Supermodel Naomi Campbell has been giving testimony at the war crimes tribunal of ex-Liberia President Charles Taylor. Earlier Thursday, she told prosecutors in the Hague that she was given a few “dirty-looking” stones.
After taking to the stand a few minutes late (fashionably late, if you will) Campbell swore on a bible before answering questions for nearly two hours. She was asked about allegations that Taylor gave her “blood diamonds” as a gift 13 years ago, which is tied in to further allegations that the stones were used to fund Sierra Leone’s civil war. Taylor denies the charges and maintains he hasn’t sold or traded diamonds for weapons.
The sequence of events, according to the British model, went down like this. Campbell said she was given two or three stones after a dinner in South Africa, hosted by Nelson Mandela. After the event, she said there was a knock at her door. “Two men were there and gave me a pouch and said: ‘A gift for you’,” she said. “I opened the pouch the next morning when I woke up … I saw a few stones in there, they were very small dirty-looking stones,” she told the court. There was no explanation and no note, she explained. Furthermore, Campbell didn’t say they were diamonds or that she was given them by Taylor himself.
Campbell said she gave the stones to Jeremy Ratcliffe of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. During her testimony, Campbell went on to say that she had previously denied having the stones as she feared for her family as Taylor was, “someone I read on the Internet has killed thousands of people, supposedly.”