KATIE HIND: When you hear MY stories about David Walliams, you'll understand my relief that he's finally been unmasked

Hands trembling, and with a haunted look in her eyes, a young fan of David Walliams showed me a letter on her phone from a leading celebrity legal firm.

The year was 2020, and the young woman in question was then aged 22 when we met near her West Midlands home. The letter which so alarmed her had been sent almost four years previously when she was just 18 and referred to a teenage friendship she'd had with the comedian and author.

But the visceral fear she had felt at receiving such a strongly worded missive had clearly not dimmed with the passage of time.

Solicitors at the London-based firm told her that she was ‘at significant risk of committing a serious civil offence’ should she disclose ‘private or purported private’ information about Walliams, almost 30 years her senior, to the press.

At the time, Walliams was a household name and at the peak of his career. As a judge on the must-watch Saturday night television show Britain’s Got Talent his face was beamed into homes across the country every week, and he was simultaneously enjoying massive success as a children’s author with titles including Mr Stink and The Boy in the Dress.

Lawyers warned the young woman in the letter that she could ‘face serious consequences’ if she was to make her story of the friendship - which included a meeting at the star’s £3.5million north London mansion - public. It would, they said, constitute an infringement of his privacy.

The woman’s story, let us be clear, did not include any accusations of sexual misconduct but was rather an account of what many might deem an ill-advised friendship between an older man at the height of his professional powers and a star-struck young fan, who was just 17 when they first met.

Yet still Walliams, via his lawyers, saw fit to issue a teenager with the sort of official letter that would cause even the most confident of adults to feel uneasy.

And that is precisely why I am not in the least bit surprised by the revelation that Walliams, 55, is the celebrity who has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect his anonymity in recent weeks.

As we can now - finally - report, it was indeed Walliams who took his case to the High Court in an attempt to permanently block two news outlets, ITN and The Guardian newspaper, from publishing allegations made against him.

To say these allegations (all denied by Walliams) are serious is an understatement. The claims are that Walliams had ‘abused his status’ to engage in ‘inappropriate and exploitative sexual activities’ with girls and young women and could ‘include potential criminal conduct’.

The information the news organisations had gathered was the result of a ‘wide-ranging and rigorous’ investigation that started in early 2022. In it they spoke to more than 100 people with knowledge of the alleged misconduct, including more than 30 sources with first-hand accounts.

In an extraordinary move, Walliams’s legal team argued that publishing them would ‘highly likely lead him to commit suicide’.

During a two-day court hearing last month Walliams’s lawyers said he had twice attempted to take his own life in recent weeks.

Gavin Millar KC, for the media outlets, warned in written submissions that preventing public interest journalism about the accusations would present an ‘ongoing risk that other young women will be subject to similar kinds of inappropriate conduct’, and would drag judges ‘into assessing the causes of suicidal ideation, which are for professionals and not for a judge’.

And on November 3 Mr Justice Nicklin rejected the former Little Britain star’s request.

The judge ruled that while Walliams’s claim that he would commit suicide ‘must be taken seriously’, his statements ‘do not, however establish that suicide is inevitable. The risk is capable of being reduced through treatment.’

In relation to Walliams's claim that his 13-year-old son would be affected by publication, Mr Justice Nicklin said there was ‘no direct evidence from the son, or from anyone speaking directly on his behalf, which enabled the Court to assess the nature and weight of the son’s own rights and interests.’

And while it is only now that Walliams can finally be unmasked, after a week in which the reporting restrictions remained while he and his team were permitted to consider an appeal, the announcement is both a significant win for press freedom, and validation for the young woman who spoke so courageously to me back in 2020.

A decade on from receiving that forceful legal letter, we can now tell in full the story of a woman, now in her mid-20s, the details of which at best make for uncomfortable reading, and at worst, suggest a potential abuse of power.

Just 17 and studying media at college in February 2015, the young woman, who we are choosing not to name, was just another excitable fan when she applied (successfully) for tickets to one of BGT’s auditions in Birmingham via an online forum.

Once she arrived with her friends for the recording at the city’s Hippodrome theatre, she was chosen to be moved to the front of the audience - just a few feet behind Walliams and his fellow judges, Simon Cowell, Alesha Dixon and Amanda Holden.

The woman and Walliams began chatting and, within hours, the former Little Britain star had sought her out on Twitter and started following her, in a move that left the star-struck teen, whose mother was battling cancer, feeling ‘giddy’ and ‘almost fainting’.

But the best, as she then saw it, was yet to come.

Walliams later contacted her on Twitter to ask her to be a guest at the semi-final of the show, which would be recorded at ITV’s Fountain Studios in Wembley on May 26, 2015.

‘I was freaking out that he had messaged me, in my reply I asked if he was being serious, and he told me it was for real and to email his PA,’ she said.

Walliams said he would make the necessary arrangements for the trip.

Several weeks later she and a friend, aged 17, made their way to London from their home town 100 miles away, booking into a budget hotel so they could stay overnight.

After the show, the woman and her friend, were taken backstage to Walliams's dressing room by his PA. There they were given snacks and soft drinks.

The woman told me: ‘He kissed me on the cheek when he arrived to meet us. I was nervous.

‘His PA gave us cupcakes, it was so nice. I didn’t think anything about it, I was just so excited to be in a room with David Walliams.

‘He said he had watched my YouTube videos, which was a bit cringe. My videos are just a girl in her bedroom doing her make up. It’s not groundbreaking.’

That night, the woman confided to Walliams that she wanted to become a television producer, so he suggested she write a letter to his production company, King Bert, seeking work experience.

When she still hadn’t contacted the production company a week later, Walliams messaged her on social media to ask for her mobile phone number so he could chase her up to send it.

‘I was sat at my make up desk in my bedroom and he rang me,’ said the woman who was then 17. ‘I was just sat there and he was like “do this, do that” telling me what to say for the producer.’

They were in regular contact from then on, she said.

The following month, he invited her to the New Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, which was staging his best-selling children’s book Gangsta Granny.

On her 18th birthday, in the autumn of 2015, she recalls that Walliams surprised her with a phone call where he sang his own rendition of Happy Birthday.

Indeed, their friendship was so strong that the woman was introduced to Walliams’s mum Kathleen and sister Julie, she later wrote online.

Then, in December, Walliams asked for the woman’s address so he could send her a Christmas card. Within days she received a card featuring Walliams and his son Alf from his marriage to Dutch model Lara Stone, which had ended in a quickie divorce in September of that year.

The card was a cartoon, depicting a big polar bear and a smaller one, captioned ‘Alfred Bear and Papa Bear’.

The woman later shared an image of the card on social media, writing alongside it: ‘This is the first Christmas card he sent me.’

Inside the card was a picture of David kissing his son.

Shortly after Christmas, Walliams once again invited the woman to watch BGT auditions in Birmingham and to visit him before the recording at the city’s five-star Hotel du Vin where he was staying.

She took a male friend, and Walliams treated them to burgers and chips while he was getting his make-up done.

The woman said Walliams told jokes, and after a chocolate ice-cream dessert, they all made their way to the Hippodrome where the woman took selfies of them in the back of the taxi.

‘Throughout the show, runners were bringing us Haribo sweets and drinks, I remember the girls behind us asking why we were treated like that. He texted after the show, telling how he was struggling with his divorce.

‘I was comforting him. I was telling him that he has his son, he had support around him and everyone loves him. I was able to give him something back after he had been inviting me to all of these shows.’

In February 2016, the woman had a missed call from Walliams. She called him back and he suggested she and a friend spend the night at his London home, Supernova Heights, which he bought from Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher in 2005.

On February 21, the 18-year-old woman and a friend took a train to the capital, then a taxi from Euston station to Walliams's home. The star had made them pasta and after eating it they went sightseeing to Buckingham Palace.

The woman was even treated to a spa afternoon at the luxurious Bulgari hotel in Knightsbridge, where she had her eyebrows and nails done. Walliams also offered to pay for an £800 massage but she declined, feeling it was too much for him to spend.

At the time, she’d ‘never had a boyfriend before’, she recalled.

She later posted a picture of herself on a relaxation bed, writing alongside it: ‘And guess who paid for the spa day?’

Back at Walliams's home, the star ordered in pizza and all three settled down to watch Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining on his sofa.

That night, she says Walliams told her once again how ‘divorce is so s***’.

‘I told him to perhaps go and find a girlfriend but he said he couldn’t as everyone recognises him,’ she added. She also recalls how he was ‘touchy feely’ with her. According to the woman, he suggested he ‘kissed her friend’.

The two women, who had been drinking wine and were tipsy by the time they went to bed, stayed the night at the mansion.

The friendship fizzled out naturally during 2016 but the woman told me that after she posted about the friendship on social media she received a message from Walliams’s ex-wife Stone who wanted to check she was ‘okay.’

In his heyday, Walliams was British showbusiness royalty whose girlfriends included model Lisa Snowdon, Patsy Kensit and former Page 3 girl turned actress, Keeley Hazell. After catapulting to fame in the mid-noughties with comedy partner Matt Lucas in sketch show Little Britain, he joined BGT and starred in movie adaptations of his best-selling books including Gangsta Granny Strikes Again. His net worth was estimated at around £120million.

But in 2022 cracks began to appear when a leaked transcript of remarks he made during recording breaks on BGT in 2020 revealed that he had made disrespectful, derogatory and sexually inappropriate comments about contestants.

He left the show and later successfully sued production company Fremantle for misuse of his private information, breaching UK GDPR and Data Protection laws, causing psychiatric harm and loss of earnings.

After his exit I had several conversations with senior bosses at Fremantle and Cowell’s now defunct company Syco, in which they said that they attempted to investigate allegations of taking young women into his dressing room.

They said they didn’t find any wrongdoing on Walliams’s part despite the woman posting a photograph of herself and other young women, taken backstage at BGT during their semi-final visit to Walliams’s dressing room in 2016.

The woman, who by 2020 had come to view their friendship very differently, made a series of public social media posts.

‘Why did I ever think it was normal for a 44-year-old male to invite four girls aged 16/17 into this dressing room without any adults - just his PA, who would bring refreshments once in a while,’ she wrote online. ‘And the fact that everyone at that TV production company would see it and say NOTHING,’ she wrote.

In another public post, the woman shared a picture of Walliams standing in a backstage corridor of the ITV studios, and told how he would text her ‘quite a bit’.

‘So many people knew about girls getting invited into this particular judge’s dressing room,’ the woman wrote in another post, which appeared on social media the same year.

In December last year Walliams was dropped by his publisher HarperCollins over alleged inappropriate behaviour with young women. Last week, Alton Towers announced it had permanently closed its £18million David Walliams World, just five years after opening to huge fanfare.

For the young woman I spoke to - who confided in me she had undergone therapy as a result of what she had come to regard as an inappropriate friendship - her personal nightmare, she says, will take ‘many more years to get over’.