Saatchi ‘threatens’ suicide after split

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Saatchi and Lawson

The divorce saga of British celebrity television chef Nigella Lawson and contemporary art collector and ad guru Charles Saatchi seems to be dragging after the couple was granted a decree nisi almost a fortnight ago.

Seventy-year-old Saatchi, who had in July announced his decision to divorce his 53-year-old wife of 10 years in a newspaper interview, had threatened to kill himself after the decree nisi, forcing Nigella Lawson to get in touch with him, according to the Mail on Sunday. In UK, decree nisi is provisional and does not end the marriage.
It allows the petitioner to apply for decree absolute after a period of six weeks and one day to dissolve the marriage.
The compulsory delay of six weeks and one day has been kept to allow time for any objection to be put forward as to why the divorce should not proceed. The millionaire couple had opted for a quickie divorce and had made no financial demands on each other.
The couple’s 10-year marriage had unravelled quickly after Saatchi was cautioned in June over photographs published in a Sunday tabloid which showed the Iraq-born co-founder of the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi grasping her neck with his hands as they sat at a table outside a central London restaurant.
Saatchi married Lawson in 2003 and they used to live with her children, Bruno and Cosima, from her marriage with journalist John Diamond, who died of cancer. Saatchi, who was married thrice, only has one daughter from his second wife Kay Saatchi.
Saatchi had sent Nigella a series of messages after the decree nisi and in one of them he threatened to kill himself, the report claimed. She also received a panicked text message from her 18-year-old stepdaughter Phoebe, expressing concerns about her father’s behaviour, it added. Phoebe, according to the article, also accused her stepmother of abandoning her in a telephone statement issued to the newspaper and said she had “behaved in a very cold-hearted way.” The piece also claims that Phoebe had also made a number of criminal allegations earlier against the stepmother that could not be substantiated and were not published.