Comedian Lucy Beaumont shares urgent demand for UK laws to change after coming forward as David Walliams whistleblower
Lucy Beaumont has shared an urgent appeal to 'close the consent gap' after she came forward as a whistleblower in the allegations against David Walliams.
Taking to Instagram on Thursday (12 November), she wrote: "If you have a 12-year-old daughter, in four years' time a man in his 60s can legally have sex with her. It's hard for me to write this and i'm sure for the majority of us it's hard for us to read it.
"But we have to. He is not a criminal. We can't prosecute him. BUT the insanity of it... the law agrees with us; she's still thought of as a child. He can't legally buy her a drink, and he can't have a nude image of her. But he can sleep with her. And f**k her life up."
The comedian, 43, added in the caption: "Please follow @closetheconsentgap #closetheagegap."
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It comes after Walliams, 55, lost his bid for a High Court injunction against ITV News and The Guardian, which published an investigation accusing him of grooming teenage girls as young as 15 and abusing his position to pursue women. He denies the allegations.
Close The Consent Gap's website reads: "At 16 and 17, young people are still legally recognised as children in safeguarding terms. Yet the law currently allows adults of any age to have sex with those same 16–17-year-olds. That is the gap we are campaigning to close.
"We are not trying to criminalise teenage relationships. We are trying to stop grown adults having legal sexual access to children."
The campaign's proposed reform is that it should be an offence for a person aged 20+ to engage in sexual activity with a person aged 16–17, unless the age difference is no more than three years.
Speaking to Cathy Newman on Sky News on Tuesday (10 November), Beaumont revealed that she was a whistleblower in the Walliams investigation.
She saidf: “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.”
The comedian said the young person told her that they had to ‘take young girls’ who were ‘definitely’ over 16 to Walliams’ dressing room, and he ‘felt they were vulnerable’.
She added: "At the time, he didn’t think there was a process, a way to let people know within the TV company what was happening and how he felt and I was really worried."
"I did as much as I could do privately. Whenever I’ve heard a rumour about anyone, I’ve done everything I can. There’s only so much you can do. I’m not the police. Nothing seems to be illegal."
She also clarified that she had never worked with Walliams or witnessed any inappropriate behaviour, but was ‘worried that these girls were young’.
Beaumont added: “I was really worried, and I was one of the whistleblowers. I was one of the people to let The Guardian know.”
She also called for a better way for those working in TV to raise safeguarding issues, outlining: “People are saying, ‘why tell journalists?’ There’s no HR department in TV. There’s no proper duty of care. There’s no social services that you deal with, and it’s partly because the industry is very well-managed.
“These things slip through the net because, I think, there will be now, but there hasn’t been a process that you can deal with.”
More to follow.
Madison Burgess
