Victoria, the soon-to-be ex-wife of former England and premiership rugby player Danny Cipriani, ponders how to portray her husband amidst their complex divorce.
She characterizes him as a mix of qualities, labeling him as “gentlemanly, chivalrous, considerate and kind” while also noting his darker side of being “completely psychotic, delusional and in a high state of paranoia” especially after consuming magic mushrooms.
Reflecting on their turbulent past, Victoria recounts incidents of seemingly harmless packages being delivered to Danny’s stylish residence in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
‘Bar after bar of what seemed to be Cadbury’s chocolate, even packaged with their distinctive Dairy Milk logo,’ she explains.
But they were not, of course, produced by the reputable confectioner at all. Actually, they contained the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin – commonly known as magic mushrooms – and were merely masquerading as ordinary chocolate bars.
‘They’d be left on the doorstep: £500 to £600 worth. And his marijuana would be delivered in a brown parcel the size of a pillow.’
It is a shocking juxtaposition, this notion that one of the fittest and most gifted sportsmen in the country could also be in thrall to hallucinogens, weed (and it emerges, a veritable pharmacy of prescription drugs) while playing rugby at elite club level and for his country.
Never mind how he found the time or stamina – pre-Victoria – as he once confessed to her, to have sex with up to three women a day!
Danny Cipriani, 37, and Victoria, 44, are now in the throes of a complicated divorce
But contradictions are key to Cipriani, who wrote about his prolific drink, drug and sexual appetites in his raw 2023 autobiography Who Am I? Once heralded as the successor to the great England fly-half Jonny Wilkinson, Cipriani was a maverick on the pitch. Precociously brilliant yet fatally flawed, he played just 16 times for his country.
‘He could smoke industrial quantities of marijuana – he wouldn’t even seem stoned – and he’d still turn up and do a day’s hard rugby training,’ says Victoria, 44, as we contemplate the Danny who is currently on our TV screens, yomping through undergrowth thrumming with deadly wildlife and navigating crocodile-infested waters in a Costa Rican jungle as one of 12 contestants in the new Bear Grylls Netflix reality drama Celebrity Bear Hunt presented by Holly Willoughby.
While tackling one challenge, Strictly Come Dancing’s head judge Shirley Ballas, 64, positively quaking with fear, is forced to confront her terror of heights by walking across a rickety bridge – which is missing several slats – 200 ft above a dizzying ravine.
And it is Danny Cipriani, 37, who coaxes her with the gentle persuasiveness you’d accord a frightened child, across the gorge.
I remark to Victoria that he seemed genuinely sweet-natured as he patiently cajoled his teammate along the bridge.
‘Oh yes,’ she agrees, ‘He’s one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met. He’ll encourage you, promote you. He’s adorable.
‘But there is also a very different version of Danny. He has been my greatest teacher and my biggest lesson,’ she adds.
She then tells me about one psychotic, mushroom-fuelled episode – they happened up to four times a year during their four-year relationship – during which Danny, ‘thought I was the Devil.
He ran down the street naked, hit his hip on a passing car, just jumped up again – his resilience was insane – and I managed to coax him into the house before he ran outside again, launching himself backwards down a flight of stone steps in the garden and smashing his head so hard on the ground I thought he was dead.’
She was 23 weeks pregnant at the time – later that same week she miscarried their baby son, whom they called River – and it is almost impossible to overstate the trauma she must have endured as her husband, still psychotic and in a bed at The Priory, recovered from the overdose.
The former England and premiership rugby player was in thrall to hallucinogens, weed and prescription drugs while playing rugby at elite club level and for his country
Victoria, who works in mental health, is petite – a full foot shorter than Danny – and improbably slim and toned
We’re sitting today in the neat, neutral-toned front room of Victoria’s rented home on a new development in Kent.
A scented candle fills the room with linen-fresh fragrance; Danny’s two dogs – huge, friendly labradoodles – greet me boisterously. He abandoned the dogs to Victoria’s care, along with all his possessions – seemingly sloughing off his old life like a snake skin – when they split up in January 2024.
Victoria, who works in mental health, is petite – a full foot shorter than Danny – and improbably slim and toned, although she says she ballooned to 15st when she and Danny undertook a succession of unsuccessful IVF attempts after they lost River.
She has two grown-up children from previous relationships and two granddaughters, one of whom, old enough to miss the man she called Pops, is bereft at Danny’s absence. ‘He taught her to swim. She struggles without him. She feels abandoned.’
Victoria and Danny met in January 2020 when she was 40 and he was 33. He approached her through social media, although they also had mutual friends, and after exchanging a series of messages she agreed to meet him at his home.
‘We had a take-away meal, chilled together and that led to sex. He wasn’t full of rugby player banter, he’s not gregarious. He’s a gentleman, slightly aloof even. Quite serious.
‘During the evening, I noticed him necking pills from a bottle. I grabbed it and said, ‘What’s this you’re taking?’ He said it was Xanax (a powerful tranquilliser usually prescribed for anxiety) and he was taking it following a knee injury. Two hours later he took a few more.’
She did not heed this red flag, but remembers thinking he was troubled. Indeed, a few weeks later his vulnerability surfaced when TV presenter Caroline Flack, a former girlfriend of Danny’s with whom he remained close friends, died from suicide.
He spoke movingly about her, saying: ‘I hadn’t really cried or felt visceral feelings before.’
Victoria stepped into this maelstrom of emotions at the start of their relationship. Less than two months later, she discovered she was pregnant.
‘Danny was in America at the time and I FaceTimed him. I told him I wanted him to share the responsibility for our baby and he was delighted, so happy. I went to fetch him from the airport and he said, ‘Let’s go to my house’.’ Before long she had moved into his six-bedroom home, and the extent of his drug use became clear to her.
Returning to those drug packages delivered to their door she says: ‘They looked so much like ordinary chocolate, Danny’s cleaner once ate a square by mistake. A square of chocolate was a single dose.
Victoria and Danny met in January 2020 when she was 40 and he was 33. He approached her through social media and after exchanging messages she agreed to meet him at his home
Danny would say it created neural pathways in the mind and relieved trauma. He said you could connect with nature and God – and it didn’t show up on routine rugby drug testing. He was always urging me to try it but I never did.’
Indeed, so on trend are the psychedelic mushroom bars that two characters in the new BBC TV series Amandaland – a spin-off of the award-winning Motherland – offer Amanda, played by actress Lucy Punch, a square of the chocolate while they’re in a hot-tub in their garden. (She surreptitiously spits it out.)
There were more revelations from Danny. ‘Once he knew I was pregnant he wanted me to know everything about his past, to wipe the slate clean, purge himself, because he had a lot of skeletons in his cupboard, a lot of guilt and shame.
‘He gave me his phone and the password and just said, ‘This is me’. You wouldn’t believe the women he’d slept with.
‘Of course there were all those we know about (former model Kelly Brook, glamour model Katie Price, American actress Lindsay Lohan among them) and then loads more, household names including A-list celebrities and actresses.’
His sexual tally also stretched to ‘porn stars, actresses, women he’d met in coffee shops or messaged on the internet. I found it hard to imagine him having the confidence to do that. It should have been another red flag to me but he told me he was a changed person; that he’d work hard to be a proper family man.’
For a while he did before relapsing and eating ‘a whole giant family-sized bar’ of drug-laced chocolate. It was this incident that culminated in Danny, naked and high, crashing down stone steps and ending up in The Priory.
Advised not to tell Danny she had miscarried – ‘he would not even have understood’ – she hid the loss of their unborn child until his condition had improved. And when I told him he was on anti-psychotic medication. He was heartbroken. He just broke down in floods of tears.’
Again he promised to change his ways and the pair married in April 2021; she talks about the ‘different version’ of Danny who inspired her love: ‘He’d send me cards on my kids’ birthdays saying how much he cherished me and how he’d be by my side as we entered a new phase of our lives.’
A month or so later he was offered a contract by Bath Rugby Club. It seemed like a chance to start afresh. They moved to the city, into a beautiful Regency villa. ‘Danny invested a lot into our relationship. I was happy. We went on long walks together. We travelled. His use of weed decreased. It was a magical time for me.’
They also started IVF and spent £63,000 on six rounds, travelling to Greece for treatment, but ultimately failing.
Sadly, Victoria says: ‘Times became turbulent again. Danny started taking Xanax, Tramadol, weed and mushrooms again, micro-dosing with small amounts so he could have ‘spiritual conversations’. I was fed up of hearing about his psychedelic drug fantasies. Why wasn’t I enough? It was shattering to my self-esteem.
‘I was also worried that he’d have another psychotic episode and kill himself. He never swore at me or even raised his voice. He’s a calm person.
‘But if he overdosed on magic mushrooms, he’d become loud and paranoid. It was frightening.’
Eighteen months after the move to Bath, Victoria gave him an ultimatum: ‘I was at the end of my tether. I was done.’ She wanted to move back to Kent to be nearer her family.
Danny agreed. He retired from rugby, they decamped to a beautiful home in Sevenoaks – and then his mum Anne, who worked 18-hour days as a black cab driver to pay for his private schooling, had a stroke.
Anne had raised Danny alone, a mixed-race boy on a Putney council estate, after his father Jay returned to his native Tobago when their son was eight.
While Danny got on famously with his easy-going, sociable dad, his relationship with his mum was problematic. She was tough and undemonstrative – he wrote in his autobiography that she administered a ‘gristly love that’s hard to swallow’ and never said she was proud of him – but she came to live with him and Victoria.
To begin with, until her needs became too much for Victoria to cope with, she was Anne’s carer.
It sounds, from Victoria’s account, that there were brief periods of relative calm, when Danny revelled in his step-parental role and enjoyed introducing Victoria’s young granddaughter to sports.
But then one evening everything imploded. Considering the litany of excess and melodrama that punctuated their lives together, the incident that precipitated the end of their marriage seems comparatively innocuous.
Victoria became upset when she and Danny attended an event he was speaking at and after his address he had gone to sit with another woman for the dinner, telling Victoria she was ‘sitting on another table’.
The next morning Victoria found ‘flattering’ (but not sexual) messages to the woman on Danny’s phone. ‘I was angry. He was infuriatingly calm.’ She told him to leave and recalls his ambiguous response: ‘He packed a few pairs of jogging bottoms in a bag and said, ‘If I leave now can I come back?’ Then he went and I never saw him again.’
A few weeks later Cipriani was pictured in India on a ‘spiritual journey’ with a striking female yoga teacher.
Since, he has dated American actress AnnaLynne McCord and, although no longer together, he has said they are still supportive friends. Victoria, however, has remained resolutely single, saying: ‘I’m no longer heartbroken. I’m reflecting and healing.’
Doubtless Danny has also had time to do his fair share of contemplation in the Costa Rican jungle. While chaperoning Shirley Ballas over rickety bridges on Celebrity Bear Hunt, he could perhaps do worse than build a few of his own with Victoria, too.
