David Sullivan has stepped down as West Ham joint chair after seven women accused the 77-year-old co-owner of sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour in a joint Panorama and Times investigation set for publication on Monday.
The resignation on Saturday turned a long-running set of allegations into a public crisis for one of football’s most prominent owners. Sullivan said he wanted to focus on fighting what he called “factually incorrect and entirely false, decades-old allegations concerning my personal life,” but the timing of his exit made clear the story had already moved beyond private dispute and into the heart of the club.
The women said the conduct stretched back to the 1980s, when they were in their late teens or early twenties and trying to get modelling work through Sullivan’s Daily and Sunday Sport newspapers. One of them, Florence, said she was 20 when he manoeuvred her into a bedroom after a business meeting at his home and started having sex with her, despite her attempts to make excuses. She said he told her she could be one of his newspaper’s “regular girls” if they had sex. Two other women said they believed they had no choice but to sleep with him because they feared damaging their future modelling careers. Another former model said he locked the door when she tried to leave after he propositioned her for sex.
The accounts were not left to stand alone. Reporters said they checked diary entries, police material and other records, and spoke to friends and family members to help corroborate the women’s accounts. Eight women have separately made disclosures about Sullivan’s conduct to the Met or Essex Police, though he was never charged over the allegations.
Sullivan denies all the claims and his lawyers described Florence’s account as implausible. He has also separately admitted paying for sex in the 1990s with a girl he said he believed was 16 or 17, when he was in his 40s, at a time before that conduct became illegal in 2003. That disclosure does not settle the current allegations, but it does explain why the new investigation lands with such force: it places old claims, old police disclosures and a man who long held power over young women in the same frame.
For years, Sullivan was a wealthy gatekeeper in glamour modelling, with a fortune built through pornography, newspapers and football, and several of the women said they were fearful of speaking publicly because of the consequences. That fear, and the fact that most asked to remain anonymous, points to the unresolved question now facing police and the club alike: whether the disclosures attached to the Panorama investigation will end with a resignation, or lead to anything more formal.
