The Metropolitan police have opened a criminal investigation into David Walliams over alleged serious sexual offences, in a development that shifts the story from damaging public accusations into a formal police process.
The force said it had received “a number of allegations of non-recent serious sexual offences involving a man now in his 50s” and that the claims under investigation are separate from those reported by the Guardian and ITV News. Detectives are also reviewing that reporting to assess whether there is evidence of offences.
According to the Guardian, the allegations made directly to police are understood to have come from several people, with some dating back to the 2000s. Initial accounts given to detectives from the Met’s specialist crime division were enough for the force to escalate the matter into a full investigation led by officers specialising in serious and complex sexual offences.
Police did not name Walliams in their statement and declined to specify the alleged offences or say where they are claimed to have happened, citing the need to reduce the risk of identifying complainants. That caution is procedural, but it also marks the point where a lurid celebrity scandal becomes a matter of evidence, anonymity and criminal thresholds.
Walliams has denied wrongdoing. In a letter to journalists cited by the Guardian, he said he had at times behaved “thoughtlessly” in casual sexual relationships and regretted not always taking others’ feelings properly into account, but denied abusing power, breaking the law or being a sexual predator.
The Guardian and ITV News had reported allegations from multiple women, including accounts from two women who said they first met Walliams when they were 15 and felt they had been groomed. The joint investigation also reported claims that he used his status to pursue women through Britain’s Got Talent and at HarperCollins. Those are allegations, not criminal findings.
The Met said specialist officers are supporting those who have come forward. It also said Walliams has not been arrested. The Guardian reported that no searches have been carried out.
For a celebrity whose business depended heavily on family-friendly exposure, the commercial fallout was already moving before police did: the Guardian reported that Walliams has been dropped by his literary agency, had programmes removed from BBC iPlayer and had his Labour party membership suspended. The police inquiry does not prove the published allegations. It does mean they now sit beside a live criminal investigation, which is a different category of trouble entirely.
Ryan C 
Marcus Azzopardi 
Sophia Borg 