The Curious Case of Mr Walliams

Last Tuesday, with the school holidays over and nobody much watching, Alton Towers quietly put a notice on its website. “The World Of David Walliams will be permanently closed from Tuesday, November 3, 2026.” And with that, Gangsta Granny: The Ride, Raj’s Bouncy Bottom Burp, the Royal Carousel, Raj’s Shop and the Burger Kitchen all vanished into the Staffordshire mist. Merlin Entertainments, the park’s owners, said the decision followed “our regular review of rides and attractions” and reflected “a range of operational and guest experience factors”. Nobody believed it then. A week later, nobody needs to.

Then, this Tuesday, ITV News and the Guardian published the results of an investigation they say took more than three years, and named David Walliams as the famous man who had spent the autumn in the High Court trying to stop them. Until then, he had been known only as an anonymous celebrity seeking an injunction, and a great many people on social media had been cheerfully guessing at his identity, mostly with no evidence at all. Some of them, it turns out, guessed right. That does not make what they were doing any less disgraceful. A man who flips a coin and calls heads has not demonstrated an understanding of probability.

Until this week, Walliams’s troubles amounted to an unpublished HarperCollins investigation into alleged inappropriate behaviour towards young female staff, a cancelled book contract, a pulped back catalogue and a theme park in mourning. None of the allegations reported until then concerned children. That is no longer the case, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What is alleged now is far more serious. It remains, however, exactly what it was then: allegation. And the way we have arrived here says as much about this country as it does about him.

So let us set out, carefully, what is being said, because the details matter, and because the headlines will not bother with them.

The investigation reports allegations from six women, dating back to 2003. Four are given pseudonyms; two, Lilly Creightmore and Abby Tomlinson, have chosen to put their names to their accounts. The most serious comes from a woman called “Jade”, who says Walliams contacted her on MySpace in 2007, when she was 15, met her in Soho and took her to his home, where she says he kissed her, touched her chest and tried to put her hand down his trousers. She says she refused, and that he told her to wait until she was 16. Walliams denies any sexual contact with her. If her account were true, it would describe a criminal offence. The Metropolitan Police says it has not received “any related reports of sexual assault or any other offences”, although it has contacted ITN and the Guardian to make sure the women know how to report. So nothing has been tested by anyone with the power to test it.

A second woman, “Alex”, says she met Walliams at a Little Britain book signing in 2004, when she was 15 and he was 32, and that he groomed her over the following years with phone calls, emails and gifts. She says he asked her for sexual photographs in 2005, and that they had consensual sex on three occasions when she was 17 and 18. Walliams denies grooming her, says he does not recall the request for photographs, and says he is “mortified to learn” that their “brief, consensual relationship has caused her sadness”. The age of consent in this country is 16. Whether a relationship between a man in his mid-thirties and a teenager he met when she was 15 is merely distasteful, or something worse, is precisely the kind of question that should be answered by evidence, not by a newspaper’s choice of verbs.

The others are of a different order. Lilly Creightmore says that in 2003, when she was 18 and between homes, Walliams let her stay with him and repeatedly asked her to share his bed, and that he “crossed the line physically” at times, although they never had sex; he says he is “devastated” by her account. “Ella” says that in 2007, when she was 19, he tried to kiss her at a party at his home, then lay his head in her lap and begged her to stay; he calls it a “clumsy pass” and denies the lap. “Sarah” says that in 2016, when she was 18, he invited her and a friend to stay at his London home and tried to kiss her; he denies making her drunk.

And then there is Abby Tomlinson, who turns out to be rather more than a former fan. She is the Prime Minister’s deputy director of digital communications, a senior aide to Andy Burnham in Downing Street. Readers with long memories may recall her as the teenager behind “Milifandom”, the online fan club for Ed Miliband in 2015. That same year, she says, Walliams sent her an unsolicited message on Twitter inviting her to watch Britain’s Got Talent. She was 17; he was 43. She took a 13-year-old friend, and says they were shown to his dressing room, where two other girls, aged 16 and 17, were already waiting, and that at one point she and the 13-year-old were left alone with him. “It was absolutely the case, the door was shut and we were alone with him,” she says. He had, she says, “a lot of access to young women, teenage girls”. In 2020 she posted on social media that he had invited her to meet him at 17, and later liked her Instagram posts and messaged her when she was 18 and 19. She does not allege that anything sexual happened in the dressing room. His lawyers say he was never alone with them, that the door “remained open at all times”, and now describe her account as misleading; a photograph shows her sitting at the judges’ desk with him.

I make no criticism of Ms Tomlinson for speaking, and she has had the courage to do so under her own name. But it is worth noticing where she works, because by Tuesday afternoon Downing Street had pronounced the allegations “deeply troubling”, and a justice minister, Alex Davies-Jones, had told the Commons that the government was “looking at what more it can do” about the use of injunctions. On X she went further: “Enough! Proud of all those victims refusing to stay silent.” Victims. Not complainants, not accusers: victims, of a man who has not been charged with anything, declared so by the government’s own victims minister, a member of the Ministry of Justice, on the day the allegations were published. If you wanted a single word to show how completely the presumption of innocence has collapsed, she has supplied it.

Read the full article on Jay Beecher’s Substack.