Charles Saatchi has said he admitted assaulting his wife Nigella Lawson to stop the incident ‘hanging over’ the couple.
Art collector Saatchi seized the celebrity cook’s throat during a row outside a restaurant and accepted a caution for assault after going to a police station in London yesterday afternoon.
He told the Evening Standard: ‘Although Nigella made no complaint I volunteered to go to Charing Cross station and take a police caution after a discussion with my lawyer because I thought it was better than the alternative of this hanging over all of us for months.’
Earlier he had dismissed as a ‘playful tiff’ photographs showing him grabbing his wife’s throat and her grimacing then crying during the argument outside Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair.
In a statement last night the Metropolitan police said: ‘Officers from the Community Safety Unit at Westminster were aware of the Sunday People article which was published on Sunday 16 June and carried out an investigation.
‘This afternoon, Monday June 17, a 70-year-old man voluntarily attended a central London police station and accepted a caution for assault.’
Lawson moved out of their home in Chelsea, west London with her son Bruno, 17, after the incident came to light.
Saatchi, a former advertising executive, told the Evening Standard he was holding the broadcaster and cook by the neck ‘to emphasise my point’ as they discussed family.
But he admitted that the pictures, in which his wife appears to be grimacing as he holds her outside Scott’s in Mayfair, looked ‘horrific’.
The 70-year-old told the newspaper: ‘About a week ago, we were sitting outside a restaurant having an intense debate about the children, and I held Nigella’s neck repeatedly while attempting to emphasise my point.
‘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.’
There was no sign of the couple at their west London home or at Saatchi’s gallery, near Chelsea’s King’s Road, yesterday.
A spokesman for Lawson, 53, confirmed she left the family home, in a multimillion-pound converted factory, with her son on Sunday, but refused to say whether it was a temporary or permanent move.
