Advertising titan Charles Saatchi informed his wife, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, through a newspaper yesterday that he was divorcing her — blaming her for not publicly defending him after he was photographed choking her at a restaurant.
The 70-year-old multimillionaire art collector also accused Lawson, 53, his wife of 10 years, of having similarly grasped his throat.
“I am sorry to announce that Nigella Lawson and I are getting divorced,” Saatchi said in a statement to Britain’s Mail.
“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.
“Difficult as it may be to believe, for those who have seen the pictures, there was not pressure applied to her,” Saatchi insisted of the June 19 incident in which he was seen grabbing the BBC celebrity’s neck at a posh London restaurant.
“In fact, it was merely a gesture — one to which a still photograph gives a wholly different and incorrect implication.’’
Saatchi added that Lawson wasn’t blameless.
“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,” he said.
Lawson, who has been silent on the scandal, was blindsided by the statement, sources said.
But the Brit chef and author has been seen around London without her wedding ring. And she moved out of their London home yesterday with her 17-year-old son, Bruno, from her marriage to journalist John Diamond, who died in 2001.
Writing in the London Evening Standard newspaper, Saatchi dismissed the incident as a “playful tiff.” British police, however, slapped Saatchi with a warning.
“This is heartbreaking for both of us as our love was very deep, but in the last year, we have become estranged and drifted apart,” he said in his statement to the Mail.