Little Britain star and kids author David Walliams accused of sexual misconduct

David Walliams, a British TV personality and bestselling children’s author, has been publicly accused of exploiting his celebrity status to prey on women and teenagers as young as 15 after a weeks-long court battle to keep the accusations private.

The allegations emerged after a judge decided November 3 that The Guardian newspaper and ITV News, a British broadcaster, could publish the claims against Walliams.

Walliams denies the allegations. In a letter sent to news outlets, he said he accepted that he had “behaved thoughtlessly towards other people I had casual sexual relationships with,” but he added: “I am not a sexual predator. I have not broken the law.”

The news organisations had been held back from publishing their joint investigation because of a temporary injunction, an English legal measure that a judge can impose to bar the identification of an individual.

The secrecy had driven a swirl of online speculation in recent weeks about the identity of the unnamed celebrity.

Walliams is a household name in the United Kingdom. He rose to fame in the 2000s as a star of Little Britain, a popular BBC sketch show that poked fun at British archetypes, and he later became best known for his children’s novels.

In recent years, he has been dogged by accusations over his professional conduct, including reports that he had made derogatory and sexually explicit remarks about contestants during the recording of an episode of the television show Britain’s Got Talent, for which he was a judge.

The investigation that the Guardian and ITV News published Tuesday (UK time), which the two organisations had worked on since April 2023, was based on accounts from 30 people who accused Walliams of abusing his power to sexually prey on women and targeting teenagers, some of whom met him when they were as young as 15.

One woman quoted in the investigation said Walliams kissed her, touched her breast and tried to get her to put her hands down his pants when she was 15, which is below the legal age of consent in Britain.

The woman said Walliams had agreed to stop after she pulled away, and that he told her “we should wait until I’m 16, and then said to keep in contact.” She told the Guardian that Walliams had first messaged her on her Myspace page, where her date of birth was clearly visible.

The Guardian and ITV News referred to the woman only as Jade, saying that she and several other women had spoken on the condition of anonymity.

Walliams’ lawyers told the media outlets that Walliams had denied having had any sexual contact with the woman.

Another woman, who was given the alias Alex, told ITV News that she met Walliams when she was 15 and had sex with him when she was 17. She accused him of grooming her after she expressed an interest in comedy writing.

Although the sex was consensual and she was above the age of consent, she said that because they had met when she was 15 and he was a “figure of authority,” she felt he had “used that power and abused that power.”

Walliams’ lawyers told the news outlets that he denied the accusations that he groomed her. None of the other cases quoted appeared to involve non-consensual sexual contact or sexual contact with anyone younger than 16.

Walliams acknowledged in his statement that some of his contact with women had involved “a power imbalance” because of his fame. But, he added, “abusing that power is something else entirely, and it is something that I never did.”

After the Guardian and ITV News contacted Walliams for comment in May, he twice attempted suicide, and his lawyers secured a temporary injunction to argue in court that the allegations against him should not be published because of the risk to his life.

British news outlets reported details of the two-day court hearing in October, in which Walliams was referred to using a court-ordered cipher, “PPT.”

A frenzy of speculation about the identity of the celebrity began online, leading to the strange situation in which his name was being openly discussed in internet forums and on social media, especially by Scottish users not bound by the strict anonymity order, while publishers based in England and Wales were banned from disclosing his identity.

Lawyers for the celebrity said in court that he had been hospitalised for months, and had been the subject of involuntary detention after his second suicide attempt. They argued that the publication of the investigation would threaten his right to life under the European Convention on Human Rights.

A lawyer for the Guardian and ITV News told the court that there was no legal precedent for preventing news outlets from publishing articles because someone might harm themselves.

On Noember. 3, the judge, Matthew Nicklin, refused the celebrity’s application for a permanent injunction, but ordered that he remain anonymous until he had decided whether to appeal the ruling. Walliams ultimately decided not to appeal.

In his ruling, the judge had described the investigation as focusing on the celebrity’s “alleged abuse of his power and status” to establish contact with young women, with whom he was accused of then engaging in, or attempting to engage in, “inappropriate sexual activity, including potential criminal activity.”

The judge acknowledged that the likely effects of publication “include a very substantial increase in the risk of suicide, severe psychiatric deterioration, loss of autonomy through compulsory detention and serious disruption to family relationships.”

He added, however, that the “journalism concerns matters of substantial public interest.”

Walliams’ children’s books have sold tens of millions of copies, with popular titles including Gangsta Granny (2013) and The Midnight Gang (2016).

In recent years, British newspapers have reported a string of controversies involving Walliams. In 2023, the Guardian reported details of a leaked transcript from Britain’s Got Talent, in which Walliams made derogatory remarks about participants.

At the time, Walliams apologised for the “disrespectful comments,” adding in a statement, “These were private conversations and — like most conversations with friends — were never intended to be shared.”

He also sued the production company behind Britain’s Got Talent over a breach of privacy; the parties reached a settlement, and Walliams left the show.

Last year, The Telegraph, another UK newspaper, reported that Walliams’ publisher, HarperCollins, had decided to stop publishing new books by him after a junior member of staff made unspecified harassment allegations against him.

Walliams’ agent told the newspaper at the time that the author denied he had “behaved inappropriately,” had been unaware of the publisher’s internal investigation and was taking legal advice.

This year, the trade journal The Bookseller and other British news outlets reported that HarperCollins was dropping Walliams’ backlist.

On November 3, Alton Towers, a British theme park, announced that it was closing an attraction themed around Walliams’ books. The decision followed “our regular review of rides and attractions across the resort,” a spokesperson for the park said in an emailed statement this month.

In a statement in Parliament on Tuesday, Alex Davies-Jones, Britain’s justice minister, said the government was “concerned” about the use of injunctions and is “looking at what more it can do to prevent abuse of process throughout the judicial system.”

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