“For me, it’s real,” Lady Gaga tells Sky News. “There are a lot of things that I’ve been through in my life, traumatic experiences, that I drew upon to play Patrizia.”
The star is talking about Patrizia Reggiani, the Italian socialite convicted of hiring a hitman to assassinate her ex-husband and fashion powerhouse Maurizio Gucci, whom she is playing in the new House Of Gucci film – currently making headlines as its stars attend premieres and promo events in an array of fabulous outfits around the world.
I’d waited to speak to her in a virtual waiting room on Zoom, two days after the UK premiere for the film. The star is running “a bit late” – 40 minutes – but when the reason is due to outfit changes, it’s hard to complain. This is Lady Gaga, after all.
Image: Adam Driver stars as Maurizio Gucci alongside Gaga in the film. Pic: Fabio Lovino/MGM
When she does pop up on my screen, dressed in a pastel blue suit, off-camera she sounds tired but insists she’s happy to do the rounds with journalists to speak about the film, which is based on the true story of the family-run Gucci fashion empire. “I can’t wait for the world to see it,” she says. “We’ve had the worst 18 months, it’s time for the world to come together and watch movies!”
It’s been more than 10 years since Stefani Germanotta rose to fame as Lady Gaga and almost instantly cemented herself as one of the biggest – and most eccentrically-dressed – pop stars in the world, firing out hit after hit after hit; from Just Dance and Poker Face, to Paparazzi and Bad Romance, to Alejandro and Born This Way.
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Since then, she has proved there are even more strings to her bow, including her talents as an actress; in 2018, she won critical acclaim for A Star Is Born, giving a raw, emotional performance that saw her nominated for the Oscar for best actress (and winning the award for best original song) the following year.
When she speaks about House Of Gucci, though, in which she stars opposite Adam Driver, it’s clear that Reggiani is one of her most emotionally challenging roles to date. “I was so broken at the end,” she says. “I feel like I’m reliving the technique of the process of building this film every day when I speak to you about it.”
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Lady Gaga, of course, has a reputation for taking whatever she does very seriously (it takes some nerve to walk the red carpet in a meat dress, don’t you know?) and for House Of Gucci, she embraced method acting.
“I was in character for six months leading up to the film, and then for the three-and-a-half months that we filmed. I began with my accents, I would spend a lot of time talking to my family and everybody in my life to learn how to naturally speak with [the Italian] accent without it driving the acting.”
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Lady Gaga leads stars on House Of Gucci red carpet
Did that not drive your family a bit… mad? I ask tentatively.
She laughs: “I think my mom actually really liked it. She’s always embraced this artistic side of me, ever since I was a little girl. My father would laugh. I drove some people crazy, of course, but you know, I’m like a child with art and I love to immerse myself.”
So serious is Lady Gaga about this role that when I bring up being envious of her imagination, she’s keen to stress that what we see on screen isn’t fully acting. The singer, who has previously spoken out about being raped by a male music producer when she was 19, tells me she directed past trauma into making the role feel real.
“I think I’m just like everybody else really,” she says. “I’m imagining, sure. I’m creative, sure. But I think that being imaginative comes from a real place, it’s just how you choose to synthesise who you are.
“When I think about my real life experiences, there was a lot of things that I’ve been through in my life, traumatic experiences, that I drew upon to play Patrizia, and it’s not necessarily imaginative in that way. I mean I’m calling upon myself. Now, it might be imaginative to you, you might see it and say ‘oh that looks like it possesses imagination’, but for me it’s not imaginative, it’s real.”
Image: The star says the film has made her reflect on her Italian-American heritage. Pic: Fabio Lovino/MGM
Gaga says the film (which is set mostly in Italy) has made her reflect on her Italian-American roots and just how far she has come since the start of her career. “I’m really grateful… my family worked so hard on the soil where we filmed so that I could have a better life, and here I am starring in a Ridley Scott film,” she says.
Strip away the costumes and wigs and the singer certainly brings an equally gripping intensity to the filmmaker’s latest work.
“I felt so empowered as a woman on set with mostly men and I felt loved,” she says. “He’s an absolute legend and he’s masterful at what he does. His process is like an architect, he describes the script as the blueprint.”
And as for the fact that the script is based on true events…
She laughs: “To say that the Guccis were complicated would be a massive understatement. It’s amazing, you know, how you say things like, ‘you can’t make this up’. The truth about this whole story is you watch it and it’s actually unbelievable that it’s true.”
Reggiani, who is currently in prison, was convicted in 1998 of hiring a hitman to kill her husband.
“I have no interest in trying to make a case for why this should have happened,” Gaga says. “I don’t believe this should have happened, it’s reprehensible, it’s horrible… when this murder took place, I believe it happened because she was so traumatised, so hurt, that she made a terrible, awful mistake that she deeply regrets.”
Was the emotional exhaustion Lady Gaga suffered bringing Reggiani’s story to the screen worth it? Audiences will get to find out when House of Gucci comes out in cinemas on 26 November.
In October 2016, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint – with jewellery worth millions of dollars stolen during the audacious heist in Paris.
It was the biggest robbery of an individual in France for more than 20 years – and made front pages around the world.
Now, almost a decade on, the case is finally coming to court.
Why has it taken so long? Will Kardashian give evidence? And who exactly are the “grandpa robbers” facing trial?
Here’s everything you need to know.
Image: Kardashian at the Siran Presentation on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
What happened?
Two years after Kardashian and rapper Kanye West tied the knot in an ostentatious week-long celebration spanning Paris and Florence, the Kardashian-West clan were back in the French capital for Paris Fashion Week.
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Her then husband had returned to the US to pick up his Saint Pablo tour – but Kardashian, along with her sister Kourtney and various members of their entourage, remained in Paris, staying in an exclusive set of apartments so discreet they’ve been dubbed the No Address Hotel.
Nestled on Tronchet Street, just a stone’s throw from Place de l’Opéra, and close to the fashionable Avenue Montaigne, the Hotel de Pourtalès is popular with A-list stars staying in the French capital.
A stay in the Sky Penthouse, the suite occupied by Kardashian, will currently set you back about £13,000 a night.
Image: Kardashian was staying at the Hotel de Pourtales
On the evening of 3 October, after attending a fashion show with her sister, Kardashian remained in the apartment alone while the rest of her convoy – including her bodyguard Pascal Duvier – went out for the night.
At about 2.30am, three armed men wearing ski masks and dressed as police forced their way into the apartment block – and according to investigators, they threatened the concierge at gunpoint.
Two of them are alleged to have forced the concierge to lead them to Kardashian’s suite. He later told police they yelled at him: “Where’s the rapper’s wife?”
Kardashian said she had been “dozing” on her bed when the men then entered her room.
She has said she believes her social media posts provided the alleged robbers with “a window of opportunity”.
“I was Snapchatting that I was home, and that everyone was going out,” she said in the months after the incident.
The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star vividly described the attack in a police report, as reported in the French weekly paper Le Journal du Dimanche.
“They grabbed me and took me into the hallway. They tied me up with plastic cables and taped my hands, then they put tape over my mouth and my legs.”
She said they pointed a gun at her, asking specifically for her ring and also for money.
Image: Police guard the entrance to the Hotel de Pourtalès the day after the robbery
Kardashian says they carried her into the bathroom and put her in the bathtub. She said she was wearing only a bathrobe at the time.
She had initially thought the robbers “were terrorists who had come to kidnap me”, according to a French police report taken in New York three months after the robbery.
Kardashian told officers: “I thought I was going to die.”
According to police, the robbers – who left the room after grabbing their haul, escaped on bicycles with items estimated to be worth about $10m (£7.5m), including a $4m (£3m) 18.88-carat diamond engagement ring from West.
After they had left, Kardashian said she escaped her restraints and went to find help. After speaking to detectives, she immediately returned to the US on a private jet and later hired a completely new security team.
Image: Kardashian shows off her $4m ring on Instagram
What was stolen?
As well as her engagement ring, Kardashian said the thieves took her large Louis Vuitton jewellery box, which she said contained “everything I owned”.
In police reports given to the French authorities at about 4.30am on the night of the alleged robbery, Kardashian listed these items as having been stolen:
• Two diamond Cartier bracelets • A gold and diamond Jacob necklace • Diamond earrings by Lauren Schwartz • Yanina earrings • Three gold Jacob necklaces • Little bracelets, jewels and rings • A Lauren Schwartz diamond necklace • A necklace with six little diamonds • A necklace with Saint spelt out in diamonds • A cross-shaped diamond-encrusted Jacob cross • A yellow gold Rolex watch • Two yellow gold rings • An iPhone 6 and a BlackBerry
Police recovered only the diamond-encrusted cross that was dropped by the robbers while leaving.
It’s likely the gold in the haul was melted down and resold, while the diamond engagement ring that is now so associated with the robbery would be far too recognisable to sell on the open market.
Image: Kardashian at the Siran Presentation on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
What will happen in court?
The hearing will begin at the Court of Appeal of Paris – the largest appeals court in France – on 28 April and is scheduled to last a month.
It will consist of a presiding judge, two professional assessors, and six main jurors.
The hearing involves more than 2,000 documents and there are four civil parties.
Image: Kardashian at the Balenciaga show on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
Who is being tried?
There were initially 12 defendants in the case, but one person has died and another has a medical condition that prevents their involvement. This means 10 people – nine men and one woman – are standing trial.
Five of them, who were all aged between 60 and 72 at the time of the incident, face armed robbery and kidnapping charges. They are:
• Yunice Abbas • Aomar Ait Khedache • Harminv Ait Khedache • Didier Dubreucq • Marc-Alexandre Boyer
Abbas, 72, has admitted his participation in the robbery. In 2021, he published a book about the robbery, titled I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian. In 2021, a court ruled he would not benefit financially from the book.
Aomar Ait Khedache, 69, known to French crime reporters as “Old Omar”, has also admitted participating in the heist but denies the prosecution’s accusation that he was the ringleader.
The remaining five defendants are charged with complicity in the heist or the unauthorised possession of a weapon. They are:
• Florus Heroui • Gary Mader • Christiane Glotin • François Delaporte • Marc Boyer
Among those, Mader was a VIP greeter who worked for the car company Kardashian used in Paris, and Heroui was a bar manager who allegedly passed on information about Kardashian’s movements.
With many of the accused now ageing and with various serious health conditions, and some having spent time in jail following their arrest, all are currently free under judicial supervision.
If found guilty, those accused of the more serious crimes could face 10 years to life imprisonment.
Image: Kardashian at the Off-White show three days before the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
Will Kardashian give evidence?
Yes.
Lawyer Michael Rhodes said Kardashian has “tremendous appreciation and admiration for the French judicial system” and “wishes for the trial to proceed in an orderly fashion in accordance with French law and with respect for all parties to the case”.
A trainee lawyer herself, Kardashian has become a high-profile criminal justice advocate in the US in recent years.
Image: (R-L) Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kris Jenner in the front row three days before the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
Why has it taken so long to come to court?
There was initially a manhunt after the robbery, with French police under pressure to prove that Paris’s security was not in question.
Just the year before in 2015, the capital had been shaken by terrorist attacks by Islamic militants, in which 130 people were killed, including 90 at a music event at the Bataclan theatre.
French police initially arrested 17 people in the Kardashian case in January 2017 – three months after the robbery – assisted by DNA traces found on plastic bands used to tie her wrists. Twelve people were later charged.
It was ordered to be sent to trial in 2021 – at a time when limited court proceedings were happening due to multiple COVID lockdowns, and France was holding its largest ever criminal trial over the November 2015 terror attacks.
Image: Kardashian at the Givenchy show on the day of the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
What has Kardashian said about the incident?
Kardashian has described the robbery as a “life-changing” moment. She took three weeks away from filming her reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and took a three-month break from social media.
In a March 2017 episode titled Paris, Kardashian first spoke publicly about her ordeal.
She described first hearing a noise in her apartment, and calling out, thinking it was her sister and assistant: “At that moment when there wasn’t an answer, my heart started to get really tense. Like, you know, your stomach just kind of like, knots up and you’re like, ‘OK, what’s going on?’ I knew something wasn’t quite right.”
She went on: “They asked for money. I said, ‘I don’t have any money’. They dragged me out to the hallway on top of the stairs. That’s when I saw the gun, clear as day. I was looking at the gun, looking down back at the stairs. I was like, I have a split second in my mind to make this quick decision.
“Either they’re going to shoot me in the back or if I make it [down the stairs] and the elevator does not open in time or the stairs are locked, there’s no way out.”
Three months later, she told a Forbes Power Women’s Summit she had changed her approach to posting on social media: “They had followed my moves on social media, and they knew my every move and what I had.”
She added: “It was definitely a huge, huge, huge lesson for me to not show off some of the things that I have. It was a huge lesson to me to not show off where I go.
“It’s just changed my whole life, but I think for the better.”
Image: West and Kardashian at the Off-White show three days before the robbery. Pic: Rex Features
In October 2020, Kardashian told US interviewer David Letterman she feared she would be raped and murdered during the heist, and that her sister had been at the forefront of her mind during the incident.
Speaking on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Kardashian said: “I kept on thinking about Kourtney, I kept on thinking she’s going to come home and I’m going to be dead in the room and she’s going to be traumatised for the rest of her life if she sees me… I thought that was my fate.”
When speaking to French police about the impact the robbery had had on her three months after it, Kardashian said: “I think that my perception of jewellery now is that I am not as attached to it as I used to be. I don’t have the same feeling about it. In fact, I even think that it has become a bit of a burden to have the responsibility of such expensive jewels.
“There is nothing of sentimental value to compare with the act of going home and finding one’s children and one’s family.”
She went on to describe Paris as “not the right place” for her, and didn’t return to the French capital for two years following the robbery.
Kardashian has since said in a 2023 episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians that she did not purchase any jewellery in the seven years following the robbery, kept no jewellery at her home and only wore items that are either borrowed or fake.
She said the realisation that material items don’t matter has made her “a completely different person in the best way”.
She told Sky News how returning feels like the society has “made good on something that was wrong”.
Image: Sophie Lloyd, who tricked the Magic Circle into believing she was a man
How did she infiltrate that exclusive group that nowadays counts the likes of David Copperfield and Dynamo as members?
In March of that year, she took her entry exam posing as a teenage boy, creating an alter-ego called Raymond Lloyd.
“I’d played a boy before,” she explained, but “it took months of preparation” to secretly infiltrate the Circle’s ranks half a year before it would officially vote to let women in.
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“Really, going back 30 years, men’s clubs were like, you know, just something you accepted.”
The men-only rule had been in place since the Circle was formed in 1905. The thinking behind it being that women just couldn’t keep secrets.
Aware of the frustration of female magicians at the time, Lloyd felt she was up for the challenge of proving women could be as good at magic as the men.
The idea was, in fact, born out of a double act, thought up by a successful magician called Jenny Winstanley who’d wanted to join herself but wasn’t allowed.
She recognised the hoax would probably only work with a much younger woman posing as a teenage boy, and met Lloyd through an acting class.
Image: Sophie Lloyd as teenage magician Raymond Lloyd. Pic: Sophie Lloyd
Lloyd said: “We had to have a wig made… the main thing was my face, I had plumpers made on a brace to bring his jawline down.”
To hide her feminine hands, she did the magic in gloves, which she says “was so hard to do, especially sleight of hand.”
The biggest test came when she was invited for a drink with her examiner, where she had to fake having laryngitis.
“After the exam, which was 20 minutes, he invited Jenny and I – she played my manager – and I sat there for one hour and three quarters and had to say ‘sorry, I’ve got a bad voice’.”
Raymond Lloyd passed the test, and his membership certificate was sent through to Sophie.
Then, in October of the same year, when whispers started circulating that the society was going to open its membership to both sexes, she and Jenny decided to reveal all. It didn’t go down well.
Rather than praise her performance, members were incandescent about the deception and, somewhat ironically, Raymond Lloyd was kicked out just before women members were let in.
Lloyd said: “We got a letter… Jenny was hurt… she was snubbed by people she actually knew, that was hurtful. However, things have really changed now…”
Three decades later the Magic Circle put out a nationwide appeal stating they wanted to apologise and Lloyd was recently tracked down in Spain.
While Jenny Winstanley died 20 years ago in a car crash, as well as Sophie receiving her certificate on Thursday, her mentor’s contribution to magic is being recognised at the special show that’s being held in both their honour at the Magic Circle.
Lloyd says: “Jenny was a wonderful, passionate person. She would have loved to be here. It’s for her really.”
Counter terror police are assessing a video reported to be from a concert by Irish rappers Kneecap.
A social media clip of the hip hop trio on stage appeared to show one member of the group shout “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”.
The footage was posted online by Danny Morris from the Jewish security charity, the Community Security Trust.
He said it was from a gig last November at London’s Kentish Town Forum.
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said: “We have been made aware of the video and it has been referred to the counter terrorism internet referral unit for assessment and to determine whether any further police investigation may be required.”
Hamas and Hezbollah are both proscribed as terrorist groups in the UK. Under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, it is an offence to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation”.
Sky News has contacted Kneecap’s management for comment.
It comes after TV personality Sharon Osbourne called for Kneecap’s US work visas to be revoked after accusing them of making “aggressive political statements” including “projections of anti-Israel messages and hate speech” at Coachella Music and Arts Festival.