Ryan Giggs acknowledged engaging in “rough sex” with his ex-girlfriend Kate Greville in a Dubai hotel, but he disputes claims that he drags her outside while she is still undressed, the court has heard.
Giggs, a 48-year-old former football player for Wales and Manchester United, is accused of kicking Ms. Greville out of a Westin hotel room in Dubai in 2017 while she was still wearing nothing. The claimed incident has to do with Giggs being accused of using coercive and controlling behaviour, which he vigorously refutes.
Giggs explained to the court how he had just concluded a futsal match in a Middle Eastern nation and had gone to a club party with Ms Greville, one of her employers, Katie Harvey, another agent from his agency, and Ms Greville herself.
Giggs responded that they were having a fantastic time when he received a message from his daughter on his phone when asked what had transpired at the club. After observing Kate (Ms. Greville) “looking over and wondering who I was messaging,” Giggs claimed that he became “irritated.”
Giggs claims he told Ms Greville he was messaging his daughter, Libby, but Ms Greville didn’t believe him and brought up the love hearts they had sent.
After that, the former footballer “stormed off back to the room,” and Ms. Greville soon after. “She walked back into the room, we started arguing, I said you’re accusing me of messaging someone when it was my daughter, she didn’t do it,” he testified to the court.
Christopher Daw QC, for Mr Giggs, then asked the former Wales manager whether there had been a “physical aspect” to the argument. Giggs replied: “No. I said I didn’t want her to stay at the hotel, and to find someone else to stay with and started packing her suitcase.”
Asked if he was aware that Ms Greville had anywhere else to stay, Giggs said: “She had plenty of friends to go to… Kate was trying to stop me putting clothes and various stuff into the suitcase… I didn’t manage to shut it but was trying to usher it to the front door, not closed but with most of the clothes in.”
Mr Daw then asked Giggs whether he did “anything physically” to Ms Greville. Giggs replied no. “No,” he said. “We carried on arguing, Kate managed to get the case in the room. I maintained I didn’t want her to sleep with me. ‘I said you’re not sleeping with me, you can sleep on the sofa’.”
“The suggestion is you threw her out in the corridor with no clothes on, Is that true?,” Mr Daw asked.
“No,” replied Giggs. He then added that once things had calmed down, he and Ms Greville engaged in sex that they would have “quite often”, labelling it “not anything weird, just rough.”
Giggs told the court they would regularly engage in rough sex, especially after they had not seen each other for a long time, and that he was not aware that Ms Greville had any injuries.
Later on during day seven of the trial, Giggs agreed with Mr Daw that he and Ms Greville would send photos of themselves to each other.
Giggs was also questioned over an email he sent with the subject “Blackmail” that had a video attachment that Ms. Greville thought was a recording of them having sex.
When it was later played in court, Ms. Greville could be seen dancing at a holiday party. “It was just a joke between me and Kate,” Giggs remarked. Just Kate dancing—not in an embarrassing way, but unusually so. joking around at a holiday gathering. When she was a resident in Abu Dhabi, it was a work event.