Pippa Middleton’s father-in-law accused of raping ‘family friend’

Pippa Middleton’s father-in-law, tycoon businessman David Matthews, has been accused of rape by a second woman who is believed to be a former family friend.



The British woman, now thought to be in 60s, reported her claims about David Matthews to South Yorkshire Police earlier this week.

This is coming after multi-millionaire Mr David Matthews, 74, was quizzed by French prosecutors over claims he raped a minor, a claim he strenuously denied.

David Matthews was arrested at a Paris airport last week and appeared in court after the woman, now aged 35, told police he carried out two offences between 1998 and 1999, when she was 15 and he in his fifties.

One was allegedly in Paris and the other on the Caribbean island of St Barts, where he and his wife Jane own a £5,000-a-night hotel.

The lady told officers she had initially blamed herself for the attacks, which left her feeling ‘shocked and disgusted’, saying: ‘Afterwards I felt like I was to blame. I developed feelings of self-loathing and I felt worthless.’

Mr Matthews vehemently denied the younger woman’s allegations, with friends suggesting he is the victim of a ‘revenge’ plot.

Now, this second woman says Pippa Middleton’s father-in-law assaulted her in Sheffield in the 1980s, when she would have been in her twenties or thirties. She came forward after the first woman’s claims surfaced last weekend.

In the 1980s, when he allegedly forced her to have sex with him, she was believed to be a friend of the family.

DailyMailUK reports there was no immediate comment from David Matthews yesterday about the latest claims, published by The Sun newspaper. He has not been arrested or questioned.

Sources close to Mr Matthews insist he has been ‘set up’ over the first allegation to humiliate him, nearly a year after his financier son James married Prince William’s sister-in-law Pippa Middleton.

David Zara, who has known the former racer and property magnate for decades, said the rape allegations were completely out of character.

‘David is not that sort of person. He is certainly not a rapist and certainly not a child molester.’
He said the Me Too movement, established in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sex abuse scandal, had made it ‘hunting season on powerful people’.