How Crispin Odey evaded sexual assault allegations for decades
4 min read
Note: This story contains depictions of sexual assault and abuse.
For more than three decades,
Then came the invitation to Eastbach Court, which happened to fall on her birthday. She accepted. Until now, Louise has never shared the full account of what happened next.
On a Thursday evening early that December, around 14 guests settled in the dining room for a catered three-course meal of hearty English fare, washed down with one of Odey’s favourite wines, Château Figeac. The mood was buoyant and carefree. At the end of the meal, Odey called Louise into the small sitting room next door for a tête-à-tête about her case.
Sitting adjacent to each other on armchairs next to a crackling fire, she updated him, then stood up to leave. As she walked past his chair, he grabbed her, pulled her on to his lap, forced his tongue into her mouth and groped her breasts by slipping his hand inside the lapel of her dress. She pushed him away and asked: “Crispin, what are you doing?”
Instead of answering, he stood up and grabbed her again, crushed her body forcefully against his, pushed his tongue into her mouth and took her hand by the wrist and clamped it to his erect penis. He was dripping with sweat. “This is how excited you make me feel,” he said.
Disgusted, Louise managed to push him off her and asked: “What the fuck are you doing?”
Then she left the room and rejoined the others, who had moved to the drawing room for coffee. She spent the rest of the evening with the younger members of the party in an attempt to stay safe. Although she appeared to join in, she was in a state of shock. “It came out of nowhere, literally out of nowhere,” she said of the attack. “There was no flirting. It was disgusting. He is a revolting, sweating mass.” At midnight, the remaining group toasted her 51st birthday.
The following day, Odey behaved sheepishly towards her and barely said a word. She kept her distance. When a taxi arrived to collect her, Louise breathed a sigh of relief.
But the incident weighed heavily on her in the weeks that followed. Odey, meanwhile, had stopped checking in on the progress of her legal case. After a couple of months, she started to confide first in their shared lawyer and then with a small number of close friends and associates about what had happened.
As the months went by, she grew angrier about the assault. On August 1 2022, she sent Odey a WhatsApp message. He agreed to meet her alone three days later at her family office in central London.
In a formal meeting room, over the course of 40 minutes, she confronted him about the December assault. Initially, he denied having any recollection of it. Then, when pressed, he said: “I remember trying to kiss you”, adding that he was “probably very drunk”.
She corrected him, insisting that he had violently groped her. He responded: “I didn’t realise that I came on so strongly . . . you said ‘no’ and I stopped.” Echoing his defence at the trial a year earlier, he later claimed: “I misread the signals.” “There were no signals to misread,” she countered. Towards the end of their conversation, he went one step further towards admitting the assault: “I basically did make a play . . . and I was probably too forceful.”
Earlier this year, Odey joined his remaining colleagues at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in Mayfair for the hedge fund world’s equivalent of the Oscars. The black-tie gala gathered the City’s financial elite, who vied to beat competitors for awards in categories such as Equity Market Neutral & Quantitative Strategies, Event Driven & Distressed and the coveted Management Firm of the Year. Odey Asset Management won firm of the year, beating seven rivals. The awards are based on financial performance, but they confer industry-wide recognition and celebration on winners. By then, eight women had reported Odey’s behaviour to the press or police.
For some of the 13 women who spoke to the FT, Odey’s continued public rehabilitation has highlighted the limitations of the #MeToo movement. “Without standing up to him, he will do it again and continue doing it,” Louise said. “The number of known assaults is large enough now that we are able to validate each other’s stories and face him with the confidence needed to stop his vile behaviour continuing.”
Madison Marriage is the FT’s special investigations editor, Antonia Cundy is an FT special investigations reporter, and Paul Caruana Galizia is an editor and reporter with Tortoise Media
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Letters in response to this article:
An employment lawyer’s take on the Odey abuse story / From James Hockin, Senior Associate, Withers, London EC4, UK
