He was the British rugby superstar whose career was derailed by his tabloid-filling lifestyle. Now a husband, step-grandad and advocate of magic mushrooms, he tells Hadley Freeman that the papers never knew the half of it.
Danny Cipriani and I are sitting in a hotel room, knee to knee, talking about sex. Specifically, the ludicrous amount of sex he had during his golden years as a professional rugby player, when he was initially seen as the sport’s David Beckham, someone whose pretty looks were matched by his talent. Cipriani’s love life put him on newspaper front pages as much as his rugby playing put him on the back ones, thanks to his habit of dating celebrities (Kelly Brook, Katie Price, Lindsay Lohan, all the usual suspects). I assumed that much of what was reported was an exaggeration, but it turns out the tabloids didn’t know even a fraction of it.
“It’s not unusual for me to sleep with three different women in one day,” he writes in his new memoir, the present-tense-heavy, Zoolanderishly titled Who Am I? Those women were “everyone from porn stars to actresses to girls I meet at the coffee shop”, and he learnt to be “very disciplined with the timings, shuffling one girl out of the house just in time for the next one to turn up”. (This may prompt bleak laughs from some former coaches, who found Cipriani less disciplined with timings when it came to turning up to practice.) It’s amazing you had any energy for rugby, I tell him.
“Listen, we’re so much more powerful than our mind or body thinks. But I was very specific with how I did it, so it was three on my off days, one when I was training, and the night before a game I would have the night off,” he says, and then rethinks that: “Sometimes.”
With its tales of sex and drugs and rugby balls, Cipriani’s memoir is a heck of a read, even for the sport ignoramus. It’s not a kiss and tell — in fact, he hardly names any women in it at all, although plenty have named him. Kelly Brook savaged him in her memoir. Given she reportedly caught him cheating on her with seven other women, he describes that as “only fair. I reaped what I sowed.” As for his ex-girlfriend Katie Price, she called him “Danny Chipolata”.
“I didn’t go out with Katie Price. But I did sleep with her,” he clarifies. But he didn’t stay in touch with any of the countless — and yes, he once tried counting — women he slept with, he says, the rare exceptions being Lindsay Lohan (“just really sweet”) and, famously, Caroline Flack. More on her shortly.
But look, Cipriani — now 35, married to a woman called Victoria and ostensibly retired from the sport (he is a free agent after parting ways with Bath last year) — doesn’t want anyone to think that he’s boasting about all this. “As much as I was having fun, it wasn’t from a happy place,” he says. This may or may not convince any young men that a life of — as he describes it in the book — rugby, partying and having sex is really an expression of psychological torment. But so much of it came from a need for validation from women because he never got it from his mum — not that he’s blaming her, he explains in the earnest tone of a man who has done, he says, “a lot of work on myself” (he means therapy).
I tell him I get that, but I just don’t get how he did it. Yes, as rugby players go, Cipriani is easier on the eye than, say, Mike Tindall. But three a day?
“I probably slept with a lot of women that I shouldn’t have. But I didn’t know how just to be with a woman. All I knew was how to bring them in,” he says, and to illustrate he does something with his eyes — widen them? Dilate them? It’s hard to say. All I know is I suddenly hear a giggle and realise in horror it’s me. Stop it, Danny!
Cipriani is very understanding about the interest in his love life: “I get it, sex makes the world go round and there’s a fascination in the fun of it,” he says with a smile (stop it, Danny!). But before he was known for his romances, he was known as the most preternaturally gifted rugby player England had produced for years.
He grew up on the Lockyer estate in Putney, southwest London, a working-class kid with a white English mother and an Afro-Caribbean father who moved back to Tobago when Cipriani was still at school. Cipriani was a skilled footballer and cricketer, and Queens Park Rangers, Reading, Chelsea and Surrey all expressed interest in signing him. In the end, he went for rugby, and his talent for the game got him scholarships to the Oratory boarding school in Reading, followed by Whitgift in Croydon.
In 2006, when he was only 18, he signed for Wasps and his fast, joyful playing style, at fly-half or fullback, made him a star from the start. His good looks didn’t hurt either. But he knows what people say about him now: “A rugby-playing kid who had everything at his feet and threw it away,” he shrugs. Coaches complained he was too mouthy, journalists complained he was too caught up in his celebrity and, as he puts it, “I gave too many people too many excuses to write me off as a dickhead.”
These excuses include, but are not limited to, being hit by a bus while dressed as a WWE wrestler on a night out in 2013; being arrested at 5am for drink-driving in 2015, hours after playing for England at Twickenham; being arrested again in 2018 for assaulting a nightclub doorman and a policewoman soon after he’d signed to Gloucester. In the end, the man who was once pitched as English rugby’s saviour got only 16 caps because, many said, of his self-destructive foolishness.
Cipriani sees things differently. He doesn’t deny his personal flaws: “I know my shadows and I’ve danced with them,” he says. But his story is not how it’s been reported, which is why he agreed, after years of saying no to publishers, to write his memoir. From his perspective he was a working-class maverick whose career was thwarted by the stuffy stick-in-the-mud chaps who run rugby, and he packs his book with testimonies from others to confirm this take. The people who sing his praises include his former head coach at Wasps, Shaun Edwards (“a joy to work with”); his team-mate at Sale Sharks, Mark Cueto (“that rare combination of exceptional natural talent and relentless work ethic”); and, perhaps most persuasively, Jonny Wilkinson, who as a player and a person is pretty much the opposite to Cipriani. Given that Cipriani was once pitched as Wilkinson’s successor, many assumed they would be rivals, yet the two are close friends.
“I’m very much a feel person, I wasn’t ever much of a thinker,” Cipriani says. “But Jonny is so intellectual, and his intellect triggers so many feelings in me, and I then put words to it, and then I trigger something in him and we go back and forth. It’s a really beautiful relationship in that way. I’m so lucky to have befriended him the way I have. He’s a very special person in my life.”
Wilkinson probably nails a big part of Cipriani’s problems when he says “most coaches favour players who do damn fine stuff a lot of the time over players who do miraculous stuff some of the time”. But to Cipriani, the problem goes deeper: English rugby was never going to accept someone like him. “I’m this kid from a council estate and I came to rugby and the sport has not stopped talking about me since. So was I doing something wrong or was I revealing something that was wrong about it?” he asks.
Because he was very close to his laid-back, good-time-guy dad, Jay, Cipriani says that he felt “more black than white — it was just my skin that was white”. These days, when he visits his father in Tobago, he’s still the same guy who used to drag his little son round the pubs of west London: “He likes to drink and go to parties and everyone loves him. I’m, like, ‘Dad, you’re 66, I want to go to bed!’ It’s like I’m the parent. But he’s cool.”
Cipriani’s cabbie mum, Anne, is a very different proposition. She would go out to drive her cab before her son was even up for school, determined to earn enough to send him to a fancy private prep school with proper sports facilities. But according to Cipriani she didn’t have a maternal instinct. Instead, she gave him, he writes, “a hard gristly love that’s hard to swallow”. She never said she was proud of him: “It was always, right, now on to the next thing.” He remains close to her, although she is “still the way she was when I was a kid”.
With an absent father and a busy single mum, Cipriani’s upbringing was very different from that of most English rugby players. “I didn’t have that loving, protective family, and I learnt to make decisions for myself from a young age. Football players are unbelievable decision makers because they often grow up in areas that are more rough and ready and maybe they don’t have the discipline at home, so they’re making decisions from a young age,” he says.
But rugby coaches, he continues, expect their players to follow orders, something Cipriani was never good at. When he was 20 he made his debut for England at Twickenham. After the game, in which England had trounced Ireland, he was interviewed by the BBC, pop-eyed with excitement. Although Jamie Noon had been named man of the match, Cipriani said that the victory was down to the whole team: “It’s the f***ing numbers one to eight who deserve the man of the match — I can’t believe I’ve just sworn on live TV!” he said with a laugh. Others were less amused. As his former coach Brian Ashton recalls in Cipriani’s memoir, “Danny had replaced a god of English rugby in Jonny Wilkinson, and I imagine people from the RFU [Rugby Football Union] and in the media were thinking, is this the sort of person we want representing our country?”
Does he ever think that maybe he should have become a footballer instead? So much of what he struggled with in rugby — the snobbery, the conformity, the dislike of his celebrity — wouldn’t have been a problem there. When he was 23 he considered signing for MK Dons in Milton Keynes, but instead opted to play rugby in Australia for the Melbourne Rebels.
“I’m sure in a different realm I played football and I had a great career, and everyone said how great I was. But that wouldn’t have served the part of me that needed to experience all this,” he says with a Zen smile. (Cipriani, if you couldn’t tell, has recently discovered meditation.)
Back in 2008, when he was 21, Cipriani had a one-night stand with a woman called Larissa. The tabloids later revealed she — as he puts it in his memoir — “used to be a bloke called Darren”. His team-mates nicknamed him, not very catchily, “Danny Cipriani Who Slept with a Man”. He didn’t blink but instead retorted: “You all couldn’t shag her if you tried and I’ll take all your girlfriends anyway,” which shut them up. I tell him how impressed I am with how he wrote about Larissa in his memoir, without any regret or embarrassment.
“Nah, it didn’t faze me. I know my intention was I thought she was female, and anyway, I had huge identity issues too, growing up mixed-race and everything,” he says. But did he not, um, notice anything at the time? “You know, I was a little tipsy, and when I have a memory of it I remember her putting Vaseline down there or something. But I wasn’t that experienced then, in the grand scheme of things.”
His relationship with Kelly Brook is what really sent his celebrity into the stratosphere. She was, he says, his “first love”. They got together when he was recovering from a disastrous ankle fracture in 2008. They were photographed everywhere, although he says he never really liked going to the fancy restaurants (“I look so pissed off in all the photos”). Their relationship was on-again, off-again, and at one point when she broke up with him he cut his wrist with some broken glass: “I’m not intending to end it all, I just desperately want to feel something,” he writes.
Self-harm and depression were the rare parts of Cipriani’s life that he mostly managed to keep hidden from the press. When he was 22, he tried to buy a gun to take his own life and he was saved only because the gun seller never turned up (instead, almost inevitably, the seller took the story to a tabloid — but the paper refused to run the story because of concerns about Cipriani’s mental health).
Cipriani had always been a joyful kid, and he says his depression began in response to all the negative press coverage he got after his ankle fracture. I ask if he thinks it might have had something to do with all the concussions he was getting in the game, as some have suggested there might be a link.
“Maybe potentially for some people. I’ve had a lot of concussions, actually, and played with concussion, but because I wanted to get my bonus or I was trying to play for England I made sure I passed every test to play the following week. The game was a bit blurry, but I knew I’d get through it because I knew how to manoeuvre and do what I had to do. It obviously has some kind of impact.”
For those who had dismissed Cipriani as just a pretty party boy, the video he posted on Instagram in February 2020, right after the Love Island presenter Caroline Flack had taken her own life, was a revelation. He talked eloquently through tears about his grief for a woman he had briefly dated and stayed close friends with afterwards, and revealed that she had tried to call him the night she died, but he couldn’t answer because he had a match.
I ask what they used to talk about. “She was fascinated with how I’d come through all the difficulties I’d had with the media and so on, and how I’d overcome my suicidal thoughts, so we talked about that. I knew how much she was affected by the things people said about her and I’d tell her, ‘You’re not going to have this feeling forever.’ But I didn’t know she was having those kinds of thoughts, and something broke in me when she died.”
Does he think there’s greater awareness in the press and on social media about the impact cruel words can have on a person’s mental health?
“I haven’t seen much of a change in how people talk about each other, no.”
Incredibly, Flack was the second of Cipriani’s exes to have been involved with Love Island and to have taken their own life: Sophie Gradon, a former Miss Newcastle and contestant on the show, took her own life in 2018 when she was 32. Does Cipriani see any link between Gradon and Flack’s deaths?
“I think it does highlight that you have to be so sure of who you are when you’re in the spotlight. I’ve not really seen Love Island but I guess when you go on the show, you can go from working in the corner shop to having this life that looks on the outside like it’s everything everyone desires. But all that’s gonna do is shine a light on all the things you lack that you feel internally,” he says.
When Cipriani was at one of his lowest points, he was introduced to the 59-year-old American surfer Laird Hamilton and his wife Gabby Reece, a former professional volleyball player. For the next few summers he stayed with the couple, taking part in the frankly extraordinary-sounding gatherings they have at their home in Malibu, where famous athletes, actors and scientists hang out and talk about life. Cipriani met Sean Penn, Orlando Bloom and “a man who redefined the second, which sounds like something Dr Evil’s dad would have done”. His mind was blown. “I never thought of myself as clever, so I was just so grateful that these people were telling me their stories,” he says.
Encouraged by Hamilton, he took up meditation. He dropped the Tramadol and cocaine he had abused in the past and got into psychedelics, especially mushrooms: “They opened the door to show me there was more than what I was feeling,” he says. He also watched the Hamilton family: “Laird is a maximum alpha guy but I would see him be so peaceful with his daughters, just beautiful. And that was so inspirational to me to see an operational family, because I hadn’t grown up with that.”
In January 2020 Cipriani met Victoria. They did not hit it off and she was — impressively — impervious to his eye trick. He was intrigued and a year later they got married. Cipriani is now, at 35, a step-grandfather. Victoria, 42, has three children, including a 27-year-old daughter who has two small children of her own.
The family live in Kent but we are meeting today in Cornwall, near the place where they’ve taken their summer holiday. Cipriani is besotted with them and although he would love to have his own biological children, he’ll be fine if he doesn’t: “I don’t see any difference between a blood family and a chosen family, and I could not love Victoria’s kids more,” he says.
Was he worried before getting married that he wouldn’t be able to stay faithful? “No, I wasn’t. I am beyond peaceful in my heart now. I don’t have those compulsions in my heart any more,” he says serenely. Maybe the man who refused to follow orders on the rugby pitch was looking for a template for how to be when off it. When I ask if he ever thought it was normal to be sleeping with so many women, he says, “Well, I thought a lot of footballers I knew were doing it.” But when he saw Hamilton’s family, he realised he could be like that.
Cipriani knows people think he should be unhappy with how his career worked out: he didn’t get enough caps, he should have kept his mouth shut, he should have conformed. But from his perspective he achieved something more: “I think the reason I feel so great today is I’ve always been true to myself. So I can sit here with no regrets.”
- Who Am I? by Danny Cipriani is published on September 14 (HarperCollins)
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London
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