END OF A FATAL AFFAIR
by Gavin Madeley The tragic celebrity DJ, his explosive relationship with a Scots millionaire’s model wife... and the Hollywood TV star sister left in mourning
AMID the austere oak panelling of a Scottish courtroom, the sight of such an uncommonly glamorous witness was enough to set pulses racing even before she delivered her explosive testimony.
By the close of proceedings, however, it was the jaw-dropping disclosures about the disintegration of former model Gemma Ramsay’s marriage to a millionaire Scots businessman – laid bare in excruciating detail – which left those present transfixed.
The case would have it all – scandal, sex, and the sparkle of international celebrity. In time, however, such titillation would pale as the Ramsays’ fractured relationship became overshadowed by tragedy.
Mrs Ramsay’s husband, Michael, stood accused of subjecting his wife to threatening or abusive behaviour by driving his Porsche along the A96 between Inverness Airport and Nairn at excessive speed towards another car before braking violently.
During a terrifying journey, she claimed he shook his fist at her before telling her to get out in the middle of nowhere in the dark. When she refused, Mr Ramsay drove on to Nairn police station, where he again invited her to get out. In the end, he drove them to their home in nearby Elgin, where they stalked off to the separate bedrooms they had occupied for months.
Mr Ramsay denied making threats or driving at excessive speed in his high-performance sports car in October 2016 and was later cleared – but he did admit jabbing his finger at his wife because he was upset and angry.
They would not be the first couple to have a blazing domestic in their car, one might imagine. Yet here is where the narrative diverges sharply from the ordinary.
It became clear that Mr Ramsay’s barely controlled rage stemmed from his knowledge of where she had been before he collected her from the airport that night and, more importantly, with whom. Sensational disclosures tumbled from his mouth as the then 59-year-old company director told Inverness Sheriff Court of the highly unconventional arrangement he had struck with his young wife in a vain attempt to salvage their doomed threeyear marriage.
GEMMA Ramsay had just flown back from London where she had been seeing an Essex playboy and celebrity DJ named Mark Vanderpump.
Her husband was fully aware of their affair and told the court that, although he was unhappy about it, he allowed it to continue because it seemed to be a tonic for her at a time when she was depressed.
He said she always returned from her trips south in a better frame of mind, adding: ‘It’s better to have an adulteress wife than no mother for our two children.’
There was more. This desperate cuckold claimed he had spent £70,000 on breast implants and nose jobs to placate his wife, then aged 34, and that on the drive from the airport the pair had argued over money, with Mr Ramsay complaining that Mr Vanderpump – the older brother of US reality TV superstar Lisa Vanderpump, no less – was not ‘paying his fair share’.
The very thought that a husband should expect his love rival – even one related to a fabulously wealthy television personality – to effectively split the difference over his wife’s cosmetic surgery was just one mad outcome of this bizarre ménage à trois, an uneasy pact which appeared destined to fail.
While a sheriff cleared Mr Ramsay of all charges, his marriage foundered amid bitterness – before Mrs Ramsay’s often volatile fling with Mr Vanderpump also began to implode in an atmosphere of deepening hostility. The story reached its nadir when a despairing Mr Vanderpump took a fatal overdose.
An inquest this week in Gloucester, near his Cotswold home, heard that ‘numerous life stresses’, including relationship problems, financial pressures and health issues in his family, all contributed to his death aged 59.
The coroner, Katy Skerrett, noted that transcripts of text exchanges recovered from his mobile showed he and Mrs Ramsay had been engaged in increasingly ‘intense’ arguments throughout the month leading up to his death on May 1 this year.
Recording a conclusion of suicide, she said: ‘It is clear from the text messages that his difficulties with his new relationship had reached a critical point during the month of April and the arguments between them were getting more intense in nature.’
His death came as a jolt to Mr Vanderpump’s friends and family. His famous sister issued a statement to her 1.79 million Twitter followers, saying: ‘He was my only sibling and I am shocked and saddened by his passing.’
Mrs Ramsay’s tone was less measured. ‘Everything has just fallen to pieces. I’m not in a good way,’ she told a tabloid newspaper earlier this year. ‘Mark was such a loving, caring individual who had a lot of struggles and he took on a lot of my problems as well. It was an amazing relationship – he looked after me and I looked after him. We were engaged to get married next year. He was the love of my life. It’s been an absolute nightmare.’
It is a nightmare in which a man lost his life and which was fated to play out amid the white-hot glare of publicity, given the backgrounds of the main players in this desperately sad affair.
Gemma Ramsay’s first real brush with the limelight came in 2003 when, at the age of 20, she entered a glamour model contest called High Street Honeys run by men’s magazine FHM. Using her maiden name of Walker she came fourth but made the most of the publicity to try to break into showbusiness. Soon afterwards, she landed a role as an exotic
dancer in an episode of ITV drama series A Touch of Frost, which was being filmed in her native Leeds.
While on set she met her first husband, the actor Patrick Baladi, better known as Neil Godwin, David Brent’s boss in BBC2’s smash sitcom The Office.
Presciently, in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2009, Baladi said: ‘I played the owner of an escort agency and strip club and she was hired as a dancer. She was quite striking, and I thought, “No, that’s going to be trouble, I should leave that alone”.’
Despite his instincts, Baladi said he contacted Walker and the two married in St Lucia in 2007 and have a daughter, Ava.
Baladi, the son of an English nurse and a Syrian doctor, introduced his wife to his actor friends, including best friend Keith Allen, with whom he sings in a band named Grow Up.
For a time Mrs Baladi harboured her own musical ambitions as part of a band called Dolly Mix. The group advertised for members and hoped to appear on The X Factor, but a pop career eluded her.
BY 2014 the couple had split up, although Baladi remains active in raising his daughter. She was remarried – to wealthy Elgin businessman Michael Ramsay, who was 25 years her senior.
At first, her new marriage afforded the couple great happiness and she bore her husband two young daughters. But things soon went downhill.
According to Mr Ramsay’s court evidence, his wife asked for money for two breast augmentations and four rhinoplasties and would fly to London for the procedures. It was during one trip south that she met Mark Vanderpump and they started seeing each other.
In an interview following Mr Vanderpump’s death, she denied that their affair was adulterous, insisting her marriage was already over.
She said: ‘From January 2016, Mike and I slept in separate bedrooms. We hadn’t been getting on for a long time. I’d given him his rings back. I told him I wanted out. We were still together on paper, but we had broken up.’
Mr Vanderpump also dismissed suggestions that Mrs Ramsay had cheated on her husband.
What is undeniable is that when the pair got together, the association with Mr Vanderpump’s name offered a portal into a world of celebrity that must have appealed to Mrs Ramsay. Her husband hinted in court that Mr Vanderpump had offered to resurrect her modelling career, possibly using the undoubted international pull of his younger sister.
Lisa Vanderpump is a bona fide worldwide star, the doyenne of hit US reality shows The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and its spinoff Vanderpump Rules. Mr Vanderpump’s own area of expertise was the music industry, where he met his ex-wife Simone with whom he had two sons.
During their 22-year marriage he steadily built up businesses and worked as a music consultant to major bar and club chains, including Tiger Tiger. He had been enjoying a career as a DJ and his Twitter feeds show him posing with JLS singer Marvin Humes, Geordie Shore’s Gaz Beadle and Scottish Big Brother star Sara McLean.
But where his career trajectory was well-paid, if unspectacular, his sister’s has been stratospheric. After attending London’s Corona Theatre School alongside Ray Winstone and Only Fools And Horses star Nicholas Lyndhurst, she fell into the lucrative world of commercials and pop videos – performing on the music video for Poison Arrow by Eighties band ABC.
By the age of 21, she was married to London restaurateur Ken Todd and heading to Los Angeles. There, the couple run 26 restaurants, bars and clubs and have amassed a joint fortune of £40million. When the Real Housewives franchise came knocking, her life effectively became part of Hollywood’s entertainment industry.
For her brother, things were on a downward slope with the collapse of his marriage and, on the face of it, he appeared to be going through a classic mid-life crisis. Perhaps keen to emulate his sister’s success, he was looking to boost his own television profile at the time he was introduced to Mrs Ramsay in London in 2016.
That year he had appeared on a Channel 5 documentary entitled Gold Digger and Proud, which followed the lives of women who hunt down men for their cash.
On the programme, Mr Vanderpump said he had just come out of a 22-year marriage and boasted: ‘I have lots of girlfriends. I enjoy the company of women and I’m dating four or five women at a time.’
Near the end of his life, it was clear relations within the Vanderpump family were not always cosy. Mrs Ramsay was present with her boyfriend in January this year when Mr Vanderpump had a heated argument with his sister in a New York restaurant. Reports in the US media stated that the row took place inside the exclusive Waverly Inn.
One witness said: ‘Lisa and her husband Ken and daughter Pandora were eating dinner with her brother Mark and a few others. They were all obviously really upset.
‘Lisa and her brother were shouting at each other so that the entire restaurant could hear. At one point, Lisa’s brother slammed his hands on the table and screamed “Enough is enough!”.’
REPORTS suggested other restaurant patrons were ‘in shock’ and Lisa Vanderpump, now 58, was said to be ‘extremely embarrassed’ by the incident.
By then, the Ramsays’ life was in turmoil. While he was locked in a protracted divorce and custody battle, Mr Ramsay’s business was failing.
The tycoon owned Scotland Electronics Limited in Forres, Moray, which went bust in April last year. The specialist firm folded despite receiving £1.2million in grants from taxpayer-funded Highlands and Islands Enterprise over a 19-year period.
HMRC lodged a claim over an unpaid tax bill and the firm was wound up at the Court of Session. All 11 employees were laid off.
This week, Mrs Ramsay could not be reached for comment about the findings of the inquest.
Mr Ramsay, who lives in a secluded property on a rural estate near Elgin, was looking after the couple’s young daughters when he was approached for comment this week. He declined to speak.
His former factory premises at nearby Forres Enterprise Park remains locked up and the only sign of life were members of a travelling community, who have set up camp in a car park to the rear of the building.
There are now several caravans, makeshift washing lines and children and dogs running loose at the site.
They will care little about the trail of human destruction which has led to this point; a business in ruins, lives in tatters.
When the dust finally settles on this tragedy, those involved might want to ask themselves: ‘Was it worth it?’