What does a conservative magazine do when a columnist is convicted of attempted rape?
In October 2017, a week after The New York Times published testimony from eight women accusing the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sex offenses, one of Weinstein’s old friends published an article defending him. “I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein,” the writer Panagiotis “Taki” Theodoracopulos declared in the British magazine The Spectator. “Harvey’s a committed lefty, Hillary’s pal, and he thinks that the Germans were all bad 70 years ago (he’s totally and catastrophically wrong on all counts). But I really like him.”
The column was classic Taki: provocative, arrogant, and self-incriminatory. (The writer, who is universally known by his nickname, was once described by The Spectator’s former owner as having views “almost worthy of Goebbels.”) “In Harvey’s case, there is a lot to hang him with, and now that it’s out in the open, they are all creeping out of the woodwork,” he wrote. “Even an ugly waitress has suddenly recalled that she served the ‘pig’ while he hit on women.”
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Reading these words, the historian and novelist Lisa Hilton, an occasional Spectator contributor, was appalled. “It was the hypocrisy of the whole thing,” she told me recently, over coffee at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. His comment about ugly waitresses suggested, Hilton said, that “women were to be judged on a scale, of his idea whether or not they were attractive enough to deserve to be raped.”
Hilton decided that she had to say something—not least because in 2009, at his chalet in Switzerland, Taki had tried to rape her.
This is a story about impunity—how a certain type of person, if he is rich enough, and well connected enough, and adept enough at disguising his misconduct as a lifestyle choice and his bigotry as humor, can get away with almost anything for a very long time. For half a century, Taki, who is now 87, has propagated racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism to thrill his readers and demonstrate his own superiority and untouchability. His provocations are not subtle: A 2018 Spectator column was initially headlined “In Praise of the Wehrmacht.” He once wrote a column praising Golden Dawn, the Greek far-right party, under the title “A Fascist Takeover of Greece? We Should Be So Lucky.” He has made a career out of pushing the boundaries of acceptability, and his columns have two recurring themes. The first is crisp dismissals of frumpy women, ghastly poor people, and the tedium of political correctness. The second is name-dropping—financiers, aristocrats, and fashion designers feature heavily—as if proximity to fame somehow alchemizes everyday bigotry into sparkling titillation. The frisson was in not just that he did it, but that he so obviously got away with it.
Something about Taki is reminiscent of Donald Trump. In a culture alert to dog whistles, he gets out a foghorn. He has made himself into a caricature, and has made tolerating his actions a loyalty test. Like the former president, Taki compulsively shows off his wealth. His persistent and enthusiastic chauvinism is often presented with a wink—as if anyone who takes it seriously must be the kind of joyless Puritan who wouldn’t be allowed on his yacht. A 2010 profile of him in the left-leaning Independent noted that “his energy has also famously been channelled into his sex life, and his advice to lovelorn men is to pursue a girl until she gives in, even if it’s out of sympathy.” The subhead described him, rather charitably, as a “womaniser.”
But in the fall, 50 years of largely consequence-free boasting collided with the dry precision of the Swiss legal system. On October 5, a judge found Taki guilty of attempting to rape Lisa Hilton. Taki has refused to accept the judgment against him and insisted throughout the trial, with Trumpian indignation, that he was the victim of a political plot. The reaction to the verdict within British media circles has been surprisingly muted—a columnist of long standing has been allowed to slink away, with barely a whisper of condemnation.
In 2009, Hilton was in her 30s, a freelance author and broadcaster, in the process of separating from her Italian composer husband, with whom she has a daughter. She wrote historical novels and biographies, focusing on the Renaissance. She was blond, attractive, athletic, and Oxford-educated, a potent combination that got her invited to parties and literary festivals. She knew some of the Spectator crowd in London, particularly Phoebe Vela, who was the magazine’s head of events, working closely with its chairman, Andrew Neil, then in his late 50s.
When Vela invited Hilton for a weekend at Taki’s chalet in Gstaad, a resort town in the Swiss Alps, Hilton assumed that she meant a skiing trip. She accepted and flew to the villa, Chalet Palataki—a name that translates as “little palace”—with Vela and Neil, and another woman, named Charlotte, whom she had never met before. Hilton found herself sharing a room with Charlotte. As the two women rushed to get changed for dinner on that first night, Taki came into the room. “I remember, like it was a horror film, looking out of the shower, and that was his face through the glass screen,” she told me. “I think we thought he was pathetic, this dirty old man … Not in any way threatening.”
The next day, according to a statement she later gave to the British police, Hilton decided to take a walk around town, and Taki gave her a set of keys to the chalet. They were attached to a wallet that she says she never looked inside. When she returned the keys, he opened the wallet to reveal a credit card and cash that, she surmised, he had meant for her to spend. He told her she had “no professional instincts whatsoever.” Those words made her feel, she told the police, like a “prostitute.” She tried to shrug off that incident too, she explained to me. “Again, he’s old,” she recalled telling herself. “And maybe he did mean it as a joke.” She didn’t want to seem uptight, difficult, or discourteous to her host. That night, she, Neil, Vela, and Taki talked together at the chalet after dinner at the Palace hotel, she told police. When Taki tried to kiss her at one point, she wriggled away—once again thinking this was a dirty old man trying his luck.
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Hilton went to bed alone; Charlotte, her roommate the previous night, had left earlier that day. Taki came in, closed the door, and then tried to climb on top of her. He has always boasted about his youthful sporting excellence, and he had bragged about winning an over-70 judo championship the previous year. According to Hilton’s police statement, she tried to treat even his use of physical force as a case of crossed wires: “Initially I thought that it was more kind of the same thing that was going on upstairs,” she told the British police in her statement, “and thought that I could just sort of wriggle him off, like: ‘Don’t be silly, you know, come on, no need for this, we already said goodnight.’” Her approach didn’t work. Taki pinned her down, she said in her statement to London police, tried to force her legs apart, and started to reach into his trousers, saying: “Come on, I want to fuck you.” The struggle lasted long enough, Hilton told police, to disabuse Taki of any idea that she was merely playing hard to get. Eventually she pushed him off, and he walked out of the room.
The next morning, before leaving, Hilton ran into Vela and told her, without going into detail, that Taki had come into her room the night before. According to Hilton, Vela responded, “Did you get the poem? They always get the poem.” And sure enough, she told me, when she returned to her room, a collection of pages scrawled on Chalet Palataki stationery had been slipped under the door. “Heaven without you would be too much to bear, and Hell would not be Hell if you were there,” the writer declared.
Even Taki’s love note was fixated on the Nazis: Although a 72-year-old like him declaring his affection, he wrote, “is as entertaining as a reading of Mein Kampf in a synagogue, it is nevertheless true.” Another page saluted Hilton as “Darling L,” adding: “Stupendous hunger for your body. ‘So wild and rough and tortured were its ways.’” The quotation was a verse from Dante’s Inferno.
For Taki, defending Harvey Weinstein was nothing out of the ordinary. But you might be wondering how, in the first wave of the #MeToo movement, a mainstream magazine decided to publish an article by an alleged rapist’s friend declaring that his accusers must all be either bitter, ugly, or gold diggers.
To question why Taki was given such latitude would be to misunderstand the unique character of The Spectator and its role in British public life. Founded in 1828, it is both profitable and influential. Boris Johnson was its editor from 1999 to 2005, before his tenure as prime minister. One of the senior editors, Mary Wakefield, is married to Johnson’s former top aide Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Brexit campaign. Its former political editor James Forsyth left in 2022 to become a senior adviser to the current Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who had been best man at his wedding. The Tories’ probable next leader, Kemi Badenoch, worked there in the mid-2010s.
Andrew Neil is a feared and respected figure in the British media, nicknamed “Brillo” for both his wiry hair and his abrasive interview style. For many years, he combined his day job at the right-wing Spectator with a side gig as a political interviewer at the supposedly neutral BBC. I used to be a regular panelist on one of his shows, Sunday Politics, where I witnessed his intense preparation—and saw how much people wanted to impress him.
Fellow journalists in Britain rarely complain about the Spectator, which employs many wholly mainstream commentators, pays well and on time, and has editors who are pleasant to write for. Few people in Britain have ever questioned its decision to provide Taki with a platform for so long. But the magazine has another side, consistently publishing views on race and immigration that are at the far edge of acceptability in Britain. A friend of mine once likened its worst tendencies to those of “a man entering a room, dropping his trousers, and shouting ‘free speech!’”
Many of the Spectator articles that have received the most backlash over the past 20 years are characterized by the deliberate poking of liberal sensibilities, and by the glib hauteur of the prose used to do that poking. In 2003, under Boris Johnson, the magazine published an article by Taki headlined “Thoughts on Thuggery.” The column suggested that “only a moron would not surmise that what politically correct newspapers refer to as ‘disaffected young people’ are black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs.” West Indians, Taki wrote, had been allowed to immigrate to Britain and “multiply like flies.” The article, which Johnson called “a terrible mistake,” was later withdrawn.
Taki had joined the magazine long before the Johnson era, beginning his “High Life” society column in 1977 and filing more than 2,000 weekly columns since. His credentials were unusual: He was the heir to one fortune, from a Greek shipping company, and had married another one, in the person of his wife, Princess Alexandra Schoenburg-Hartenstein of Austria.
According to Taki, when he was 18 his father offered him a job in the family business, but he could not face a life of dutiful capitalism. Instead, he ran away to Palm Beach, Florida, where he fell in love with the lifestyle of the idle rich. The promotional copy for his collected columns—Princes, Playboys, & High-Class Tarts, foreword by Tom Wolfe—boasts that he has “heaved cream pies at the Aga Khan and urinated on the cars of feared mafiosi.” The impression is of a daredevil who is unafraid of consequences, whose outrages should be chuckled over with indulgence.
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In the world of Taki’s columns, nothing bad really happens: In the 1980s, he was arrested when he tried to go through customs at Heathrow Airport with cocaine in his pocket; he got a three-month incarceration and a prison memoir out of it. His columns are written from his apartment in New York, a city that he invariably refers to as “the Bagel”; the Eurotrash paradise of Monte Carlo; and his chalet in Gstaad. The 2010 profile in The Independent noted that he “peppers his conversation with words like ‘wop’, ‘yid’ or ‘dago’; yet he has survived seven editors and five proprietors.”
Taki’s Spectator columns, I should note, are at the mild end of his output. He saves the really strong stuff for The American Conservative, which he co-founded in 2002, and the online publication Taki’s Magazine, which his daughter edits. The latter was where the commentator Gavin McInnes announced the formation of his far-right militia, the Proud Boys. Taki’s Magazine once ran an article so overtly racist that its author, John Derbyshire, was exiled from the American right because of it. (“Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks,” Derbyshire advised, in a parody of “The Talk” that Black parents sometimes give their children about the dangers of racism. He also wrote, “Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.”)
David Aaronovitch, a former London Times columnist who has been critical of The Spectator, told me that for years successive editors of the magazine have sold Taki to the public “as being somehow droll—a kind of parody of himself not to be taken seriously, when in fact he is expressing the semisecret Paleolithic impulses of many of the magazine’s readers.”
On occasions when controversy has erupted around Spectator articles, the magazine’s current editor, Fraser Nelson, has defended his choices by arguing that “people like reading well-argued pieces with which they might disagree … And if what [Spectator columnists] write causes a stir, our job is to defend to the death their right to say it.”
Taki, as it turned out, had a lot to say about that weekend in Gstaad—and he wanted to say it in The Spectator.
After leaving the chalet that morning in 2009, Hilton caught a train to Milan. Her head was spinning. When she undressed that night, she told me, she found her thighs marked with fist-size bruises; she took photos of her injuries with her phone and sent them to a friend. (The photographs have been lost, but the friend submitted a sworn statement to the court describing “heavy black bruises [that] covered both inner thighs from the knees to the groin,” and finger marks on her hips.) Hilton tried to put the incident behind her—she was so worried about not seeming “correct,” as she puts it, that she even sent a thank-you note for the weekend.
A few days later, a strange column appeared in The Spectator under Taki’s byline. It began with a characteristically obscure story of a medieval blood feud between two brothers, Guelf and Gibel, started by a young woman flirting with a “man not her husband.” The feud had come to mind, Taki went on to explain, when a historian named Lisa “walked into my chalet accompanied by our chairman Andrew Neil, and two other beauties.” He was immediately drawn to Lisa, “with love being too weak a word to describe how I felt the moment I laid eyes on her.” She is described as writing a biography of Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan, a detail that made her easily identifiable to people in her social and professional circles, and the column also contains two cryptic references to a man with whom Hilton was then having a relationship. “I read it very much as a threat,” she told me. “It made me feel really small.”
The article also bolstered Hilton’s sense that Taki was too powerful to confront. She decided to try to forget the incident at the chalet. She declined Vela’s subsequent invitation to join her, Taki, and others on his yacht at the Monaco Grand Prix. She was, she told me, trying to keep up appearances—even jokingly referring to herself in one note to Vela as “the future Mrs Theodoracopulos.”
She stashed Taki’s note away somewhere, underwent therapy, and tried to get on with her life. In 2016, she published an erotic thriller called Maestra, full of sex scenes that a New York Times reviewer described as “very graphic” and “gymnastic” but also “repetitive.” She did a photo shoot in high heels, with a red coat falling suggestively off her bare shoulders. She wrote about the end of her second marriage, which came after her husband gave her the wrong size Manolo Blahnik heels for Christmas. (She found a second pair in his study, in the right size, and deduced that he had bought one pair for her and another for his lover.) Hilton once told an interviewer that “being a feature writer is a bit like playing a character.” Hers was femme fatale. She talked about attending an orgy for research, and played up the glamour and transgression of her love life. “One of the effects that this thing had professionally was that I felt really scared and intimidated about pitching literary or artistic or even political articles,” she told me. “I felt like I’d been very firmly put back in a particular box.”
Years later, after reading Taki’s article on the #MeToo movement, she reappraised her thriller: It wasn’t quite the lighthearted satire she remembered, she said, but a revenge fantasy. Maestra features a hostess bar called the Gstaad Club and themes of sexual assault and objectification. “I went back and looked at the book, and I thought, Oh my God, this is just one great big, long howl of rage.”
The wheels of justice grind slowly, particularly when they involve Swiss courts, a British complainant, and an international playboy with homes in multiple countries. After reading Taki’s article on the ugly waitresses of #MeToo, Hilton first tried to interest the Daily Mail in her story, but got nowhere; she also consulted a lawyer. In January 2019, she went to the London police, who took a comprehensive statement and told her she would have to pursue the case in Switzerland. She did so, paying out of pocket for her lawyer.
The court case came in two stages, in accordance with Swiss law. During an interview with police, Taki had denied writing Hilton a letter that weekend. At the preliminary hearing, in the summer of 2022, he was shown photographs of the notes on Chalet Palataki stationery. He then said he could not remember anything about them, and had written them after drinking. He said that the “Darling L” might refer to someone else, and Hilton told me that at this point he started making noises and calling her a “liar.” (Her lawyer confirmed her account.) In his eventual ruling, the judge found Taki’s explanation unconvincing.
When being interviewed by Swiss police in February 2022, Taki also claimed that he had never written personally to Hilton and that he had little memory of her. During the preliminary hearing, however, he was shown the 2009 Spectator article about his infatuation with Lisa the historian. The judge’s ruling mentions both of these incidents, and notes that although Hilton’s story never changed, Taki’s did.
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After this hearing, the prosecutor decided that there was enough evidence to move forward to a trial. Hilton asked a male friend to tell Nelson, The Spectator’s editor, about the court case, which he did on November 22, 2022. (I confirmed this version of events with the man involved, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the case.) She didn’t want to embarrass the magazine, she told me, when the accusation became public. Despite Taki’s impending trial for a sex offense, his column continued to run, datelined from Gstaad, New York City, Greece, and the Hamptons. He clearly continued to socialize with the Spectator crowd, too. In June 2023, he wrote about getting drunk at Nelson’s 50th birthday party and telling a fellow columnist about losing his virginity at the age of 15. “Andrew Neil took one look at me and decided to cancel our planned post-party drink,” he added.
In September 2023, Hilton was offered a commission by the Spectator—her first article for the British magazine in three years—to review a book on Venice. She found the offer hard to interpret. Was it, she wondered, a way of keeping her “on side”? She decided to accept anyway.
The trial eventually took place in the regional court at Thun, in German-speaking Switzerland, in the fall of 2023. It was, by American standards, a low-key and perfunctory affair. A single judge heard the evidence. Taki and Hilton sat only yards apart in the courtroom, almost facing each other; both testified in English, using a translator. No other witnesses were called.
In Taki’s defense, his lawyer offered a Sunday Times article Hilton had written in January 2018 about the #MeToo movement. “It might seem that we have reached a tipping point, a place where, finally, women are claiming the authority of speech in a manner that has never been seen before,” Hilton had written. She had also added a caveat: “Empowering victims to expose their abusers can only be laudable, but presenting woman as man’s eternal victim is retrogressive and disrespectful of the possibilities that #MeToo has opened up.” This was Taki’s evidence that Hilton was an activist, motivated by spite.
The judge described Taki’s defense as “meager.” He offered written statements from three character witnesses—his wife, a friend named Mark William Lloyd, and the film producer Michael Mailer (son of Norman). Taki’s request to call Neil and Vela as witnesses was denied because, the judge ruled, they were “not present for the core event.” Taki’s memory of events was hazy, and then conveniently sharp; again his story changed, while Hilton’s remained consistent. The defendant made clear that he considered the entire case a conspiracy against him. He called the accusation “monstrous,” suggesting that Hilton was an avenging angel of the feminist movement, determined to ruin his career. “It’s a great travesty of justice and I shouldn’t be here,” he added. “I’m a Christian and I don’t hold grudges but I might make an exception in this case.”
The judge was unmoved. He said that Hilton’s account was “stringent and credible” and she had no motive to make a false accusation. Taki was found guilty, given a 12-month suspended prison sentence, and ordered to pay Hilton a fine of 5,000 Swiss francs, or $5,700, plus interest and her legal costs of 18,000 francs.
The conviction prompted The Spectator to act. Taki’s column disappeared from the next issue of the magazine, and was later replaced with a short note explaining his absence: “Taki’s High Life column is taking a break while he appeals a recent conviction.” (In February, Taki filed that appeal, citing the judge’s decision not to allow him to call Vela and Neil as witnesses. Hilton has been advised that it may take months, or even years, to be heard.)
Phoebe Vela, now Phoebe Vela-Hitchcox, did not reply to a request for comment. According to her LinkedIn profile, after leaving The Spectator, she went to work for the lobbying firm Bell Pottinger, and then as a party treasurer for the ruling Conservatives until last September. Mandolyna Theodoracopulos, the editor of Taki’s Magazine, replied to me on her father’s behalf, declining to comment before the appeal was heard. The Charlotte who roomed with Hilton that first night in Gstaad—whom The Atlantic has identified as Charlotte Sorato-Citron—did not respond to a request for comment.
When I contacted Nelson for comment, he told me via email that “this is still a live criminal case—under Swiss law it remains so unto the appeal, which (unlike the first one-day, no-witness hearing) is the bigger event.” As such, he added, “we aren’t commenting while proceedings are still under way, so I hope you will forgive me if I don’t elaborate on what Taki and The Spectator have already said about this tragic affair.”
Andrew Neil did not respond to my request for comment. When an Atlantic editor contacted him by email, he responded, “We have already refused to talk to the author. We will not get involved in so called checking of ‘facts’, some of which are anything but.” When asked to clarify which specific assertions he contested, Neil declined to elaborate.
In The Spectator’s Christmas edition, a familiar name made a comeback. “This is the 47th year in a row that I have written a column for The Spectator’s Christmas issue,” Taki wrote under his usual banner, “High Life.” “Recently, however, something bad happened to me in a Swiss village court of law, which led me to suspend writing my regular column.” In the article, Taki compared himself to Job, the biblical hero punished by God to test his devotion, before adding: “And now it’s time. After 47 years, I am taking a break.” He concluded with a roll call of thanks to supportive friends that included two Bismarcks, four old Etonians, a former prime minister’s sister, and the wife of a marquess. “I was so upset,” Hilton told me. “I thought, Well, how many convictions for sex offenses does it take to get fired from The Spectator? Is one not enough?”
The Spectator column pales beside the version that ran in Taki’s own magazine. “Recently I asked myself, why do bad things happen to good people?” it read. “Something bad happened to me. A totally false accusation and a staged entrapment by someone whom I hardly know and have never physically touched was passed off as truth in a Swiss village court of law.” The column was typically inattentive to unhelpful details: Taki was convicted in a court that covers the large region of Bern, not a mere “village court,” and the judge—a member of the right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party, as it happens—found no evidence of entrapment.
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As a complainant in a sexual-offenses trial, Hilton is entitled to lifelong anonymity. She has waived that right, she told me when we met in London, because she has discovered that her identity is already widely known to her social circle and other writers for The Spectator.
Hilton despairs of ever recovering her costs from Taki, even if his appeal is dismissed. The case has already devoured three years of her life. She has not spoken publicly about it outside court, while Taki used his own magazine to paint her as a spiteful liar. Meanwhile, The Spectator continues to influence Conservative politics as much as it ever did. Taki keeps writing with his former verve, just in slightly fewer forums than before: One recent column in Taki’s Magazine attacked the idea of reparations for slavery, implying that enslaved people’s plight wasn’t so bad because “they were given jobs for life.” The entire case keeps reminding Hilton, she told me, of “this sense that there are no consequences to people like you.” People like Taki, she means—careless people.
Today, Hilton is still a freelance writer, living paycheck to paycheck, wondering whether, despite everything, some of her former colleagues believe him over her. She is, at least, doing one thing Taki would hate: working on a book about the medieval expulsion of the Jews from Europe.
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