Ad mogul Charles Saatchi may appear in paparazzi photographs to have choked his wife of nine years, TV chef Nigella Lawson, but don’t let that fool you. Though he grasped her neck four times and pinched her nose, don’t let’s talk spouse abuse, he says, because that’s just his way of being emphatic.
As he explained it, after UK’s Sunday People put the photos as its headline, they were having “an intense debate about the children,” but that he had merely grasped his wife’s neck repeatedly to “emphasize a point.”
Wife choking apparently is a sort of punctuation, a way of making a point clearer, like italics or bold face, purely a rhetorical device. Saatchi went on to describe what happened in more detail:
“There was no grip, it was a playful tiff. The pictures are horrific but give a far more drastic and violent impression of what took place. Nigella’s tears were because we both hate arguing, not because she had been hurt.”
“We had made up by the time we were home. The paparazzi were congregated outside our house after the story broke yesterday morning, so I told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled.”
And her sobbing was not due to being physically assaulted – heavens who would ever assume such a thing – but because she didn’t like to argue!
“A man reportedly grasps a woman’s neck 4 times in public & no one intervenes, incl. photographers who took photos,” labored Labour MP Luciana Berger, as reported by the Gawker. Good point.
