Saying she had “nothing to gain,” supermodel Naomi Campbell denied providing false testimony at the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who is accused of receiving blood diamonds.
“I’ve no motive here. Nothing to gain,” she said in a statement released in London late on Tuesday.
The model defended her testimony after her former agent, Carole White, and US actress Mia Farrow told judges this week that Campbell had accepted a gift of diamonds from Taylor and boasted about it the next day.
Farrow said Campbell had named Taylor as the man who sent her a “huge diamond.”
This contradicted Campbell’s testimony on Thursday last week at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, in which the model said she was not certain about the identity of the person who sent her the parcel of gems.
In her statement on Tuesday, the 40-year-old model did, however, concede that she had slipped up when she told judges during her testimony that coming to court was a “big inconvenience,” adding that: “I am a black woman who has and will always support good causes especially relating to Africa.”
According to White, the supermodel’s agent at the time, Campbell and Taylor had flirted throughout a charity dinner hosted by South Africa’s then-president Nelson Mandela in Pretoria in September 1997.
At one point, “she told me: ‘he is going to give me some diamonds,’” White said in her testimony on Monday. “She was very excited.”
Defending Taylor, lawyer Courtenay Griffiths on Tuesday branded White’s account a “complete pack of lies.”
On Monday, Griffiths also sought to discredit Farrow.
“Mia Farrow sees herself as the modern-day Mother Theresa to Africa,” he told a press conference. “She does not have an open mind so far as Charles Taylor is concerned. She is looking for sainthood.”
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