When Naomi Campbell stepped into a gilded hall at the Ministry of Culture in Paris last September, she had more reason than usual to feel triumphant. Nearly four decades had passed since she first walked, at the age of 15, down a Parisian runway. Now, at 54, she was about to receive the insignia of a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France’s highest honours, recognising significant contributions to the arts and literature.
Campbell stood behind a podium, dressed in a black-and-white-striped Chanel gown, to address the audience. The world’s most famous supermodel looked the way most of us have come to know her, impossibly beautiful, enduring, undeniable. “I stand here not just as Naomi Campbell the model,” she said. “But as Naomi the advocate, the collaborator and, most importantly, the grateful human being.”
She was also, she felt, Naomi the target. A few hours earlier, the UK’s Charity Commission had released the findings of a three-year inquiry into the UK branch of Campbell’s charity Fashion for Relief. They were damning, telling a story of financial mismanagement and sloppy governance. The charity regulator for England and Wales banned her from running any charity for five years.
The news largely ignored Campbell’s award and focused on the bombshell ban. Reports cited one finding in particular: that thousands of pounds’ worth of spa treatments, room service and cigarettes were among Campbell’s inappropriate expenses during a trip to Cannes. These accusations played into the other long-running narrative about Campbell, the woman of excess convicted of assaulting her personal assistant and housekeeper, among others, and the diva who subsequently attended her community service wearing a $300,000 Dolce & Gabbana gown.
When I speak to Campbell, she is not the figure the public assumes it knows. She is as poised and striking (and late) as I had been told to expect, but she is almost demure. Campbell only becomes emotional when I ask about misconduct allegations and the day the ban was announced. The timing, she tells me, was no coincidence. “It was very planned, knowing that I was getting an award that day in another country.”
Campbell says those headline-making expenses were paid by her travel agent, which billed the charity instead of her personal account. She says she had no reason to think otherwise. “I believed the money that was raised was going to the causes and the people that [it] was meant to benefit — and that’s the most important thing.” But it isn’t the most incredible. Because Campbell then proceeds to lay out a scarcely believable story about what she says really happened — a tale of stolen identity, siphoned funds and betrayed friendship.
Naomi Campbell was joined on the catwalk by her famous friends Rupert Everett, Vivienne Westwood and Katie Price, in pieces donated by Dolce, Givenchy and Versace. Ella Eyre performed her single “Gravity”, and there was an auction of items including Tracey Emin artwork and Bvlgari jewellery. All of it raising funds to fight a deadly outbreak of Ebola in west Africa. Photographs from that night in 2015, which opened London Fashion Week, show high-fives on the runway, bright lights and big smiles.
That the debut of Fashion for Relief’s UK offshoot went so smoothly would not have surprised anyone in the philanthropy world. Campbell had founded her charity in the US a decade before to support victims of Hurricane Katrina. From there, she had expanded, offering help to Haitian earthquake and Japanese tsunami victims and bundling funds for Save the Children, the #MeToo movement and the Mayor’s Fund for London.
Over the years, Fashion for Relief raised more than £15mn globally. Whatever the cause, its operating model was the same. It hosted glitzy events and auctioned donated clothes, then distributed the money to charities already working on those causes. Campbell’s star power — and her singular ability to convene the rich and famous around the world — was the main draw.
In early November 2021, Campbell received a strange WhatsApp message from Veronica Chou. Chou, the 40-year-old daughter of Hong Kong textile billionaire Silas Chou, is a fashion entrepreneur turned climate technology investor. At the time, along with Campbell, she was one of the three trustees of Fashion for Relief’s UK branch. The Charities Act defines trustees as “the persons having the general control and management of the administration of a charity”, implying they are collectively responsible for governance and finances. Chou was messaging to ask if Campbell had lawyers involved to deal with “the investigators”. But Campbell had no idea that the Charity Commission had opened a full inquiry.
Although they had known each other for a long time, it was unusual for Chou to contact Campbell directly. “Most of the interaction was with Bianka,” Chou later told me. She was referring to Bianka Hellmich, the third UK trustee. Hellmich not only managed the charity’s day-to-day operations, according to Campbell, who lives primarily in New York, she was also the one who convinced her that Fashion for Relief needed a UK outpost to begin with.
Campbell first met Hellmich back in April 2013, at a five-storey mansion on Sloane Street in London. It was owned by Lalit Modi, a scion of one of India’s leading business families and an old friend of Campbell’s. Modi founded the Indian Premier League in the mid-2000s and served on the Board of Control for Cricket in India, but he’d decamped to London after the regulatory body raised complaints about suspected bid-rigging and financial irregularities. (Modi has previously denied any wrongdoing in relation to those matters but did not respond to my requests for comment.)
At the time of the meeting, Campbell was “coming out of a separation” from her partner, the Russian-born billionaire Vladislav Doronin. Because they lived in different countries, Campbell needed help retrieving personal belongings, including jewellery and clothing. Modi suggested Campbell meet Hellmich because she spoke Russian and was a lawyer.
Hellmich was a petite blonde, with hair pulled back from her round cheeks and broad smile. She was born Bianka Tobinska in 1978, in Poland, and studied at SGH Warsaw School of Economics before qualifying as a lawyer. She completed her training at the Warsaw office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a corporate law firm, before moving to Clifford Chance, a multinational firm in London’s so-called magic circle. By early 2006, Hellmich was an associate in its Moscow office.
While Hellmich spoke Russian, Polish, German and English, she was not qualified to practise law outside Poland. Instead, she assisted other Clifford Chance lawyers on corporate transactions. A lawyer in Moscow at the time recalled that Hellmich’s main responsibility was as a client-engagement executive, a role that suited her gregarious nature.
Hellmich later married an executive at Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank. They had a child together and moved to London in 2012, settling in a Georgian townhouse off the King’s Road in Chelsea, which one occasional visitor described as a “beautiful” part of an “extravagant life”. But the marriage ended not long after the move.
Through a contact made during her Clifford Chance days, Hellmich was introduced to Roger Gherson, founder of Gherson Solicitors and its boutique offshoot, Discreet Law, where she became a consultant in 2013. (Discreet Law closed two years ago, after being accused of filing a meritless defamation claim on behalf of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group; the Solicitors Regulation Authority found no evidence of wrongdoing by the firm. Gherson did not respond to requests for comment.)
At Discreet Law, Hellmich advised wealthy individuals on immigration matters and described herself as a citizenship lawyer. She also advised clients on relocation matters, including property purchases and school placements. “I thought it would be helpful and make sense to work with her,” Campbell recalls. The two later met at Discreet Law’s office in London to discuss the supermodel’s predicament. “I trusted her, as she was presented to me as a lawyer. I had no reason to believe her not to be OK.” (The Solicitors Regulation Authority said that Hellmich has never been a solicitor in England and Wales, adding that “the term lawyer is not a protected term” and “unregulated individuals working in the law can refer to themselves as such”.)
The relationship grew deeper, with Hellmich advising Campbell on other personal matters, including finding nannies for the supermodel’s children. Through Campbell, she gained access to the high-fashion world. Hellmich would soon appear in photographs with people like Emma Weymouth, Marchioness of Bath, and Sheikha Raya al-Khalifa of Bahrain. But when Hellmich advised Campbell to establish a UK arm of Fashion for Relief in 2014, the model says she was sceptical.
Eventually, she was persuaded by Hellmich’s argument that it would make fundraising easier. Fashion for Relief was registered as a UK charity in January 2015, using Discreet Law’s office as its address. In a witness statement filed as part of an appeal of the Charity Commission ban, Campbell said Hellmich told her she would be only a “figurehead”, using her public profile to raise funds, while Hellmich would be responsible for operations.
Even after Chou’s cryptic “investigator” message, Campbell thought the commission’s interest amounted to administrative oversight, rather than a full inquiry. And it was in that context that she contacted Hellmich the following day, asking her to have lawyers handle the matter. Chou quit as a trustee 10 days later, and hired her own lawyers, leaving only Campbell and Hellmich on the board.
Shortly after Chou’s resignation, Hellmich messaged Campbell, saying the commission had confirmed it was investigating the charity’s governance, fundraising and charitable projects. But Campbell says she trusted Hellmich to handle the inquiry professionally and was assured there was nothing more for her to do.
A couple of months later, in mid-January 2022, Hellmich emailed Campbell saying the Charity Commission’s “process” was “nearly over” and that they had submitted extensive materials, detailing how events were run and funds raised. She said the commission had requested a brief statement on Campbell’s role in the charity. Five days later, Hellmich sent a one-page document for her to sign via Campbell’s assistant, Desiree Ejoh, who was also the charity’s production manager. “Sending you the one page Naomi needs to sign today,” Hellmich wrote on WhatsApp. “And video her signing super important as tomorrow is deadline we can’t miss.”
Ejoh provided the completed document and a video of Campbell signing. Hellmich then asked an independent lawyer, Abel Manukyan, to witness it before she submitted it to the commission. Manukyan worked at Gherson Solicitors when Hellmich was a Discreet Law consultant, suggesting a prior connection, and was later fined by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over personal travel expenses violations when working for a City law firm. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) Hellmich messaged him: “Need my client’s signature witnessed from a video . . . You clearly see her signing the document.” In usual practice, any witnessing of a signature would be done contemporaneously in the presence of the signatory. Manukyan obliged.
Hellmich then turned to Carter-Ruck, the famed London law firm that specialises in media cases and has represented high-profile clients, including Modi. In March, she instructed Carter-Ruck to represent both herself and Campbell in relation to the Charity Commission inquiry, according to a document the law firm submitted to the regulator. As verification of sorts, Hellmich sent a copy of Campbell’s passport. But Carter-Ruck requested direct confirmation from Campbell of the proposed representation arrangement. The next day, Hellmich sent an email addressed to Campbell, copying Carter-Ruck:
“Hi Naomi, as discussed yesterday you need to send an email confirmation of our instructions to the new lawyers.”
Later that day, the Campbell email address responded:
“I confirm that I wish to instruct Carter-Ruck to represent me in relation to the Charity Commission, and that I am happy for Bianka Hellmich to provide instructions to Carter-Ruck on my behalf.”
From then on, Carter-Ruck communicated with the Charity Commission on behalf of both Hellmich and Campbell. At the time, it went unnoticed that the email address purporting to be Campbell’s personal Gmail was in fact different by a single character.
On at least eight occasions, Carter-Ruck sent material intended for Campbell to the email address it believed was hers. In one, from mid-September 2022, Hellmich asked Carter-Ruck to draft a declaration for Campbell to submit to the Charity Commission, telling the firm, “Please note that Naomi does not email,” and “she also doesn’t use messages as a form of communication except personal.” Carter-Ruck appears to have prepared the declaration. As before, Hellmich had its signing vouched for by Manukyan.
This second declaration does not appear to have eased the regulator’s concerns, either. The following June, the Charity Commission informed Carter-Ruck it intended to ban Campbell from serving as a trustee for 10 years and gave it time to make representations. Carter-Ruck notified the Gmail address it believed was Campbell’s.
Ultimately, Carter-Ruck’s intervention cut the proposed ban in half, and when the Charity Commission formally issued its ruling in April 2024, the firm again sent notice to the same email address. Campbell never received it. “Carter-Ruck thought they were speaking to me for two years,” Campbell says. “I’ve never spoken to anyone at Carter-Ruck, never met, never over Zoom, over anything.” She says she only became aware of the ban five months later, when the regulator’s press statement was released on September 26, the day she was in Paris.
After the initial shock, Campbell says she decided “to do my own investigation”. She engaged Michelle Duncan at Joseph Hage Aaronson, a London law firm specialised in fraud investigations, and Jennifer Robinson, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, who has represented Julian Assange and Amber Heard. The lawyers pored over documents, emails and messages from Fashion for Relief, the Charity Commission and Carter-Ruck. And what they uncovered, Campbell says, was “shocking”.
Although Campbell’s lawyers have publicly said she was a “victim of fraud”, they have not previously shared why they believe that is the case. It was only when Campbell’s team sought information about her purported instructions to Carter-Ruck that the existence of the false Gmail address was discovered.
The Charity Commission, which thought it was dealing with the firm as Campbell’s personal lawyers, now also wanted answers from Carter-Ruck. In response to a series of questions from the commission, the law firm noted it had acted for Campbell in the past, but that it was unable to confirm the email address, “if any”, that she had used in those previous cases because its files had been archived or deleted.
In a statement to the FT, Carter-Ruck said its “file preservation/deletion policies are in accordance with professional best practice”. It said its obligations to Hellmich, who unlike Campbell did not provide the firm with a waiver of confidentiality and privilege to speak to me, restrict what it can say about the fake Gmail address, but that it “conducted itself in good faith and in keeping with [its] professional obligations” at all times.
Carter-Ruck said that Campbell “explicitly acknowledged” in her witness statement for her appeal that she “understood” the firm acted for her “throughout” the Charity Commission inquiry. In that statement, Campbell says she “relied on and trusted” Hellmich to handle the inquiry and that her understanding of Carter-Ruck’s involvement came through occasional WhatsApp messages from Hellmich. She refers to the firm as the “lawyers purportedly acting on [her] behalf” and notes she had no direct contact with them because, she “now understand[s]” the email address they were using for her was “incorrect”.
Campbell’s team then set out to uncover the identity behind the false Gmail address, suspecting a link between that account and the wider issues at Fashion for Relief. Through a lawful disclosure process, they obtained a document from Google showing the Gmail address was created on the same day it first contacted Carter-Ruck to confirm Hellmich’s instructions. The name supplied during the account’s set-up was “N,” and the surname was “Campbell.” But the birth date entered was four days off from the model’s actual date of birth. The recovery email assigned to the account was Hellmich’s personal Yahoo email. The recovery mobile number also belonged to Hellmich.
The Google document revealed two more details. First, the email account was deleted on October 21 2024, less than a month after the Charity Commission’s report was published. And, more importantly, it included the IP address that sent the deletion request. An IP address is like a finger print, a unique string of up to 39 characters assigned to a device, such as a laptop or iPhone, on a network. This IP address was registered at the time to a “Miss Bianka Tobinska”, Hellmich’s maiden name.
Even before these discoveries, the Charity Commission’s own inquiry suggested that Hellmich had only got deeper into trouble as its investigation had progressed. Its interest in Fashion for Relief UK had originally been raised by a financial return for 2017-18, which had been filed late like the previous year’s. The commission has since archived the charity’s filings. A copy of the financial return that I acquired through a Freedom of Information request states that Fashion for Relief UK raised £610,704 that year, yet only 30 per cent was distributed as grants to other charities. The rest was spent on events, governance and operations. While there is no mandated ratio, trustees are expected to balance spending on charitable work and necessary operational costs.
The financial return does not record who submitted it to the Charity Commission. But copies of Fashion for Relief UK’s financial statement and the trustees’ annual report for the same year, which I reviewed for this article, show Hellmich was the only trustee who signed off on both documents.
In the final three months of that financial year, Hellmich invoiced the charity three times for a total of £36,000 in consultancy fees. As part of its inquiry, the commission also examined spending from subsequent years, finding that, in the lead-up to the Covid-19 outbreak, Hellmich submitted 11 invoices, totalling over £200,000. Even after the pandemic halted operations, she continued invoicing the charity, receiving another £61,500.
Hellmich told the Charity Commission she was owed these fees because she had dedicated significant time to Fashion for Relief UK and was responsible for its management. To support her position, she supplied the commission with a letter stating she “receives remuneration of £150,000 per annum with a 10 per cent annual commission of all sponsorships received”, which appears to have Campbell’s signature on it and is dated January 27 2021.
But Campbell’s witness statement for her appeal said that she was not in the UK on that date, that she did not sign the letter, has no record of it being sent to her or being asked to sign it. She added that she would not have agreed to pay Hellmich out of charity funds, not least because it was Campbell who brought in the sponsors. Chou added: “Bianka never told me she’d paid herself.”
Under the Charities Act, trustees cannot pay themselves from the charities they control except in specific circumstances. The Charity Commission found that, excluding expenses, the £290,572 Hellmich received in consultancy fees was “not authorised by the commission, by the act, the court or otherwise in accordance with the charity’s constitution”. These irregularities received significantly less media coverage than the £7,000 incurred by Campbell during her trip to Cannes.
During its inquiry, the commission appointed interim managers to oversee Campbell’s charity. They struggled to locate funds to fulfil the charity’s grant commitments, including £147,000 owed to Save the Children after a 2017 gala event in Cannes. Save the Children said it had “made repeated requests” for the pledged funds and that it had liaised with Hellmich, as well as Campbell’s team, but not Campbell herself.
As the interim managers searched for funds in 2022, they received an email from Hellmich stating that she wished to repay the unauthorised fees. The repayment was processed through Carter-Ruck. While the commission’s inquiry report would state that “the full amount was eventually repaid by [Hellmich]”, £100,000 of the repayment in fact came from the US branch of Campbell’s charity. (Due to its obligations to Hellmich, Carter-Ruck said it cannot comment on this point either, other than to say it is satisfied that it conducted itself properly.)
To enable the transfer, Hellmich used what appeared to be a resolution by the US charity’s board approving the transaction. But Campbell and the two other US board members have denied ever signing this resolution. Campbell has said she only became aware of the purported resolution through her team’s findings. The same applies to two statutory declarations, a type of written statement that is signed and declared to be true, submitted to the Charity Commission during its inquiry. Both were witnessed by Manukyan.
Incredibly, the flurry of contested documents unearthed by the commission included the one that ultimately led to Fashion for Relief UK’s closure (the US charity remains operational). The regulator found that, via a so-called members’ written resolution, the trustees had agreed to dissolve the charity after the commission concluded its inquiry. Campbell’s purported signature on the resolution is dated July 6 2023. But, in her witness statement, Campbell said, “Bianka did not send the members’ written resolution to sign and nor did she ask me to sign it.” She added she was in the US at the time. Chou also told me she had never been involved with drafting or signing such a resolution.
Early in my reporting, Hellmich told me she would be “happy to meet and fill in any gaps”. Using her personal Yahoo email address, which I recognised from documents submitted to the Charity Commission, we made plans to talk one morning at the Charlotte Street Hotel in Fitzrovia. But then she cancelled, citing a family illness. My communication with Hellmich was taken over by representatives from DRD Partnership, a London-based strategic communications firm that describes itself as protecting clients’ “reputations at moments of challenge”.
At first, DRD denied that Hellmich had any knowledge of the Gmail address that purported to be Campbell’s. Then, I relayed the information from Google about the account’s creation. When I asked where Hellmich got the money to repay the £290,572, DRD responded that it came from her personal funds. Then, I provided the information that the resolution she used to transfer £100,000 to the UK appeared to have been forged. DRD did not provide on-the-record responses to these discrepancies, but sent a statement from Hellmich.
“It is deeply distressing that Naomi Campbell is making these false accusations,” it read. “Her claims are a device carefully designed to paint her as a victim, while scapegoating a so-called friend. This is testament to the sort of behaviour I endured during this difficult and damaging relationship. I have fully co-operated with the Charity Commission over the past six years.
I am grateful this challenging period of my life is over. I hope that Naomi finds peace and happiness in her future.”
Hellmich, I was told, accepts she should have done more to properly manage Fashion for Relief UK but claims it would not have made a real difference because Campbell held power over her. Although a successful professional, she was a just-divorced single mother in a new city at the time they met. Her position, I was told, is that she was a victim of bullying and coercive behaviour by Campbell. I was also reminded of Campbell’s past assault allegations by former staff.
“Oh, please,” Campbell says about the accusations. “Complete crap . . . I lived across the ocean in another country, so that makes no sense to me, bullied. But if you were bullied, why would you come in my home and be around me and my kids?” Even if Hellmich’s allegation were true, Campbell adds, “it does not give any explanation for opening up a bank account with a false signature and impersonating me . . . It’s complete bullshit.”
Still, the question of what motivated Hellmich’s alleged actions remains unanswered. Was she driven to finance a Campbell-like lifestyle? Or was she swallowed by a whirlwind of increasingly nearsighted and bad decisions, as the inquiry dragged on?
During my investigation into what happened between Campbell and Hellmich, I uncovered emails that show Hellmich attempted to open an account for Fashion for Relief UK at the Cayman National Bank on the Isle of Man in June 2015, just a few months after the charity was officially registered. The messages were part of a cache of leaked Cayman National documents. The Isle of Man is a well-known tax haven and there is no apparent reason why a UK charity, which is already tax-exempt, would seek to bank there.
But Cayman National was involved in some of the corporate transactions Hellmich assisted on when she worked at Clifford Chance, according to the same cache. Among the documents submitted to Cayman National by a colleague of Hellmich’s at Discreet Law was a copy of Campbell’s passport and a mandate form, which specifies who is authorised to operate the account. After reviewing these documents, the bank’s head of compliance raised a concern: “The signature signed by Naomi Campbell on the [form] does not match her passport. Can this be explained?” The response from Hellmich’s colleague was: “The client’s signature does differ slightly from her passport.”
Despite this, Cayman National appears to have continued processing the request, going so far as to allocate an account number and to draft a welcome letter, dated July 2015, which read: “We are pleased to advise that we have now completed all our due diligence satisfactorily and opened accounts for you.” It is unclear whether the letter was ever sent, but no funds were deposited. (Cayman National said the bank cannot comment on specific clients.)
Then, in October 2015, a compliance review conducted by Cayman National flagged news reports about controversies in India related to Modi, according to an email sent to Hellmich’s Discreet Law colleague. At the time of the charity’s registration in the UK, Modi had been listed as a trustee, alongside Campbell, Hellmich and Chou.
Cayman National warned that the account might be closed unless Modi was removed as a trustee. The records show Hellmich was copied into some of the emails that followed. Her colleague claimed steps were taken to remove Modi, but despite repeated requests from the bank, supporting documents were never provided.
The Charity Commission’s inquiry uncovered emails that shed some light on what happened next. According to one of those documents, on December 21 2017, Hellmich emailed the fake Campbell Gmail, as well as a Yahoo email that appeared to belong to Chou, stating that Modi could no longer be a trustee “for personal reasons”. Less than a month later, she sent a follow-up: “Hi Naomi, Regarding your questions earlier, Lalit is no longer a trustee following his resignation so we don’t need to worry about press issues and involvement for the 2018 event.” She signed it “See you soon, xxx” and copied a different Yahoo email that appeared to belong to Chou. (“Both of those are not me,” Chou told me. “Mine is Gmail.”)
Modi formally resigned as a trustee in April 2018 but, by then, Hellmich appears to have abandoned Cayman National.
At one point during my interview with Campbell, I bring up Cayman National. When I describe the documents showing Hellmich tried to open an account there, her eyes widen. “What!?” I ask whether Hellmich had ever told her about this account. “Absolutely not,” she says.
Campbell insists she would never have condoned the use of an offshore account. “Why would I set up an account somewhere else when all the monies are supposed to go to the charities? Why would I do that? I’m completely shocked.” When I read Campbell the concerns Cayman National’s compliance head raised about her mismatching signatures, she says: “Of course! Because I didn’t sign it.”
There are a lot of dubious documents in this story, but the Cayman National emails appear to show one thing in particular: that Hellmich was already deeply involved in managing the charity’s paperwork from its earliest days. “Identity theft is such an invasion,” the supermodel tells me, regaining her composure. “And this is why I wanted to come public, because I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”
Hellmich is not appealing her nine-year ban from acting as a trustee, and Chou is not contesting her four-year ban. Campbell is determined to prove she was a victim of identity theft so extensive that it prevented her from fulfilling her legal duties as a trustee.
With the help of her new representation, Campbell’s challenge of the Charity Commission’s ban is moving through a tribunal process, in which a specialised court that handles appeals of decisions made by government regulators will review the matter. The Charity Commission told me that Campbell’s appeal will require her to “prove very serious allegations of wrongdoing against a fellow trustee”.
If she succeeds, the implications for her former friend could be serious. Knowingly providing misleading information to the Charity Commission is a criminal offence that carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.
During a preliminary tribunal hearing in February, the commission’s lawyer said that Campbell’s argument is that she was not in control of the charity, rather than that there was no mismanagement. That could mean that, even if the tribunal finds that Campbell was impersonated, it might still sustain the regulator’s argument that “trustees are equally responsible for the overall management and administration of the charity”.
It isn’t clear how long the process will take. But it may not matter. “I’ve had to change everything, change my email address, change my credit cards,” Campbell says. “You take it more personally because it’s someone that you know.”
Paul Caruana Galizia is an investigative reporter at the FT
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