What interests me is not the prurient moralizing of the gutter press about the couple’s personal habits and the sadness of what was clearly once a love match, although one reinforced with status, security, and power—the latter seeming to be the tragic flaw which turned so toxic—but the narratives which are being written and rewritten about them, some of it by their own hands, or at one remove by their machinations. Saatchi had been portrayed as the heartbroken husband, making arrogant gestures and errors, granted, but essentially flailing in romantic grief, only to become the demonic slave-owner who cannot deal with the emancipation of what was once his property. Lawson, on the other hand, seems to have transmuted from battered housewife to apogee of modern feminism, facing down her accusers and tormentors in court and slaying the dragon of the patriarchy with integrity, a quick wit, and exceedingly well-applied make-up.
