You can’t choose your family, and you sure as hell can’t choose your in-laws.
Just ask Pippa Middleton, who must be watching on in horror as a second round of rape claims are directed at her father-in-law, David Matthews [pictured above right with Pippa and her husband James].
The 74-year-old multi-millionaire businessman has been charged by French authorities over the alleged rape of a 15-year-old girl during the late 1990s.
South Yorkshire Police are also said to be looking into another rape allegation, which reportedly took place in the late 1980s.
Details below via US Weekly:
[Matthews] was taken for questioning by France’s Minor Protection Brigade in connection to an alleged incident that took place some time between 1998 and 1999, The Telegraph reports. He was charged with rape of a minor. AFP claims that a complaint about the alleged assault was made in 2017. Matthews was released from police custody and placed under legal supervision after being held for 48 hours.
“I confirm that David M was placed in police custody on 27 March at the Brigade for the Protection of Minors Protection,” a French judicial official told The Telegraph. “Following his arrest, the Paris public prosecutor’s office opened a judicial investigation, overlooked by an examining magistrate, who charged him with the rape of a female minor.”
Of course if you want the “inside sources” and “family sources” you need the Daily Mail, who have some more deets on what is alleged to have gone down.
A family source insisted Mr Matthews had been ‘set up’ to humiliate him and his family, just months after his financier son James married Kate Middleton’s sister.
The woman at the centre of the claims contacted police last year and initially told officers Mr Matthews had acted inappropriately towards her when she was 15.
She then told police from the French Brigade for the Protection of Minors she was raped in 1998 in St Barts – when she was 15 and Mr Matthews was in his fifties – and a year later in Paris.
The woman, now 35 and living in Britain, told police she had initially blamed herself for the attacks, which left her feeling ‘shocked and disgusted’.
She reportedly told police: ‘Afterwards I felt like I was to blame. I developed feelings of self-loathing and felt worthless.’
Matthews, who is represented by the Queen’s solicitors Farrer & Co, has said he “categorically denies the allegation and unequivocally contests the untrue and scandalous accusation”.
As for those other allegations, South Yorkshire Police refused to comment on the second accusation yesterday.
And here you were thinking Meghan Markle’s family had some skeletons in the closet.
