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Football super-agent Jonathan Barnett may face the prospect of multiple past controversies being aired in court, if his lawyers cannot get the case of a woman who claims he raped her and kept her as a ‘sex slave’ heard in London.
Barnett’s US legal firm Lavely and Singer, who were part of the legal team the former Prince Andrew assembled to fight the civil sexual assault lawsuit filed against him by Virginia Giuffre, has lodged a 23-page document with the Central District Court in California, arguing that the civil case being brought against him by an Australian woman must not be heard there, as her own lawyers wish.
The US court system’s liberal approach to the public disclosure of evidence has already put Barnett at the centre of extraordinary claims, all of which he denies.
The central allegations are that he raped the woman in a London hotel room in 2017 before subjecting her to a six-year campaign of sexual assault and torture, enabled by a financial bondage held over her and her two teenage children. The woman claims he kept her as a ‘sex slave’ and subjected her to degrading treatment – instructing her to buy sex toys and treating her like an animal.
The legal claim against Barnett, who was named by Forbes in 2019 as the world's top agent after negotiating £1.04billion in football deals and counted Gareth Bale among his Stellar agency clients, also alleges ‘institutional abuse at the highest level’.
Lawyers for Barnett, who has said he is ‘looking forward to being entirely vindicated and exonerated’, state that a civil hearing in California would ‘impose an unreasonably high burden’ on him as a ’75-year-old… lifelong resident of England who does not regularly travel to California’.
Jonathan Barnett, then owner of the Stellar Group, was named by Forbes in 2019 as the world's top agent after negotiating £1.04billion in football deals
Barnett represented many players including Gareth Bale and oversaw his £85million transfer from Tottenham to Real Madrid in 2013
But the most significant benefits of a London civil case would include the greater chance that a judge, rather than a full jury, will consider the evidence - and stricter rules governing which elements of the accuser’s extraordinary 60-page case document is heard.
That document is a remarkable tour through every Barnett controversy and alleged misdemeanour, citing everything from the tapping up of his client Ashley Cole by Chelsea, to the agent’s non-appearance before Horsham Magistrates in West Sussex, to answer a charge of refusing to cooperate with a police speeding offence inquiry, eight years ago.
Citing multiple British media articles including a Daily Mail report on his arrest at Heathrow Airport by Metropolitan Police officers investigating her claims, the accuser’s legal team attempt to demonstrate that Barnett has used the United States to somehow delay or avoid facing justice in the UK.
Her lawyers state that Met officers had to wait until Barnett’s return from the US to question him on these claims, in March. His failure to appear before magistrates on charges of failing to reveal who was driving a Stellar-owned Bentley Convertible at 90mph on the A23 is being cited because the agent was in the States on business when due in court.
‘Barnett has travelled to the United States in the past to avoid UK legal proceedings,’ the complainant’s lawyers argue. Barnett’s non-appearance in 2018 – and the dim view taken of it by the magistrates – was reported by the Brighton Argus at the time.
The citing of the Cole case, in which Barnett set up a meeting between the then Arsenal player and Chelsea's manager Jose Mourinho and CEO Peter Kenyon, contrary to football rules, is also apparently tangential to the central allegations and lawyers have told Daily Mail Sport that it would be unlikely to form part of the case if it was heard in the UK.
Neither would historic detail cited in the same case document relating to irregular payments, that in 2007 the former Luton Town chairman Bill Tomlins told FA lawyers he had made to certain agents via a holding company, rather than through proper FA‑approved channels.
The six agents named in a subsequent FA Regulatory Commission judgement on that case did not include Barnett, though his business associate David Manasseh was one of them. The accuser’s lawyers go on to cite a tax evasion case without citing documentary evidence.
Barnett, who maintains his innocence, has reason to want any court proceedings to take place in London, not Los Angeles
Ashley Cole's move from Arsenal to Chelsea in 2006 has come under scrutiny in the case document submitted by Barnett's accuser's lawyers
Barnett’s lawyers have disclosed that he acknowledges paying his accuser ‘well in excess of £1,000,000’ since the end of a ‘consensual personal relationship’ with her, which began when he had paid for her to be relocated from Australia and work for Stellar, bringing her children, then aged 14 and 15.
The woman says she had been introduced to Barnett in the mid-1990s by a male friend of hers who was a professional athlete. After a summer’s work experience at Stellar, she had heard no more of him or the firm until 2017, when he sent her a private message, via LinkedIn, to compliment her on a picture.
She was impressed by his career record, mentioned to him that she would be in London, and it was at an ensuing lunch at the private members’ club George in Mayfair that he suggested she relocate with the children, allegedly paying for their education at an elite boarding school.
She says that having asked her to meet him in a London hotel room suite, following her relocation, that Barnett’s demeanour changed – ‘as if a switch had flipped’ – and that he became ‘direct and aggressive.’
Her lawyers’ document details allegations that he kept her as a ‘sex slave’ for six years, ‘torturing’ her and raping her ‘in excess of 39 times’.
The woman alleges she was instructed by Barnett to film herself performing degrading acts and that she was sometimes ‘tied up overnight without food or water’. She alleges the offences took place in numerous locations, including Los Angeles.
None of these allegations are proven and some friends of Barnett, who announced his retirement last year, reportedly consider this to be ‘a fishing exercise’.
But the allegations, if fully tested in court, carry potential reputational damage for Stellar and the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which bought a majority stake in the former in 2015. Nine of the civil suit’s 12 claims are against a combination of CAA and/or Stellar.
The woman alleges she was instructed by Barnett to film herself performing degrading acts and that she was sometimes ‘tied up overnight without food or water’
The accuser’s claim names a CAA Stellar administrative assistant whom Barnett’s accuser says delivered money to the apartments where he ‘kept’ her. The envelopes explicitly had the assistant’s name on the front, the legal suit claims, citing this as evidence that others within the wider business were complicit.
Barnett’s accuser also claims he used a ‘company-owned email address’ to communicate his orders to her, ‘using language that would have been a red flag to a corporation’.
Barnett’s legal team argue that he has travelled to California only two or three times a year for the past decade, staying just a few nights on each occasion and that the state’s legal jurisdiction is inappropriate, given that the relationship took place in London.
It is unclear how long it will take to rule on where this case, if it does come to court, will be heard.
