In January, it was “revealed” that the England captain John Terry had had an affair with a team-mate’s ex-girlfriend. But nothing was heard from the woman at the centre of the scandal, Vanessa Perroncel. Here, the 34-year-old mother finally sets out her (very different) side of the story
Vanessa Perroncel – the woman at the centre of the sex scandal that lost footballer John Terry the captaincy of the England team and kick-started a bumper year of celebrity infidelity splashes – has always denied the affair.
In September 2009, the 34-year-old, routinely described as “glamorous brunette French lingerie model Vanessa Perroncel”, says that a long-standing friendship with Chelsea defender Terry did not develop into a sexual relationship. This would suggest that Terry (who was, and who remains, married to Toni Poole) and Perroncel (who at the time of the alleged affair had recently split from fellow England footballer Wayne Bridge, father of her three-year-old son Jaydon and former team-mate of Terry’s) did not meet twice a week for sex at Perroncel’s £2m, five-bedroom mock Georgian house in Oxshott, Surrey (as was breathlessly reported in the News of the World on 31 January this year). It would also mean that Perroncel did not become pregnant and did not have an abortion at a private London clinic, arranged and paid for by Terry. It would mean that Terry didn’t give Perroncel £20,000 after the procedure so that she might “cheer herself up”.
There is no reason not to believe Perroncel. Evidence for the affair comes from journalists with a vested interest in it being true, from a number of nameless, faceless and unsubstantiated sources (ah, the unimpeachable credibility of the anonymous “close friend”). It also comes in the context of the super injunction Terry sought, and then lost, in January, which prevented the press from reporting the allegations.
Why did he do that if there was nothing to hide, I ask Perroncel. “I don’t know!” she says. She is exasperated. “No one asked me whether or not I thought it was the right thing to do. If they had, I’d have said no. Let them publish it, then sue. I suppose they were worried about negative press about John Terry.”
We know Perroncel did not “tout her story round Fleet Street – for a figure in excess of £250,000″ (Daily Mail, 4 February). No Perroncel-authored tabloid “tell all” ever ran. We also know Terry did not buy Perroncel’s silence for figures estimated to be anything from £400,000 (Times) to £800,000 (Evening Standard). We know this because she’s agreed to talk to the Observer, for a sum of precisely £0. So Vanessa Perroncel is the girl who didn’t kiss and didn’t tell – and got trashed in the tabloids anyway.
For the first three months of this year, Perroncel was ripped apart by the press. Her reputation was destroyed, her public profile one of the most tarnished in the country. Journalists delved deep into her sexual history, running stories based on rumour. They printed satellite images of her home and maps of where and how she might be found. They raked up the details of her parents’ divorce, and her father’s suicide. “There is a word the French use for women like Vanessa Perroncel,” wrote the Mail in an “examination” of Perroncel which ran in early February. “The word is effronte, and it means barefaced or shameless.”
“Vanessa Perroncel is a she-devil in John Terry’s dirty game,” Sue Carroll wrote in the Mirror on 23 February. She was a “maneater”, a “football groupie”. She was “money-hungry” and “gagging for it”. Claims that Perroncel had slept with five members of Chelsea surfaced; one red-top paper printed a team photograph and circled the men concerned in marker pen. “Maybe she’ll make it a full 11 by the weekend?” the Mail wondered. When anyone reported Perroncel’s denials of relationships with anyone other than Bridge – which occasionally, they did – those anonymous sources piped up. “To say she’s a Chelsea girl is a bit of an understatement. By the time she got to John Terry, she’d achieved her own five-a-side football team,’” said one particular unidentified “close friend”, choosing to speak in a tabloid-ready soundbite.
“A prostitute. Gold digger. Slut,” Perroncel says, wearily. It’s now early August, just over six months since the scandal first broke; a couple of days before news of Peter Crouch’s alleged sexual transgressions makes the front pages, ensuring the Terry scandal is invoked once again. “There was a joke going round. It was: ‘What does Vanessa Perroncel say after sex?’” A bitter pause, before the punchline. “‘So do you all play for the same team?’” She laughs, angrily.
Perroncel has agreed to talk to us because she wants her version of the truth to be in circulation “before my son is old enough to read any of these other stories”. She wants to raise her profile as a human being in the hope that the pantomime scarlet woman version propagated by elements of the media might be diminished. She is suing everyone who ever published an especially unpleasant story about her. Perroncel and her lawyer, Charlotte Harris, sifted through the press clippings, ordered them in terms of the most offensive, most damaging and most outrageous, and began addressing them, one by one. “I felt better when I started the legal action,” she says. But beyond that, she has to find ways to move on, to redefine herself; and interviews like this are, perhaps, a starting point.
So we meet. I’m fascinated to see Perroncel in the flesh. I followed the story at the beginning of this year, along with everyone else, and though I was annoyed at her treatment (so typical, I thought, to vilify the woman), I also bought a lot of the received wisdom. I never doubted a relationship had happened, or that cash had been paid in exchange for her silence. It wasn’t until I started researching in advance of this interview that I realised Perroncel had consistently denied the affair.
I watch her pose for pictures: she is reserved, circumspect, compliant, a good model. She is, of course, physically lovely. If Perroncel hadn’t been quite so gorgeous, in quite such an aloof and unattainable way, she wouldn’t have been such excellent paparazzi fodder; nor would she have been so easy to dislike on principle. Beyond that she is cautious, considered, smart. Her English is extremely good. She has a baccalaureate in philosophy and languages, so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. She says “at the end of the day” a little too often, but apart from that, she is cliché-confoundingly eloquent.
There’s a toughness to her. I ask her if she felt vulnerable in the early stages of her scandal, when her home was besieged by journalists “buzzing, buzzing, always buzzing on the door!”. She says, coolly, “Vulnerable – it’s not a word I use about myself. It’s not really my character.” She’s not without humour. She tells me she fantasises about blowing up the offices of the News of the World, and describes herself wearing a hard hat and grinning cheesily for photographers as she plunges the cartoonish charge on a detonator. But she is also brittle, defensive and incredibly angry. A bassline of fury pulses through Perroncel. “I do rant, sometimes,” she says, and her eyes glint with something very raw and very dark.
She was born in Bandol in the south of France in 1976; her parents divorced when she was five and she moved to Paris with her mother. She worked as a model in Paris in the 1990s – she was scouted as a teenager – and she enjoyed it although, “I didn’t like it when we were expected to have dinner with older men…” She is referring to the industry executives, photographers and money men who can assume that socialising with the beautiful young clothes horses in their employ is a perk of the position. “It seemed exploiting and I saw the drugs and the sex… I didn’t like it. I was always causing a drama about it, threatening to leave my agency! Ranting about why do I have to spend time with these fat, ugly, old men! When I wanted to be off out with my friends and the male models my own age!”
She acted a little (”in TV programmes like the French version of Saved by the Bell”) and spent the summers working in expensive night clubs in St Tropez. “There was a scene, we were a close group; they were my friends and we looked out for each other.” When she moved to London, in 1999, she modelled some more; in 2003 she took up a job as a VIP table runner at the Elysium nightclub in central London: a glam, upmarket venue that attracted a footballer clientele, among other VIPs.
This is how she met Wayne Bridge in 2004, “when I was working, by the way, because I wanted to earn extra money, not because I was plotting to meet a footballer. Not because I was studying the back pages for fixture lists and transfer lists or any of this crap the papers made up. There are girls who do that, yes. I am not one of them.” I hadn’t suggested otherwise, but you can forgive Perroncel if she gets preemptively defensive from time to time.
Perroncel and Bridge never married, but they were together for five years, during which time she gave birth to Jaydon. In the grand scheme of these things, theirs was a low-key life.
“Wayne was private, I am private; we never did any magazine deals, never had anyone take pictures in our house. I never did the whole: ‘Oh! Here I am pregnant’ thing,” she says. Perroncel turns to one side, strokes her hand over an imaginary belly and smiles an empty Hello! magazine-friendly smile.
Perroncel encountered some of the press frenzy associated with footballers and Wag culture during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. She was papped shopping in Baden-Baden with Elen Rives (ex-girlfriend of Frank Lampard and mother of his two daughters); she read a couple of erroneous reports about her own movements. “But then it was just: Wayne and Vanessa were spotted in such and such a restaurant, when really we were somewhere else. So it was not true, but…”
Inconsequential? “Yes.”
In January 2009, Bridge transferred from Chelsea to Manchester City. He, Perroncel and Jaydon shared a suite in a Manchester hotel while they looked for a more permanent base; after six months, Perroncel took Jaydon back to Oxshott. Their relationship floundered, then ended. She was miserable. “I loved him. I wanted the happy-ever-after, the fairy tale. My parents’ divorce was awful, this was not what I wanted for my son.”
