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Naomi Campbell Barred from Being Charity Trustee in England and Wales

British model Naomi Campbell cries after being awarded the 'Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres' (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) title at the French Ministry for Culture in Paris on September 26, 2024. (Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP)
British model Naomi Campbell cries after being awarded the 'Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres' (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) title at the French Ministry for Culture in Paris on September 26, 2024. (Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP)
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Naomi Campbell Barred from Being Charity Trustee in England and Wales

British model Naomi Campbell cries after being awarded the 'Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres' (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) title at the French Ministry for Culture in Paris on September 26, 2024. (Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP)
British model Naomi Campbell cries after being awarded the 'Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres' (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) title at the French Ministry for Culture in Paris on September 26, 2024. (Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP)

British supermodel Naomi Campbell has been barred from being a charity trustee in England and Wales for five years after the poverty charity she founded nearly two decades ago was deemed Thursday to have been “poorly governed” with “inadequate financial management.”
Following a three-year investigation into the financial activities of “Fashion for Relief,” the Charity Commission, which registers and regulates charities in England and Wales, said it had found “multiple instances of misconduct and/or mismanagement,” and that only 8.5% of the charity’s overall expenditure went on charitable grants in a six-year period from 2016.
For example, it said that thousands of pounds worth of charity funds were used to pay for a luxury hotel stay in Cannes, France, for Campbell as well as spa treatments, room service and even cigarettes. The regulator sought explanations from the trustees but said no evidence was provided to back up their explanation that hotel costs were typically covered by a donor to the charity, therefore not costing the charity, said The Associated Press.
Campbell, 54, said she was “extremely concerned” by the findings of the regulator and that an investigation on her part was underway.
“I was not in control of my charity, I put the control in the hands of a legal employer,” she said in response to a question from the AP after being named a knight in France’s Order of Arts and Letters at the country's culture ministry for her contribution to French culture. "We are investigating to find out what and how, and everything I do and every penny I ever raised goes to charity.”
The commission, which registers and regulates charities in England and Wales, also found that fellow trustee Bianka Hellmich received around 290,000 pounds ($385,000) of unauthorized funds for consultancy services, which was in breach of the charity's constitution. She has been disqualified as a trustee for nine years. The other trustee, Veronica Chou, was barred for four years.
“Trustees are legally required to make decisions that are in their charity’s best interests and to comply with their legal duties and responsibilities,” said Tim Hopkins, deputy director for specialist investigations and standards. “Our inquiry has found that the trustees of this charity failed to do so, which has resulted in our action to disqualify them.”
The charity, which was founded in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, was dissolved and removed from the register of charities earlier this year. On its website, which is still active, the charity said that it presented fashion initiatives and projects in New York, London, Cannes, Moscow, Mumbai and Dar es Salaam, raising more than $15 million for good causes around the world.
The charity had been set up with the aim of uniting the fashion industry to relieve poverty and advance health and education, by making grants to other organizations and giving resources towards global disasters.
The commission said that around 344,000 pounds ($460,000) has been recovered and that a further 98,000 pounds of charitable funds have been protected. These funds were used to make donations to two other charities and settle outstanding liabilities.  
“I am pleased that the inquiry has seen donations made to other charities which this charity has previously supported,” said the regulator's Hopkins.

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‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
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‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)

Over the years, Guy Pearce has been good in most all things. But he’s been particularly good at playing characters with a refined disposition who harbor darker impulses underneath.

That was true of his breakout performance in “L.A. Confidential" as a squeaky clean police detective whose ambitions outstrip his ethics. It was true of his dashing upper-class bachelor in “Mildred Pierce.” And it’s most definitely true of his mid-Atlantic tycoon in “The Brutalist.”

“I’m really aware of how precarious we are as human beings,” Pearce says. “Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. Moment to moment, we’re trying to just get through the day. We’re trying to be good. And we can do good things for ourselves and other people, but pretty easily we can be tipped off course.”

That sense of duality has served Pearce’s characters well, especially his men of class who turn out to have less of it than they seem. His Harrison Lee Van Buren in “The Brutalist” may be Pearce’s most colossally two-faced concoction yet. If Brady Corbet’s film, which was nominated for 10 Oscars on Thursday, is one of the best films of the year, it’s Pearce’s performance that gives the movie its disquieting shiver.

Pearce’s Van Buren is a recognizable kind of villain: a well-bred aristocrat who, at first, is a benevolent benefactor to Adrien Brody’s architect László Tóth. But what begins as a friendship — Tóth, a Holocaust survivor is nearly destitute when they meet — turns increasingly ugly, as Van Buren’s patronage, warped by jealousy and privilege, turns into a creeping sense of ownership over Tóth. The psychodrama eventually boils over in a grim, climactic scene in which Van Buren pronounces Tóth “just a lady of the night.”

“What was great to discuss with Brady is that he is actually a man of taste,” said Pearce in a recent interview. “He’s a man of class and a man of sophistication. He’s not just a bull in a China shop. He’s not just about greed, taking, taking, taking. It’s probably as much of a curse as anything that he can recognize beauty and he can recognize other people’s artistry.”

For his performance, the 57-year-old Pearce on Thursday landed his first Oscar nomination – a long-in-coming and perhaps overdue honor for the character actor of “Memento,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The King’s Speech.” For the Australian-born Pearce, such recognitions are as awkward as they are rewarding. He long ago decided Hollywood stardom wasn’t for him.

“I get uncomfortable with that, to be honest,” he says. “I’m really happy with doing a good performance. I can genuinely say within myself I’ve done a good job. Equally, I know when I’ve done a (bad) job. But I’m also well aware of how a performance can appear good purely because of the tone of the film. I might have done exactly the same performance in another movie with not such a good director, and people might have gone, ‘That was full-on but whatever.’ Whereas in this film, we are all better than we actually are because the film has integrity to it that elevates us all.”

Like F. Murray Abraham’s Saleri in “Amadeus,” Peace’s Van Buren has quickly ascended the ranks of great cinema villains to artists. The character likewise has some basis in reality, albeit extrapolated from a much different time and place. Corbet and Mona Fastvold, who are married and wrote “The Brutalist” together, were fueled by their hardships with financiers on their previous film, 2018's “Vox Lux.”

“We didn’t have a Van Buren but we certainly had our fill of complicated relationships with the people who hold the purse strings,” says Fastvold. “There’s a sense of: I have ownership of the project because I’m paying for it, and I almost have ownership of you.”

Pearce has been around the movie business long enough to shake hands with plenty of wealthy men putting money toward a film production. But he says none of his own experiences went into “The Brutalist.”

“There’s always this slew of producers at a higher level than us who come and visit the set,” Pearce says. “I’m polite and I go, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks.’ But I’m a little caught up with what I’m doing. Then three years later you’ll meet someone who says, ‘You know, I was a producer on “L.A. Confidential.”’ Ah, were you?”

Pearce, who lives in the Netherlands, has generally kept much of Hollywood at arm's length. In conversation, he tends to be chipper and humble — more interested in talking Aussie rules football than the Oscar race. “Any chance to have a kick, I'll have a kick,” he says with smile.

That youthful spirit Pearce tends to apply to his acting as well. Pearce, who started performing in the mid-'80s on the long-running Australian soap opera “Neighbors,” doesn't like to be precious about performing.

“If I’m hanging on to it all day, it’s exhausting,” Pearce says. “The thing that still exists for me is using our imagination, which is kind of a childlike venture. I think there’s something valuable about that even as adults. I think you can be all ages at all times.”

Pearce compares receiving the script from Corbet to “The Brutalist” to when Christopher Nolan approached him 25 years ago. Both times, he went back to watch the director's earlier films and quickly decided this was an opportunity to pounce at.

In digging into Van Buren, Pearce was guided less by real-life experience than the script. The hardest entry way to the character, he says, was the voice. “Thankfully,” Pearce says, “I’m friends with Danny Huston and he’s got a wonderfully old-fashioned voice.” He and Corbet didn't speak much about the director's hardships on “Vox Lux.”

“I know that it was troubled. Brady is going to have trouble on every film he makes, I reckon, because he is such a visionary,” says Pearce. “I know on this there were producers trying to get him to cut the time down. Of course, all those producers now are going, ‘I was with him all the way.’”

To a certain degree, Pearce says, he doesn't fully understand a performance while he's doing it. He's more likely to understand it fully afterward while watching. Take that “lady of the night scene.” While filming, Pearce felt he was saying that line to put Tóth in his place. “But when I watched it, I went: ‘I’m just telling myself. I’m purely telling myself,’” he says. “There’s something even more distasteful about it.”

It's ironic, in a way, that Van Buren, a man bent on control, is played so indelibly by an actor who seeks to impose so little of it, himself.

“There’s a performative element to Van Buren. He exhausts himself because he’s trying to dominate, to be the one in charge, be Mr. Charming,” Pearce says. “I don’t think he can ever enter a room without being self-conscious. That’s an exhausting way to be, I reckon.”