, forgery and misappropriation of charitable funds,’ says a source close to the celebrity. ‘This investigation has uncovered evidence of Naomi being impersonated, forged signatures, fraudulent email correspondence and serious financial irregularities that may warrant police investigation.
‘Naomi is understandably horrified by what has been uncovered so far and she and her legal team are determined to get to the bottom of what happened – not least so she can carry on supporting charities in the way she has for more than 30 years.’
There appears to be no suggestion as to the identity of the person responsible for the fraud.
To properly understand the whole thing, we must venture back to the mid-2000s – when Campbell began organising fundraising couture shows under the Fashion For Relief brand, citing the inspiration of her ‘honourable mentor’ Nelson Mandela.
The big idea was to ‘unite the fashion industry as a force for good’. An early event raised money for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Over ensuing years, there were other fundraisers in New York, Mumbai and Moscow, with fellow stars such as Bella Hadid and Jane Fonda joining her on the catwalk, while everyone from Justin Bieber to Sarah, Duchess of York, attended.
Initially the non-profit was administered from the US. But in early 2015 it was registered as a UK charity.
Central to this change, according to Campbell, was the aforementioned Bianka Hellmich, a lawyer she’d originally been introduced to during her recent separation from ex-boyfriend Vladislav Doronin, a wealthy Russian-born entrepreneur.
Hellmich, who had helped the supermodel recover jewellery, clothing and personal effects during the split, soon became a trusted confidante and legal adviser.
Campbell says the decision to register Fashion For Relief as a charity was taken on her advice. She claims the lawyer would then manage its operations, while Campbell would be a sort of ‘figurehead’, using her celebrity profile to drum up interest in events.
Sarah, Duchess of York, has previously attended Fashion For Relief events. She is here pictured with the model at Somerset House in London
Over the ensuing years, several outwardly successful fundraisers were staged. But, behind the scenes, trouble was brewing. The problem, it turned out, involved money. Specifically: lots of cash raised at the events was not actually finding its way to the charities they were supposed to benefit.
By 2019, Save The Children was threatening to take Fashion For Relief to Court, claiming it was owed hundreds of thousands of pounds from star-studded events organised in Cannes. The same year, the Mayor’s Fund For London realised that huge sums raised via a red-carpet bash at the British Museum were also missing in action.
Eventually, a ‘serious incident report’ was made to the Commission, which launched a formal inquiry in 2021.
Campbell was made aware of this development, but she claims to have then been given almost no information about it for the next three years. Instead, she insists she was deliberately kept in the dark.
As a result, her lawyers will argue, she had no chance to make proper ‘representations’ to the people deciding on her charity’s fate. Campbell believes this fatally undermines the Inquiry’s findings. What’s more, they will add, Campbell believes the whole thing was part of an orchestrated plot, by persons unknown.
The ‘fake’ email account purportedly set up in her name is central to this alleged deception. It still remains a mystery as to who was responsible for setting up the account. Sources close to Hellmich maintain she had nothing to do with the ‘fake’ email account. Created on Gmail, it used an address that was just one letter different from the supermodel’s real one. Campbell is set to claim that, between 2021 and 2024, the unnamed person operating it received at least eight crucial documents that ought to have been shared with her.
The person using the account also sent various messages back. In other words, she claims whoever was operating the account was committing fraud designed to hijack the probe into Fashion For Relief.
To prove their case, I gather that her lawyers are now applying for an order that will require Google, which runs Gmail, to divulge information about the back-up email addresses, plus verification phone numbers used to create the disputed account. They hope this will help identify who really operated it.
A friend of Hellmich tells me she disputes Campbell’s version of events, saying that the address did indeed belong to the supermodel and was one of several that she had used over the years.
‘She is a woman with many email addresses and many phone numbers,’ a friend of Hellmich tells me.
Then come the claims about forged documents, and they are murkier still.
Campbell is expected to testify to the tribunal that several crucial documents submitted to the inquiry bearing her signature were in fact created by an imposter.
They include a ‘Members Written Resolution’ about the dissolution of Fashion For Relief dated July 6, 2023. The supermodel now insists her signature on the document is fake, saying she wasn’t in the UK on the date it was signed.
Also contested is a memorandum carrying Campbell’s signature, dated January 27, 2021. This represented a key piece of evidence to the Commission’s inquiry, stating that Campbell was fully aware of the highly controversial financial arrangement (mentioned earlier) under which the charity paid Hellmich £150,000 a year.
Again, the supermodel believes her signature on this document was forged. On the day it was purportedly signed, she claims to have been in Paris at a Fendi couture show.
A final bone of contention involves a 20-page ‘statutory declaration’ that was allegedly signed by Campbell and submitted to the inquiry on January 19, 2022. It contains detailed evidence about many of the contested issues the Commission was probing.
The supermodel is expected to insist that the document was just one page long when she signed it (witnessed by a Fashion For Relief employee named Desiree Ejoh). Campbell is also expected to tell the tribunal that the remaining pages, containing all sorts of information that she now insists is inaccurate, were added at a later date.
In support of this argument, Campbell intends to share a WhatsApp message she was sent around this time by Hellmich, asking her to sign a ‘one-pager’.
Again, Hellmich seems to remembers things quite differently.
A source close to Hellmich insists the message about a ‘one-pager’ concerned a completely different document that Campbell also had to sign around this time and says it’s inconceivable that any of the paperwork submitted to the inquiry in her name carried a forged signature.
The source added that dozens of emails and messages exchanged between the trustees and their representatives during the inquiry prove that ‘her submissions had been discussed with her.
‘You have no idea how much information we had to prepare together during the inquiry. At one point, we spent two weeks in a house in the south of France, with two law firms and a barrister preparing responses. There were also accountants involved.’
It is understood Ms Campbell’s team denies any such meeting took place, and say that she did not pay legal bills nor ever meet with lawyers or barristers in connection with the regulator’s inquiry.
We must, of course, take each women at their word, although it seems unlikely that both of their versions of events can be entirely true. That, in turn, raises the prospect of an extraordinary legal battle in which Campbell will be cross-examined under oath about the alleged fraud, while her former friend gives evidence that contradicts her.
The Charity Commissions is not, it must be said, relishing this prospect. ‘On October 23 the Commission was notified that Ms Naomi Campbell has filed an out-of-time appeal against the Commission’s Order disqualifying her from holding trusteeship and senior management functions within charities,’ says a spokesman. ‘The Commission responded to the application and is now awaiting further directions from the Tribunal.’
Meanwhile, Campbell is gearing up for a long fight, with friends comparing it to the high-profile case she pursued against Piers Morgan’s Daily Mirror in the early 2000s, after the title published images of her leaving a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous.
‘Just as she successfully fought to establish the right to privacy in the UK of those seeking treatment and counselling, Naomi is now taking action to protect the integrity of charitable organisations by exposing potential criminal activity that could affect charitable organisations of high-profile individuals,’ says a source.
‘Her priority is to ensure that any wrongdoing is fully investigated and that lessons are learned to prevent similar situations in the future. All avenues are being explored by Naomi and her legal team – and identity theft is, of course, a crime.’
To put things another way, this most combative of celebrity litigants is looking forward to having yet another big day in court.
