Tessa Dahl evades jail by agreeing to therapy

The latest chapter in the often troubled life of socialite Tessa Dahl, daughter of children’s writer Roald Dahl and Oscarwinning American actress Patricia Neal, was played out this week at Litchfield Judicial District Courthouse in Torrington, Connecticut.

Named in her youth by Time magazine as one of the five most beautiful women in the world, Tessa was spared a jail sentence for larceny (theft) on the condition she seeks treatment and therapy.

As I disclosed earlier this year, Dahl, 60, was arrested last November when she abruptly departed the £140-anight Interlaken Inn in Connecticut after running up an unpaid bill of £3,970. her police mugshot (above) graphically stripped bare the vestiges of her once radiant glamour and she faced between one and five years in prison if convicted.

That is a fate she has now been spared, after a deal was struck on Tuesday between the state prosecutor and Tessa’s attorney, Mark Sherman. Gregory L. Borrelli, deputy assistant state’s attorney, tells me that the state of Connecticut has decided not to prosecute her — ‘ nolle prosequi’ — after Tessa, who intended to plead not guilty, agreed to a number of conditions.

‘ The state, in its discretion, required that she seek individual treatment and therapy, as well as make full restitution to the victim,’ adds Borrelli.

‘I put on the record that the “victim”, through the representative of the Interlaken Inn, submitted a letter to my office stating that it had “no objection” to the state entering a nolle prosequi, after Ms Dahl “made full restitution” and “expressed remorse and regret” for her actions.’

Tessa’s family will hope that she will seize the chance offered by this reprieve, not least her ex-supermodel daughter Sophie, the oldest of Tessa’s four children by three different men. In 2003, Sophie paid for one of her mother’s previous stints in rehab.

The auguries are not necessarily promising. Tessa has admitted that, even as a child receiving clinical attention in tandem with her mother, she ‘had the shrink wound around my little finger’. Tessa has recalled how her father doped her with tranquillisers from an early age to help cope with a series of family tragedies.

Roald said of Tessa before he died in 1990: ‘ She’s by far the most complicated of my children, but she’s the most interesting.’