Groucho Club

Groucho Club   (Club, Blackmail operation?)
Formation	1985
Headquarters	Soho, London, England
Leader	John Lewis
British private members in London's Soho, for VIPs in the publishing, media, entertainment and arts industries. Heavy drug use, which was being filmed for blackmail purposes. Also sexual molestation allegations.

The Groucho Club is a British private members club formed in 1985 located on Dean Street in London's Soho. Its members are mostly drawn from the publishing, media, entertainment and arts industries.

The club is known for the copious amounts of cocaine snorted there with seeming legal impunity. The drug use was being secretly filmed for blackmail purposes.

Allegations have been made that directors and/or staff knowingly allowed, and helped cover up, sexual molestation on the premises of the Club, and, once discovered, conspired to delete paedophile links that had been running over many months on the Groucho Members’ forum website.

Owners

The Groucho’s ownership has changed several times since the 1980s. After a failed takeover attempt by Benjy Fry, it was sold to Joel Cadbury, Matthew Freud (the son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch) and Rupert Hambro in 2001.

In 2008 they sold it to Graphite Capital, who then sold a majority stake to a group of private investors led by Alcuin Capital, a fellow private equity firm.

The British businessman John Lewis was Chairman of the Club from 2008-10 until 2015 During his time myriad allegations were made, including charges that him and his fellow directors, and/or staff, knowingly allowed, and helped cover up, sexual molestation on the premises of the Club, and, once discovered, conspired to delete paedophile links that had been running over many months on the Groucho Members’ forum website.

Secret filming

The Groucho Club has always maintained that it had only two surveillance cameras there, purely for the protection of its clients: but investigator Tyrone Murphy disproved this. The club attempted to intimidate him by suing, but withdrew the case at the last minute

John Ward wrote:

At the Leveson Enquiry, Steve Coogan for example talks about a dinner he had with a journalist. It was intimated to him that a conversation about his kids with the journalist was off the record. Details then appeared in short order in a Sunday Times article….a Murdoch newspaper.

Coogan assumed the hack had betrayed the confidence. But was he recorded by others….and the information passed on?

I have spoken to several celebrities and their agents over the last three years about their tabloid dealings. All but one of them (this group doesn’t include Coogan, by the way) trod warily about blowing the whistle on what they suspected as phone-hacking because they had been threatened with cocaine use exposure. The agent of one of these – a well-known model and TV personality – told me last Tuesday, “[She] was a regular at The Groucho. It had never occurred to me before that there might be visual evidence of substance abuse. But [name] was out of control at the time. She admits that, and she is now clean. But she spent a lot of time ingesting at The Groucho. Almost everyone did. And yes, she was told to cooperate or else her Coke habit would be splashed…but she’s still too scared to say that on the record.”

I can vouch for the level of white powder inhaled at the club over the years. I thought it completely normal in the late 1990s to go to the downstairs loo there and be deafened by the sound of sniffing. Was it a mystery virus, I would often wonder. It may well have been: I couldn’t possibly comment. But the current head of one massive international ad agency yesterday confirmed many similar experiences. "There was," he observed, "a tendency after about nine pm for conversation to be like an Olympic 100 metres final". As a comment threader here noted yesterday, "The Snooker Room was known as the Peruvian procurement office".

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