Their affair began, perhaps inevitably, at a London club one night last September.
‘We hit it off straight away because we had so much in common,’ gushed Imogen Thomas in a breathless interview with a Sunday tabloid a little over a month ago.
It was a ‘kiss and tell’ account – with a twist, of course.
The married football star lover who she claims took her back to his hotel, called her the following day to check she had arrived home safely, and subsequently pursued her with a stream of flirty texts, was not named in the expose spread over two salacious pages.
By then, the ‘football star’ in question had already won a gagging order to stop details of their seven-month liaison becoming public. With good reason, it turns out.
For we now know that the man with whom she shared a bed – often, according to her, on the night before matches – was none other than Ryan Giggs, the (married) Manchester United legend, former BBC Sports Personality of the Year, one of the few Premier League players with a reputation to protect; the antithesis, supposedly, of such ‘Red Top’ favourites as John Terry, Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney and too many others to mention.
Giggs, a father of two, was supposed to be different. Indeed, the Giggs brand – worth £24million in sponsorships – was underpinned by his ‘clean cut, family man’ image.
This was the man who loved to parade his children at football matches. He has been the model professional. He joined Manchester United as a boy, making his first team debut at 17. He has won a record 12 Premier League titles – with the same club – making him Britain’s most successful footballer.
‘Nothing could have prepared me for the limelight I was thrust into at 17,’ he once said. ‘I was in newspapers, magazines, on TV, and everyone in the street knew me. It was strange for me and I dealt with it by trying not to create a fuss. I have just tried to keep it that way ever since…football is my bread and butter. It has to, and always will, come first.’
But his life on the pitch, it now emerges, was at odds with his private life. His decision to obtain an injunction has cost in the region of at least £150,000 – not an insignificant sum even for a multi-millionaire footballer.
He is alleged to have recognised Miss Thomas as the pneumatic contestant from Big Brother as soon as they met. But Miss Thomas was much more than that.
She had posed topless for lads’ magazines, recorded a sex tape with a previous DJ boyfriend which leaked on to the internet, and had already dated Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe and comedian Russell Brand; a track record which only adds to Giggs’s embarrassment and personal humiliation.
Should we be really surprised though? Apart from anything else, his father, ex-rugby league star Danny Wilson, was a womaniser who split up from Ryan’s mother when he was still a boy; his father’s career was curtailed by heavy drinking and crime, including a six-month jail stretch for attacking a police officer.
The young Ryan disowned him and adopted his mother’s surname. But might he have inherited at least one of his father’s character flaws?
The current scandal began to unfold on April 14 when the Sun newspaper published an article under the headline: ‘Footie Star’s Affair with Big Bro Imogen.’
The first paragraph read: ‘A Premier League star last night gagged The Sun after we found him romping with busty Big Brother babe Imogen Thomas behind his wife’s back.’
Who could have guessed then that the article would have such far reaching consequences and provoke one of the biggest communal acts of civil disobedience in modern times?
The following morning, the Sun reported how she was struggling to cope after being exposed as the ‘mistress of a married footballer hiding behind a court gagging order’. She was spotted near her London home weeping before holding her head in her hands and crumpling to the pavement.
One friend of brunette Miss Thomas, 28, was quoted as saying: ‘He [Giggs] told her she was the love of his life. She said she was in love with him and he was in love with her. It wasn’t purely built on sex. She thought it went much deeper. Imogen was lovestruck.’
Imogen Thomas was many things, but she was certainly no victim.
At a subsequent hearing in the High Court in London, the judge who granted the injunction gave his reasons for doing so.
It was claimed Miss Thomas was blackmailing Giggs.
According to the footballer’s statement he and Miss Thomas ‘met four times between September and December last year’.
She then contacted him by text in March, which led him to conclude she was thinking of selling her story.
She allegedly told him ‘she wanted’, or ‘needed’, a payment from him of £50,000. Giggs agreed to meet her in a hotel where he was staying last month. There, he claimed he gave her a signed football shirt, but said he was not prepared to give her £50,000. She asked to see him again shortly afterwards, to which ‘he agreed with reluctance’ and provided her with some football tickets.
Although the position was ‘by no means clear’, the judge said the evidence ‘appeared to suggest’ Miss Thomas had arranged the two hotel meetings ‘in collaboration with photographers and/or journalists’.
Whatever the truth, Miss Thomas eventually sold her story through Max Clifford. Her ‘edited’ version appeared in the Sunday Mirror on April 17. There were more revelations – giving a very different account of events, of course.
‘He’s not like other footballers,’ she said in the interview. ‘He seemed very decent and private with good morals, and I fell for that.’
She claimed she had only told her mother, Janette and sister Alana about the relationship. Giggs – or the ‘married football star’ as he was continually referred to – had apparently kept their secret from everyone including close friends, and his agent. Miss Thomas said they feared they may have been found out after she suspected someone was following her.
Their ‘worst fears were confirmed’ when a friend called Miss Thomas to say reporters had been asking after her at her flat in North-West London. But from then on, Miss Thomas only heard from Giggs through his lawyers. She would later appear on ITV’s This Morning to complain about the injunction.
A few days later, on May 8, the identity of Miss Thomas’s ‘lover’ was revealed on Twitter. At the height of the campaign, Giggs’s name was being mentioned at the rate of 160 times a minute.
Then, last week, Giggs’s lawyers hit back by launching a ground-breaking legal action against Twitter to force the social messaging site to reveal the names of those who had broken the injunction. He was fighting a losing battle.
At the weekend, a newspaper in Scotland published a photograph of Giggs and football fans mockingly chanted his name at a match with a worldwide audience. The game was finally up yesterday when MP John Hemming used Parliamentary privilege to name him.
‘We hit it off straight away because we had so much in common,’ gushed Imogen Thomas in a breathless interview with a Sunday tabloid a little over a month ago.
It was a ‘kiss and tell’ account – with a twist, of course.
The married football star lover who she claims took her back to his hotel, called her the following day to check she had arrived home safely, and subsequently pursued her with a stream of flirty texts, was not named in the expose spread over two salacious pages.
By then, the ‘football star’ in question had already won a gagging order to stop details of their seven-month liaison becoming public. With good reason, it turns out.
For we now know that the man with whom she shared a bed – often, according to her, on the night before matches – was none other than Ryan Giggs, the (married) Manchester United legend, former BBC Sports Personality of the Year, one of the few Premier League players with a reputation to protect; the antithesis, supposedly, of such ‘Red Top’ favourites as John Terry, Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney and too many others to mention.
Giggs, a father of two, was supposed to be different. Indeed, the Giggs brand – worth £24million in sponsorships – was underpinned by his ‘clean cut, family man’ image.
This was the man who loved to parade his children at football matches. He has been the model professional. He joined Manchester United as a boy, making his first team debut at 17. He has won a record 12 Premier League titles – with the same club – making him Britain’s most successful footballer.
‘Nothing could have prepared me for the limelight I was thrust into at 17,’ he once said. ‘I was in newspapers, magazines, on TV, and everyone in the street knew me. It was strange for me and I dealt with it by trying not to create a fuss. I have just tried to keep it that way ever since…football is my bread and butter. It has to, and always will, come first.’
But his life on the pitch, it now emerges, was at odds with his private life. His decision to obtain an injunction has cost in the region of at least £150,000 – not an insignificant sum even for a multi-millionaire footballer.
He is alleged to have recognised Miss Thomas as the pneumatic contestant from Big Brother as soon as they met. But Miss Thomas was much more than that.
She had posed topless for lads’ magazines, recorded a sex tape with a previous DJ boyfriend which leaked on to the internet, and had already dated Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe and comedian Russell Brand; a track record which only adds to Giggs’s embarrassment and personal humiliation.
Should we be really surprised though? Apart from anything else, his father, ex-rugby league star Danny Wilson, was a womaniser who split up from Ryan’s mother when he was still a boy; his father’s career was curtailed by heavy drinking and crime, including a six-month jail stretch for attacking a police officer.
The young Ryan disowned him and adopted his mother’s surname. But might he have inherited at least one of his father’s character flaws?
The current scandal began to unfold on April 14 when the Sun newspaper published an article under the headline: ‘Footie Star’s Affair with Big Bro Imogen.’
The first paragraph read: ‘A Premier League star last night gagged The Sun after we found him romping with busty Big Brother babe Imogen Thomas behind his wife’s back.’
Who could have guessed then that the article would have such far reaching consequences and provoke one of the biggest communal acts of civil disobedience in modern times?
The following morning, the Sun reported how she was struggling to cope after being exposed as the ‘mistress of a married footballer hiding behind a court gagging order’. She was spotted near her London home weeping before holding her head in her hands and crumpling to the pavement.
One friend of brunette Miss Thomas, 28, was quoted as saying: ‘He [Giggs] told her she was the love of his life. She said she was in love with him and he was in love with her. It wasn’t purely built on sex. She thought it went much deeper. Imogen was lovestruck.’
Imogen Thomas was many things, but she was certainly no victim.
At a subsequent hearing in the High Court in London, the judge who granted the injunction gave his reasons for doing so.
It was claimed Miss Thomas was blackmailing Giggs.
She then contacted him by text in March, which led him to conclude she was thinking of selling her story.
She allegedly told him ‘she wanted’, or ‘needed’, a payment from him of £50,000. Giggs agreed to meet her in a hotel where he was staying last month. There, he claimed he gave her a signed football shirt, but said he was not prepared to give her £50,000. She asked to see him again shortly afterwards, to which ‘he agreed with reluctance’ and provided her with some football tickets.
Although the position was ‘by no means clear’, the judge said the evidence ‘appeared to suggest’ Miss Thomas had arranged the two hotel meetings ‘in collaboration with photographers and/or journalists’.
Whatever the truth, Miss Thomas eventually sold her story through Max Clifford. Her ‘edited’ version appeared in the Sunday Mirror on April 17. There were more revelations – giving a very different account of events, of course.
‘He’s not like other footballers,’ she said in the interview. ‘He seemed very decent and private with good morals, and I fell for that.’
She claimed she had only told her mother, Janette and sister Alana about the relationship. Giggs – or the ‘married football star’ as he was continually referred to – had apparently kept their secret from everyone including close friends, and his agent. Miss Thomas said they feared they may have been found out after she suspected someone was following her.
Their ‘worst fears were confirmed’ when a friend called Miss Thomas to say reporters had been asking after her at her flat in North-West London. But from then on, Miss Thomas only heard from Giggs through his lawyers. She would later appear on ITV’s This Morning to complain about the injunction.
A few days later, on May 8, the identity of Miss Thomas’s ‘lover’ was revealed on Twitter. At the height of the campaign, Giggs’s name was being mentioned at the rate of 160 times a minute.
Then, last week, Giggs’s lawyers hit back by launching a ground-breaking legal action against Twitter to force the social messaging site to reveal the names of those who had broken the injunction. He was fighting a losing battle.
At the weekend, a newspaper in Scotland published a photograph of Giggs and football fans mockingly chanted his name at a match with a worldwide audience. The game was finally up yesterday when MP John Hemming used Parliamentary privilege to name him.
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