Thursday, March 14, 2024 – A business man on trial for punching a Miss Universe finalist 30 times after a text message argument claims it is ‘impossible’ he hit her because there were no marks on his hands.
Ricky Lawrence, 32, is also said to have bitten
ex-girlfriend Chloe Othen, 33, and pulled her hair during an hour-long quarrel
in the early hours of October 15, 2022.
Ms Othen, an Instagram influencer with 305,000 followers,
said she feared she would die after Lawrence threatened to slit her throat at
his £1.5m Knightsbridge apartment.
They had been in an ‘on and off’ relationship from December 2021 to May 2022, with Lawrence telling jurors at the Nightingale Crown Court in central London it was ‘nothing but trouble for six months’.
But he said they would bump into each other every two weeks
or so as they moved in similar social circles and slept together several times
till October that year, including while she was in a relationship with someone
else called Bora Guccuk.
Defending lawyer, Tony Wyatt,
asked: ‘We’ve heard the relationship being described as toxic – would you
agree?’
Lawrence said: ‘Oh yes,
absolutely.’
Mr Wyatt asked him: ‘Looking
back did you even like each other?’
Lawrence replied: ‘Looking
back at it, no, it was nothing but trouble in that space of six months of my
life.’
He said they exchanged messages between around midday and 2.30pm on October 14 before arranging to meet at 5.30pm that evening.
Ms Othen cancelled, and Lawrence next heard from her at
about midnight, he said, after which they then spoke every half an hour until
the early hours of October 15.
The jury was then shown WhatsApp messages exchanged between
Lawrence and Ms Othen on October 15 from 04.17am onwards.
These included messages from
Lawrence which said ‘You f***** up tonight. Watch what I do now you silly
c***”, and “I’ll do anything in my power to f*** up the rest of your life.
Screenshot that.’
Lawrence told the court the messages were ‘terrible’ and he
was ‘not proud of that’.
Asked by Mr Wyatt why he
wrote them, he said: ‘When you’ve had the last couple of months I’d had … there
comes a point when your language becomes more colourful than it might usually
be.’
Referencing the ‘Screenshot
that’ part of one message, Lawrence said: ‘She used to delete messages so I
couldn’t forward them to somebody else.’
Lawrence said he was going to tell Mr Gaccuk that he and Ms
Othen were having an affair.
He told the court he woke up at about 5.45am and answered
the door to Ms Othen straight afterwards.
Asked about Ms Othen’s condition at that time, Lawrence said
she was ‘clearly very, very drunk, or on something else’ and was ‘slurring’.
Lawrence said he answered Ms Othen’s phone, which she had put on the coffee table, after he saw it was Mr Guccuk ringing ‘to tell him she was at my house’.
He alleged Ms Othen then ‘panicked and started saying, “He’s
kidnapped me”’ whilst he was still on the phone, and that he put the phone back
on the table once the short call ended.
Lawrence said that after having ‘the same, repetitive
conversation’ with Ms Othen, he ‘scooped her up and held her almost like a
baby’ and took her to front door, again asking her to leave.
Ms Othen re-entered the flat but did eventually leave of her
own will, Lawrence said, and he did not hear anything else until around 12.30pm
later that day when police arrived at the property.
Mr Wyatt said: ‘Ms Othen said
you bit her, is there any truth in that?’
‘She has told us now in
evidence that actually that evening you punched her in the face and busted her
nose and that’s why she left.’
Lawrence said, ‘Absolutely not’, to both comments.
According to UK reports, Lawrence denied a charge of assault
occasioning actual bodily harm. The trial continues.
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