Nigella Lawson now the face of domestic violence

FOR a very private couple it was a very public fight, and now celebrity cook Nigella Lawson is again at the forefront of a push for changing attitudes.

FOR an untrained cook, Nigella Lawson can sure whip up a meal and a whole kitchen full of controversy.

Whether it was her chicken mango and chilli salad or her plum-accented highly sexualised remarks and suggestive finger sucking antics on her TV cooking shows, her image has always been under the microscope.

Suddenly what she cooked was almost as important as what she wore on her shows and just how much cleavage she revealed as she leant into her bowl of mushy peas.

Food and sex sell and she has been credited with reinspiring British women and men particularly to look at cooking in a different light, as a fun exercise rather than a chore. Simple cooking, for simple living with chicken and bacon pie and a healthy serve of sex on the side.

But the 53-year-old woman dubbed the "Queen of food porn" and "domestic goddess" was making headlines for very different reasons this week but ones that are again being pushed to change attitudes in the home.

Just what happened at that outdoor table behind the olive bushes at Scott's in Mayfair in Central London is still being unravelled but it's shown a very private side to her life and opened up discussion and debate on what constitutes domestic violence.

Lawson and her husband Charles Saatchi were having a meal at their favourite restaurant Scott's, a haunt for the rich and famous drawn to the establishment by its seafood dishes.

Make no mistake the couple are celebrities in Britain - she the successful and glamorous TV cook with a string of best selling cook books under her belt and he the co-founder of one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world and now a globally renowned art collector - but they are seen so regularly at the restaurant and particularly that same preferred table of theirs other dining guests barely blink an eye.

Paparazzi too don't usually bother photographing the couple here, it'd be the same image they have taken and had published many times before.

But last weekend around the time Saatchi was celebrating his 70th birthday they drew attention to themselves.

According to those who were there, their voices were loud and his menacing before he suddenly thrust his left hand into a chokehold on her neck. He then used both hands three more times around her neck as well as tweaking her nose and pushing at her face. She was distressed and at one point crying but later held his hand as she appeared to want to console him.

"I have no doubt she was scared," one onlooker was quoted as saying. "It was horrific really … she was very tearful."

A photographer was nearby capturing the moment in a series of pictures.

Lawson started her working life as a book reviewer and restaurant and food critic for The Spectator. They were anonymous days for her despite her father Nigel Lawson being a prominent politician as a one-time treasurer in the Thatcher government and later a peer in the House of Lords. By 1986 she was working as a deputy literary editor for the Sunday Times and was dating Sydney-born lawyer and academic Geoffrey Robertson.

It was at the newspaper where she met her future husband Jim Diamond who later encouraged her to write a cookbook inspired by her mother's fondness for simple easy cooking. In 1998 'How to Eat' became a massive success selling 300,000 copies in the UK alone. By the time Diamond died in 2001 from throat cancer she had a second successful cookbook "How To Be a Domestic Goddess", a TV show "Nigella Bites" and was made author of the year in the British Book Awards beating the likes of Harry Potter author J.K Rowling.

She had her critics, also about this time from feminists for her sexually flirtatious TV cooking style to those who frowned on her moving in with multi-millionaire Charles Saatchi - one half of the brothers who founded the globally successful Saatchi & Saatchi advertising empire and later M&C Saatchi and a renowned collector of art just nine months after her husband's death and also because of the 16-year age difference. A year before they married in 2003 she was quoted as saying "I thought I'd be alone forever so I'm very happy I'm not and I have got a life I want".

A week after the apparent throttling, photographs were published in the UK national tabloid Sunday People newspaper. They instantly created a media frenzy.

A day later police confirmed its Community Safety Unit was investigating. With confirmation they were investigating, Charles Saatchi and his lawyer voluntary attended Charing Cross police station but not before he made a statement to the Evening Standard, where he writes a column, in which he defended his actions, saying he "held her neck repeatedly" merely as a "playful tiff" during an "intense debate" about their children.

He said: "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." Saatchi accepted a formal caution but with no formal complaint from Lawson, the matter has not gone further except with commentators.

The remarks by Saatchi provoked outrage first on social media then mainstream.

Former outspoken MP Louise Mensch said it was a shocking story with broader ramifications than just one couple's quarrel.

"Lots of people are saying 'it's Nigella's business'. I don't agree. An alleged assault photographed in a public place is everyone's business. The police have come under a great deal of criticism for not investigating domestic violence and given the photos public confidence requires it."

Eaves for Women, a charity that supports victims of domestic violence, said Saatchi's comments spoke volumes about attitudes in some quarters.

"This is not a 'row', it is not a 'tiff', it is an incidence of domestic violence," Eaves spokeswoman Heather Harvey said. "There is an unfortunate myth that domestic violence only happens to a certain type of person. But it happens in every social class and in every profession."

Domestic violence charity group Women's Aid said dismissing such violence was common.

"Abusive men will often attempt to excuse or minimise their behaviour," spokeswoman Polly Neate said.

While everyone else was commentating about the images including most columnists across the UK, Australia and the US, Nigella Lawson was going about her business tweeting her latest favourite recipes and images of food she had prepared. Her spokesman said she had no intention of speaking about the incident but confirmed she had moved out of home and taken her teenage children.

The woman who was setting the trend in the kitchen does not now want to be a poster girl, for want of a better term, for domestic violence. She has in the past revealed she was beaten by her mother, now deceased, repeatedly for the smallest things including the crinkling of a plastic wrapper which would send her mother "deranged" with anger.

"She'd shout at all of us and say 'I'm going to hit you till you cry' and so I would never cry. I still don't," Lawson revealed late last year. She said her mother would stop hitting when her hand hurt.

On Saatchi she has also in the past described him as an "exploder".

"I'll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness," she said. But she has remained silent now on this apparent explosion.

Melbourne radio DJ Dee Dee Dunleavy expressed disappointment Lawson was not speaking out and taking a stand against domestic violence. She said she was a beacon for women and should now be a campaigner for domestic violence.

"If you want us to buy your books and watch your shows on how to run our kitchens then we need you to make a stand on domestic violence," she wrote on her blog.

The remarks themselves caused an uproar both in Australia and the UK, interpreted as they were as victim bullying.

There have reportedly being other public tiffs between the couple, married 10 years this September, but nothing as seen so graphically.

It is always dangerous to interfere in the marriages of others even when they have such a high public profile. But with fame comes responsibility and many public commentators, particularly in the UK, see her responsibility now to talk about the incident for herself if not other less famous people suffering physical and mental abuse in silence.

Saatchi may see forcing public humiliation on his wife and reducing her to tears through his hands on her neck and face as playful but he is alone in that assessment. He even said the only reason he accepted the police caution was so the controversy would not hang around for months, not for any act of remorse or guilt.

Like it or not, the face of the "domestic goddess" is now inadvertently become the face of domestic violence. Perhaps she needs time, perhaps she didn't see the incident as others have but only she can now direct public opinion in her own way and time. Perhaps just the highlighting of her silence alone will have the same effect on the reporting of abuse, that is encourage others to speak out and report their own experiences.