David Sullivan resigned as joint chair of West Ham on Saturday, hours before a joint BBC Panorama and Times investigation published allegations that he abused his power and preyed on women for sex. The 77-year-old billionaire said he wanted to focus on fighting what he called “factually incorrect and entirely false, decades-old allegations concerning my personal life”, describing the investigation as “fundamentally unfair”.
The allegations from seven women span decades, starting in the 1980s, and come from women who were in their late teens or early twenties and were young models seeking work at Sullivan’s Daily and Sunday Sport newspapers. They accuse him of sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour, including pressuring them for sex during business meetings, where he offered to boost their careers if they slept with him or gave him oral sex.
“David Sullivan resigned as West Ham joint chair after seven women accused him of sexually exploitative behaviour over decades.”
One woman, Florence (not her real name), said she felt forced to have sex with him even though she did not want to. Then aged 20, she said he told her during a business meeting at his home that she would be one of his newspapers’ “regular girls” if they had sex. She tried to make excuses, including that she was on her period, before he manoeuvred her into a bedroom and started having sex with her, she said. Lawyers for Sullivan described her account as implausible.
Another woman, named Mia in the programme, said she went to his house for a meeting and felt she had no choice but to have sex if she wanted to be in the paper. Two women said they went to his house with their mothers and both accused Sullivan of attempting to pressure them into sex. A teenage model called Beth found Sullivan lying in bed wearing a dressing gown when she arrived for a meeting; he asked her to parade topless for him.
Sacha Wall, a 24-year-old glamour model at the time, is the only alleged victim named in the investigation. She says she was expecting a business meeting when she went to an Essex address in 1998 but discovered it was Sullivan’s private home. “He said, go and get changed, so I went into the en suite in this bedroom, and I took off my dress and walked out of the en suite with my bra and knickers in my heels,” she recalled. “He tells me to take off my bra… I’ll get the job. So I took off my bra, but when he asked me to come and sit next to him I was like what is going on, that’s not part of the job interview. As I walked over, I put my bra back on, and I sat as far away as I could possibly get. He leaned over and said he could put me in the paper, but he needed me to be one of his special friends.”
The investigation also reveals that Sullivan has separately admitted paying for sex in the 1990s with a girl who, he says, he believed was 16 or 17 years old. Sullivan was in his 40s at the time. It only became illegal to pay for sex with a 16 or 17 year old in 2003.
Most of the women wanted to remain anonymous, in some cases because they fear Sullivan and are concerned about potential repercussions. Sullivan’s lawyers have denied all the claims. “He was taking advantage of young people,” one of the women said.