Big House for Bellamy?

November 24 - 2006

The trial of Liverpool’s $12million waste of space has begun, and the first day’s proceedings weren’t pretty: aspersions, contradictory testimony, and reopened breast-enhancement scars all made an appearance. Two wildly different versions of the nightclub incident arose along the way. First, the victim’s account, according to the BBC:

Ms Palmer, now 20, from Barry, near Cardiff, said she encountered Mr Bellamy as she walked along a corridor to the VIP bar with two friends on 5 February 2006.

“I began to walk through the gap and Craig Bellamy was walking in the other direction and he bumped into me. He was quite aggressive, he was just swaggering around,” she said.

“I turned around and said to him: ‘Excuse me why couldn’t you wait in that gap there?’”

She said Mr Bellamy swore at her, saying she was too fat to get around and called her a “slag”.

“I can’t remember if he pushed her or she pushed him first, but they both pushed each other,” she said, adding that the footballer proceeded to follow her. “He grabbed me with both hands around the neck and held me up against the wall and he was squeezing,” she said.

The victim suffered bruising of the neck and a reopening of a scar on her breast. Damning stuff. And now for Bellamy’s version:

Mr Bellamy said he had caught the eye of one of the women who asked “what he was looking at”. He said he replied: “If I was looking at anyone it would be those two behind you because they are far prettier.”

Mr Bellamy said the woman slapped him and he made a counter complaint to the police.

Yeah, and we have a good friend named Appomattox Courthouse. “Far prettier” is not something Craig Bellamy would say. “Way more fit than you fat slags” would be more like it, but “far prettier” is a nonstarter. We’re not saying the girls are telling the truth, but clearly Bellamy’s version is glossed up.

We’ll follow the story in the coming weeks, and bring you all the lurid updates.