If you want to know more about why David Sullivan is accused of being a sexual predator, perhaps a good place to start is the television interview with one of the models who, in her own words, “got away” from the billionaire football-club owner.
Her name is Lindi Drew. She was a model and porn star in the 1980s and, in 2015, she was interviewed for a documentary, Respectable: The Mary Millington Story, telling the story of Sullivan’s former partner, a well-known name from the adult entertainment industry who died by suicide, aged 33, in 1979.
“I do know he (Sullivan) used to employ lots of girls and they would only be employed by him if they went round to his house first,” said Drew. “I don’t know whether I should say this, they used to call him ‘No-job Blowjobs’. If you didn’t give him a blowjob, you didn’t get a job. I never gave him a blowjob and I didn’t get a job … (laughing) I’m the one that got away.”
Sullivan was branded the ‘Sultan of Sleaze’ after building an empire of 150 sex shops and cornering the adult entertainment market before using his immense wealth, estimated at around £1.1billion ($1.5bn), to take control of West Ham United in January 2010, leading to the Premier League club moving into the stadium that was built for the 2012 Olympics in London.
Now, though, the 77-year-old has been named by seven women in a joint investigation by the BBC and The Times as a man who has faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct stretching back over decades, mostly involving young women, in their late teens or early 20s, seeking work as newspaper models.
They accuse Sullivan of exploitative behaviour, including pressuring them for sex during business meetings, where he allegedly offered to boost their careers if they slept with him or gave him oral sex.
Most of the women spoke on condition of anonymity — in some cases, according to the BBC, because “they fear Sullivan and are concerned about potential repercussions”.
David Sullivan has co-owned West Ham for more than 16 years (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
Sullivan retains a 38.8 per cent stake in West Ham but resigned as the club’s joint chair on Saturday, just hours after it was confirmed the BBC would be screening a Panorama documentary about his alleged behaviour.
In a statement, he said he wanted to focus on fighting what he called “factually incorrect and entirely false, decades-old allegations concerning my personal life”, describing the investigation as “fundamentally unfair” and saying he would sue the BBC “along with any other media outlet that repeats any libellous allegations”.
According to the joint investigation, eight women have made disclosures about Sullivan’s conduct to the London Metropolitan and Essex police forces. He has never been charged, with the police saying there was insufficient evidence to do so, and denies any criminality, stating that “the false allegations levelled against me have been sensationalised by the media”.
The Athletic has learned that he has separately admitted paying for sex in the 1990s with a girl who, he says, he believed was 16 or 17 years old. Sullivan was in his 40s at the time. It was made illegal to pay for sex with a 16 or 17-year-old in 2003.
The son of an RAF serviceman, Sullivan was brought up in a working-class family home in Wales before moving to Essex, a West Ham heartland, at the age of 10 and making himself a millionaire by the age of 25. He opened his first sex shop, called Private Shop, in 1978 and was soon in control of half of the UK adult magazine market with his business partner, David Gold.
“I am not embarrassed by what I have done,” Sullivan told The Times in 2007. “I’m in the adult entertainment industry and I have met some lovely girls and made a lot of money. I have given an awful lot of people a lot of pleasure and I have never hurt anyone.”
That is now in serious question after a series of allegations that prompted the English Football Association, without naming him, to announce in November 2024 it had begun its own investigation to determine “the risk this individual may, or does, pose to children and/or adults at risk within affiliated football”.
The FA chose not to invoke an Interim Suspension Order and has been criticised by a number of the alleged victims for not doing more.
“They have allowed David Sullivan to remain front and centre, held up as a leading light of football and deserving of the respect of millions,” one has told The Athletic, speaking with the lifelong anonymity that is granted automatically in the UK for someone who has made an allegation of sexual wrongdoing. “That has caused significant added trauma to the people who were exploited by him.”
The FA says it cannot speak about individual safeguarding investigations. “We operate a robust safeguarding programme across every level of English football, and all referrals to us are handled in line with our rigorous and stringent policies and procedures,” read a statement. “Appropriate action is always taken against individuals who pose or may pose a risk of harm to children and adults at risk in football.”
As for the Premier League’s fit-and-proper-person testing — or the Owners’ and Directors’ Test, to give it its proper name — that has never seemed a problem for Sullivan during West Ham’s time in the top division of English football, even though he already had a criminal conviction in 1982 for living off the immoral earnings of prostitutes.
Sullivan served 71 days in prison for that conviction before being freed on appeal and, within 10 years, he and Gold made their first venture into football, buying Birmingham City.
(Left to right) Birmingham City owners David Gold and David Sullivan, with the club’s managing director Karren Brady, in August 1995 (Bryn Colton/Getty Images)
By that stage, Sullivan was running the Daily Sport, in tandem with the Sunday Sport, proudly styling itself as “the world’s most outrageous newspaper” and claiming to have found a statue for the long-dead Elvis Presley on the planet Mars. Mostly, the sister titles were known for an extraordinarily high number of topless glamour models, prompting calls for them to be sold as top-shelf material, namely pornographic productions, rather than as bona fide newspapers.
The BBC Panorama documentary — Predator: The Billionaire Football Boss — was shown in the UK on Monday and recounted how Sullivan’s tabloids printed day-by-day countdowns to the 16th birthday of some models, the age at which it was legal to publish the first photographs of topless girls.
All the complaints in the BBC/Times investigation come from women seeking work at the Sport titles. Two said they felt they had no choice but to sleep with Sullivan to avoid damaging their future modelling careers, and accused him of abusing his power.
Within the football world, Sullivan is seen as a little man — short of 5ft tall even in stacked shoes — with big influence and powerful connections. He has garish fashion tastes, a reality TV star, Ampika Pickston, as his fiancee and an extravagantly decorated house with two waxwork butlers inside the front door.
Readers of Mark Killick’s 1994 book, The Sultan of Sleaze, may get a better understanding, however, why that nickname came about. “Sullivan often boasted to the newspapers that he had sex with every model who worked for him,” the author claimed.
Sullivan, Killick adds, could be surprisingly possessive, however, when it came to his girlfriends, quoting one, Tara Bardot, to make the point. “He’s allowed to see all the women he wants and bonk 10 times a day,” she says. “But he’d object if I were even talking to someone or he’d hear I was talking to someone. I’d say to him, ‘Well, look at how many women you bonk.’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, but I pay your bills.’”
Sullivan and Gold, who died aged 86 in 2023, were once branded “the Dildo Brothers” by Bruno de Carvalho, then president of Portuguese club Sporting CP in a 2017 row over an aborted transfer.
Sullivan, however, prefers to style himself more as a philanthropist and a “freedom fighter” for the porn industry who, as a child, would pray for three things before going to bed every night. “I wanted to be the captain of Cardiff City and Wales, I wanted to be a world champion boxer and I wanted to be a millionaire,” he once said.
David Sullivan and Ampika Pickston watch West Ham’s final match of the Premier League season on May 24 (Peter Tarry/PA Images via Getty Images)
This is not the first time he has faced allegations of abusing his position.
A tabloid sting in 1981 headlined “Come To Bed If You’re Seeking a Job” claimed that Sullivan was using an assumed name — “Don Bell, sales director” — and luring women to his house through adverts in his own sex magazine for “promotional entertainment work”. The article in the now-defunct News of the World newspaper interviewed one 24-year-old woman who claimed that, within two minutes of arriving, he told her his real name and asked her to go upstairs to his bedroom and undress.
“When I refused to have sex with him, he said, ‘If you aren’t going to do anything, it’s like a boxer without training — I don’t know what you can do.’ He seemed upset and couldn’t wait to get rid of me,” she told the newspaper.
Acting on this information, the reporter, Tina Dalgleish, went undercover, applying for the job herself, and claimed that Sullivan told her: “Do you want to get up to no good or not? I mean, my time is valuable.” Her article alleged Sullivan, then 32, invited her to his bedroom and asked her to strip so he could “see what my future was like”.
Sullivan declined to comment on this and other matters in this article when approached by The Athletic.
In 2008, he released a statement saying he “categorically denied” sexually assaulting a 25-year-old actress at his mansion in the Essex village of Theydon Bois. Then 59, he later told the Birmingham Mail he had been sexually touching the woman but that it was consensual. “I’m a rich person so I’m a target for this sort of thing,” he added. “That is the world we live in.”
Since then, a change in the UK privacy laws prevents the British media, in the vast majority of cases, from reporting the name of a criminal suspect unless that person has been charged with an offence. And that, in part, is why Sullivan has not been identified until now despite a slew of allegations being made to the Essex and Metropolitan police forces. Each case has ended with the police issuing an NFA notice — No Further Action.
Detectives could not proceed with one case because of a little-known legal anomaly — under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act — that has been described by the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) as “devastating” and “heartbreaking” for the people it works against.
The legislation states that if the alleged offence took place between 1956 and 2004, and the alleged victim was a girl aged 13 to 15, she had to make a complaint within a year or the case could not proceed. The complainant was 15 at the time of the alleged offence.
Another woman, who also made a non-recent allegation about an incident when she was 15 years old, took her case to a VRR (Victims’ Right to Review), which requires the police to re-examine a decision not to charge a suspect. The decision was upheld but the findings raised questions about the police tactics in the previous investigation.
“There was a missed opportunity within this investigation,” the VRR report, written by a detective superintendent, states. “He (Sullivan) was invited in for an interview, but I believe they should have arrested him and searched his property for items to support the investigation, especially as the victim believes she was recorded.”
Some of the complainants have expressed anger that, last year, West Ham became the first Premier League club to become an accredited employer by White Ribbon UK, a charity seeking to end male violence against women and girls. The award was said to reflect West Ham’s commitment to creating environments where women and girls felt “safe, valued and respected”. White Ribbon has been approached for comment.
Sullivan’s decision to step down at West Ham was preceded on April 21 by vice-chair Karren Brady — an aide to Alan Sugar on the BBC’s flagship show The Apprentice — announcing she was ending her 16-year association with the club. Brady, author of a book called Strong Woman, was awarded a Conservative peerage in 2014, becoming Baroness Brady of Kensington. Her association with Sullivan goes back to when she was employed as Birmingham’s managing director, aged 23, from that point onwards becoming a key figure in his inner circle.
Other staff in senior positions have also left West Ham, and Sullivan’s last involvement with the club was to oversee their relegation to the Championship amid protests and anger. A lot of supporters have been campaigning to rid the club of Brady and Sullivan because of the way they ran West Ham. Fans referred to them as ‘BS’ in their protest banners declaring: “No More BS — This Pair Are Killing Our Club.”
What happens next at West Ham remains to be seen. Sullivan, meanwhile, says that he is the true victim of this story. “After a lifetime spent building businesses in the adult industry in which I have met thousands of women, it is sadly inevitable that a small number of improper conduct claims are being made against me. I categorically deny these claims.”
