Noel Clarke’s wife has said his accusers are liars who have deliberately fabricated sexual misconduct claims about him.
Giving evidence in the actor’s libel case against the Guardian, Iris Clarke said her husband was generous and caring, and that people he had worked with and helped had taken advantage of him.
Noel Clarke, 49, who wrote and produced the Kidulthood trilogy, is suing Guardian News and Media (GNM) over seven articles and a podcast published between April 2021 and March 2022.
Among GNM’s witnesses are Gina Powell, a film producer and documentary maker, who worked for Clarke from 2014 to 2017 and alleges “a pattern of abusive behaviour, financial exploitation, bullying and sexual misconduct”.
Iris Clarke said Powell had never seemed uncomfortable around her husband and so could not be telling the truth. “She is a liar,” she said. “She was not threatened or intimidated by him. I feel like she was infatuated with him.”
Asked by Gavin Millar KC, for GNM, how she could say Powell had never been uncomfortable away from her own presence, she replied: “I am telling you, she was never uncomfortable around my husband, and even when she was not in my presence I could see she was not uncomfortable, or do I have to be physically beside her?”
She also accused Davie Fairbanks, a writer, director and former creative partner of her husband, of lying. Fairbanks’s allegations include claims that Noel Clarke secretly filmed nude auditions and groped an actor at a wrap party.
Iris Clarke said Fairbanks had been like a brother to her husband but had been envious of him and deceitful. “He would go around telling people not nice things about my husband to better himself,” she told the court. “He’s a liar … It’s very clear he wanted to target my husband.”
She said the former Doctor Who star had tried to help Fairbanks when his friend’s mother had died and with finding a place to live. She told the court she had warned her husband that Fairbanks was manipulative but he was “always with his kind heart trying to help people”.
“Noel is a person who is too generous, he’s too caring,” she said.
Earlier, completing his evidence on day four in the witness box, Noel Clarke said: “I think the world has changed. I think things that were acceptable 10, 20 years ago are just no longer acceptable and throwing a blanket lens of 2021 on them is just not fair on anybody.”
