Lucy Beaumont Blew the Whistle on David Walliams (and May Suffer the Consequences)

The long-awaited publication of the investigation into claims of sexual misconduct by British comedian and writer David Walliams hit the stands yesterday. Walliams had tried to block the report by The Guardian and ITV News by claiming he was at risk of suicide if the allegations of sexual harassment and grooming of teenage girls went public. With the report has come the usual wave of finger-wagging and discourse, not unlike what happened with convicted rapist Russell Brand. It was an open secret, everyone was warned about it, everyone made jokes about it, and so on. As with Brand, we didn’t see many industry contemporaries step forward to discuss what they knew about Walliams. But one big star in the comedy scene has emerged as a key figure in helping to break the story.

You might know Lucy Beaumont for her delightfully bananas turn on Taskmaster or her appearance on Celebrity Traitors. She’s a regular on panel shows and a popular touring stand-up. Last night, she appeared on Sky News to discuss how she helped to blow the whistle on the Walliams story. Discussing her response to the allegations involving Walliams, Ms Beaumont said:

“I don’t know Walliams, I haven’t worked with him but, bizarrely, it’s been a really strange day for me. Because about three years ago, a young person, and it was their first job on TV, worked on a show he was on and the next show that they worked on was with me. They took me aside and said, ‘I need to tell somebody something,’ and confided in me, some of his conduct that they were really worried about.

It was to do with his job, this young person, was to take young girls — he didn’t think that they were children, he thought they were young girls, possibly adults, he definitely knew that they were over 16 — and he had to take them to Walliams’s dressing room. The thing that struck me about it, and I was very concerned about it, was that he said they were very working-class girls, and some of the had never been to London before. They’d never been around TV. He felt that they were vulnerable. And he felt that, at the time — and this is the point of me talking about this so frankly — at the time, he didn’t think there was a process or a way to let people know within the TV company what was happening and how he felt. And I was really worried.”

Beaumont is a former teaching assistant who has been trained in safeguarding. As she said, “There’s no HR department in TV”, and she says this has encouraged her to help as often as she can in situations like this. It was what led her to talk to The Guardian about Walliams.

She also revealed that she got in contact with one of the girls and women who alleged that Walliams had hurt them. “She was in a really bad way,” Beaumont said. “I was really worried about her […] I was really worried that she was gonna take her own life.” She says she offered to pay for legal aid for the young woman, who had been pushed into signing an NDA that prevented her from talking to anyone, including therapists and her family.

Beaumont is so damn brave for this. In the interview, she says several times that she’s pretty sure she’ll never work in TV again after this because she’ll be seen as a “trouble causer” for daring to go against a very powerful man in the same industry. Like Brand, Walliams was litigious and had the money to freely attack anyone who came forward. NDAs are used to not just silence people but to make everyone else scared to speak up, even if something verifiably illegal has happened. And in an industry like comedy, which is essentially a cycle of freelancers of varying degrees of power vying for a limited number of opportunities, nobody wants to disrupt the status quo. Walliams and Brand were on every TV show in Britain for a while, including ones that Beaumont has starred in, like 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Would I Lie to You?, which are big deals on this side of the pond. The bookers, if choosing between Walliams and Beaumont, would probably pick him nine times out of ten.

So, I understand her fear that she may have hurt her career by speaking out. She says she’ll probably see a winding down of TV gigs and the like following this interview. Honestly, you can tell how nervous she is in this interview. I hope that doesn’t happen, but the entertainment business is a petty and highly cloistered one run by a bunch of enablers who are now all pretending to be shocked and appalled by these allegations. Isn’t it so telling that the female comedians are the ones who will face repercussions for supporting vulnerable teenage girls and not the ones joking about their pals having sex with them?