THE GORGEOUS CELEBRITY CHEF NIGELLA LAWSON -DRAGGED THROUGH THE COURTS ….. BUT STILL (IN OUR VIEW) MORE POPULAR THAN EVER… & DESERVEDLY SO.

Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo tell ITV’s This Morning that their trial was mortifying for everyone involved, not just Nigella Lawson.

Nigella Lawson‘s former personal assistants have said they may have won their legal battle but the celebrity chef has won the hearts of the British public.

Elisabetta and Francesca Grillo spoke to ITV This Morning following their acquittal in December on charges of fraudulently using company credit cards, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on designer goods for themselves, while working as personal assistants to Lawson and her ex-husband Charles Saatchi.

The sisters claimed every purchase had been approved by their then bosses, and they were found not guilty by jurors at Isleworth crown court in west London.

“We have won the court case but definitely she had the most support from the public. She [Lawson] is well loved and she will always be loved and I am sure she will be fine,” Francesca Grillo, 35, told the programme on Tuesday. “She is great at what she is doing and I wish her all the best.”

Lawson, whose series The Taste starts on Tuesday evening on Channel 4, said last week that her only desire during the trial had been to protect her children but that she was unable to always do so.

The mother-of-two appeared on the US TV show Good Morning America to promote her new show and was asked about the court case in which allegations of drug-taking arose.

Asked what it was like to be a witness in the trial, Lawson said: “I can’t really remember exactly because you’re so focused on answering the questions to the best of your ability that actually you don’t really have an enormous awareness of yourself.

“Maybe that’s a good thing. My only desire really was to protect my children as much as possible which … alas I couldn’t always do.”

Lawson added that having details of her acrimonious split from the art dealer Saatchi talked about in court under the glare of the world’s media was mortifying.

Nigella Lawson tells Good Morning America she felt herself to be on trial. She was not asked about the drug claims made against her in court. Photograph: Barcroft USA”To have not only your private life but distortions of your private life put on display is mortifying, but there are people going through an awful lot worse and to dwell on any of it would be self-pity and I don’t like to do that,” she said.

She said she was looking towards the future. “Since then I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate, had a very good Christmas and am into the new year.”

Lawson admitted during the trial that she took cocaine with her late husband John Diamond when he found out he had terminal cancer, and in 2010 when she claimed she was being “subjected to intimate terrorism” by Saatchi. Police are to review her admission that she took the

The Grillos said on Tuesday it was brave of their former employer to admit during the trial that she had taken cocaine. The sisters said they did not feel guilty about Lawson giving evidence because their own “freedom was at stake”.

Francesca Grillo said: “It was tough but it was more tough to sit down in a dock and think, I might be in prison for a long time.”

She said of Lawson’s family affairs being aired publicly: “I felt sorry for all of us involved. We shouldn’t have reached that. But unfortunately you are in a position where your freedom is at stake so you have to tell your side of the story … I wish it didn’t happen, but I had to think about my freedom.”

She added: “We were in court not because of her drug use or because we wanted her to be punished. In admitting it, I think she was very brave to do so … but I didn’t feel guilty.

“It’s mortifying for her, it’s mortifying for us, it’s mortifying for everybody involved.”

Elisabetta said: “I feel sorry that we ended up in that situation, that she [Lawson] did admit to that. But no, not guilty, because it was nothing to do with me, it’s her life.”

Francesca said of being accused: “It’s like you wake up one morning and your mother says, ‘I’m not your mother any more, sorry. You’ve been with me all your life, but I don’t know you any more.'”

Elisabetta added: “There are no winners in this situation. All of us lost something.”

Francesca said it was too early for a reconciliation with Lawson. “It’s like a broken mirror – you can glue it back together but you see all the cracks.”

She said that when she was told of the jury’s verdict, her sister had a panic attack. “At that point I just wanted my sister to be well. I wasn’t very worried about the verdict.”

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O J SIMPSON …. AMERICAN ICON FALLS FROM GRACE …..

HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL WE FEATURE AN  IN DEPTH INSIGHT INTO THE ALLEGED MURDERER ….. O J SIMPSON , WHO WAS SUBSEQUENTLY CLEARED OF THE MURDER OF HIS EX WIFE  NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON AND RONALD GOLDMAN. ALSO VARIOUS PERSONALLY SIGNED MEMORABILIA ITEMS FROM HIM .

Orenthal James “O. J.” Simpson (born July 9, 1947), nicknamed “The Juice”, is a retired American football player and actor. Simpson was the first professional football player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, a mark he set in 1973. While six other players have passed the 2,000 rush yard mark, he stands alone as the only player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a 14-game season (professional football changed to a 16-game season in 1978). He holds the record for the single season yards-per-game average, which stands at 143.1 ypg. Simpson was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

After retiring from professional football, Simpson had a successful career as a football broadcaster and actor.

In 1995, he was acquitted of the 1994 murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman after a lengthy and internationally publicized criminal trial, the People v. Simpson. In 1997, a civil court awarded a judgment against Simpson for their wrongful deaths; to date he has paid little of the $33.5 million penalty.

In September 2007, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, and charged with numerous felonies, including armed robbery and kidnapping. In 2008, he was found guilty and sentenced to 33 years’ imprisonment, with a minimum of nine years without parole.He is serving his sentence at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Lovelock, Nevada.

 

Below is video footage of when Football and film star O.J. Simpson led police on a low-speed chase along the Los Angeles freeways shortly before his arrest for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. This video, aired on CNN, features the sound from OJ’s phone conversation with Homicide Detective Tom Lange. Listen as the accused killer tells Lange that he is the one who “deserves” to be hurt.

Below is an in depth investigation into new evidence that has been found surrounding the murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

Who did kill OJ’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman? This is still a gripping tale. It may be five years on but this story hasn’t lost its heady mixture of violence, race, sex and Hollywood glitz.

Five years ago, the world watched spellbound as OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder. And interest in the case remains as great as ever. Why, asks the BBC’s former Washington correspondent Bridget Kendall, are we still obsessed?

Ask any American exactly where they were when the verdict in OJ Simpson’s trial was announced and they will probably remember. It was one of those defining moments.

When the dramatic announcement came that OJ had been found “not guilty”, the reaction was almost as stunning as the unexpected verdict. America was divided down the middle.

Five years since that moment, and still the ghosts in this weird and ghastly double murder have not been laid to rest. And it is somehow fitting that the latest investigation to unearth new clues into what might have happened – who did kill OJ’s ex- wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman? – is not the result of police work, but a television documentary, OJ: The Untold Story. Once again, it is trial by television, a TV audience being invited to sift through the evidence and draw their own conclusions.

What is more, there are some startling new revelations and a real-life American private eye to help guide us through the maze of new circumstantial evidence. Not exactly a suave Raymond Chandler hero with deadpan delivery, Bill Dear is no Humphrey Bogart. But as a tenacious private detective from Dallas, Texas, he certainly proves that all those American crime novels got one thing right: one private eye with a bee in his bonnet and apparently boundless energy can get a whole lot further in coming up with new leads than an American city police department.

To begin with gruesome photos from the crime scene and eyewitness accounts from the LA police detectives reminds you of how they built their case, and convinces you all over again that surely the evidence against OJ was overwhelming.

But then comes the analysis: the evidence that does not add up.

Here the makers of this documentary have been careful not to be too categorical. They offer two sets of circumstantial evidence that point to two quite separate suspects and two quite different lines of inquiry. So who do they think did it? There is no final chapter to this new investigation. Watch it, and decide for yourself if you still think OJ is guilty.

Below is video footage of “CBS News RAW”: O.J. Simpson has been sentenced to time in prison for hotel armed robbery.