U.S. actress Mia Farrow said Monday that Naomi Campbell named former Liberian leader Charles Taylor as the man who sent a “huge diamond” to the supermodel’s room in 1997.
“She [Campbell] said that in the night she had been awakened. Some men were knocking at the door, and they had been sent by Charles Taylor, and they were giving her — they had given her — a huge diamond,” Farrow said Monday, at the Liberian ex-president’s war crimes trial in The Hague. “She [Campbell] said that she intended to give the diamond to Nelson Mandela’s children’s charities.”
Farrow gave evidence for more than three hours at the war crimes trial in The Hague Monday.
Farrow and Campbell’s former agent, Carole White, were called to testify at the tribunal about a charity dinner hosted by then-South African president Nelson Mandela.
After the September 1997 dinner, a number of men bought a parcel of diamonds to Campbell’s room at a guesthouse.
Farrow and White were summoned as witnesses in Taylor’s trial to challenge Campbell’s evidence that she did not know who sent her the late-night gift.
Wearing a dark pinstriped suit, Farrow said on the witness stand that Campbell talked of the gift at breakfast the next morning “before she even sat down.”
Prosecutors are trying to link the gift to Taylor, who they accuse of having taken a consignment of rough diamonds to South Africa “to sell … or exchange them for weapons” for Sierra Leone rebels.
Campbell told judges at Taylor’s trail last Thursday that the men gave her a pouch containing two or three “dirty-looking stones,” which South African police have since identified as rough diamonds, but she insisted she did not know who the gift came from, though she “assumed” it was Taylor.
“Naomi Campbell said they came from Charles Taylor,” testified Farrow, who remembered the supermodel as having been “quite excited” at the time, adding that Campbell referred to “one large diamond” and not more. “There could have been dozens. I don’t know how many diamonds there were. I didn’t see them,” Farrow said.
Asked why she did not come forward before being approached by the prosecution last year, Farrow said she did not know the incident would be “so consequential.”
“Yes, I regret that I didn’t put it together earlier, I suppose,” she said.
White also is expected to challenge Campbell’s version of events, having told prosecutors that Taylor and her former protege were “mildly flirtatious” throughout the dinner and that she heard him promise the model a gift of diamonds. “It was arranged that he [Taylor] would send some men back with the gift,” according to the notes of an interview prosecutors had with White in May.
White, who said she witnessed the delivery of about six small gems to the model, “thought that Ms. Campbell was disappointed because she thought she was going to get a big shiny diamond and these just looked like pebbles.”
Taylor, 62, is on trial for his alleged role in the 1991-2001 Sierra Leone civil war that claimed some 120,000 lives. He is accused of receiving so-called blood diamonds, which were illegally mined, in return for arming rebels who murdered, raped and maimed civilians in neighboring Sierra Leone, amputating their limbs and carving initials on their bodies.
“If indeed he is guilty of the crimes he is accused of, I am gratified that he is involved in (this) procedure,” Farrow told the court.
Jeremy Ratcliffe, a former director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, has since confirmed that Campbell gave him the rough diamonds, which he handed over to police last Thursday.
South African police said they may want to question Campbell, as well.