AS football pundit Richard Keys lay sleeping, his wife Julia tentatively opened the text messages on his phone.
What she saw made her heart stop.
There, in black and white, were a series of exchanges between the presenter and a young lawyer called Lucie Rose – a woman more than half his age and his daughter Jemma’s best friend.
Julia, who checked Keys’ phone on ‘female intuition’, woke her husband and demanded to know what was going on.
Still recovering from thyroid cancer, she was devastated at the thought he could be cheating after 36 years together.
But the brazen star, working for Al Jazeera TV at the time, brushed off her concerns, insisting Lucie needed help with a problem and that he was a mentor to her and her friends.
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He even claimed that the group referred to him as their ‘Doha dad’.
But it was all a lie which would unravel 18 months later, in 2016, when Julia found more incriminating texts and posed as Richard to get to the truth.
The cruel betrayal left Julia, 62, son Joshua, 34, an assistant producer in America, and Jemma, 38, a former Hollyoaks actress, devastated.
Julia had stood by him when he quit Sky Sports in 2011 after being caught making derogatory comments about women – including official Sian Massey.
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£20k wedding
At the weekend Keys, 66, married Lucie, 35, in a low-key £20,000 ceremony in Devon.
Unsurprisingly, daughter Jemma was not among the guests.
Keys told The Sun ahead of the nuptials: “I’m a very lucky man, although feeling a bit nervous.
“We’re heading off to Canada for our honeymoon which is a bit different. Then it’s back to work for both of us in August and the start of the football season for me.
“People might think I’m a bit long in the tooth now but I don’t care.”
Certainly, psychologist Julia has accused him of not giving a fig about his behaviour – claiming today he only told her about the wedding in a text two hours before getting hitched.
She previously called Keys “controlling” and “manipulative” after discovering the affair during a family holiday in Cornwall.
In a 2017 interview Julia revealed the moment she tricked Richard’s lover to get to the bottom of the fling.
Richard and Jemma were sleeping after the long journey to St Ives when Julia saw a picture of Lucie pop up on Richard’s phone along with the message: “You okay?”
She said: “That’s when I pretended to be Richard.
“I texted back: ‘No, I’m not’. Ping, Lucie replies: ‘I didn’t think you were. You sounded so sad. I just wish I could give you a cuddle.
“I ping back ‘so do I’, then she pings over a picture of herself.
“I say a few more things like, ‘ it will be great when we can see each other again’.
“She sends emoji hearts and cuddles. Then I got so incensed I couldn’t be bothered carrying it on any more.”
Sexism storm
Keys met up with Lucie, who worked as a lawyer at a Qatar investment company, when he took a job for Al Jeezera with old pal and fellow sports presenter Andy Gray.
The pair left Sky in the midst of a sexism storm.
Keys quit in 2011 after he asked pundit Jamie Redknapp if he had slept with an ex by asking him, “Did you smash it?”.
He and Gray also thought they were off-air when they made comments about linesman Massey questioning the ability of women to do the job.
A video then emerged of Gray crudely referring to Massey’s appearance and a third clip showed him making inappropriate comments to presenter Charlotte Jackson.
When Keys was caught red-handed with Lucie following the texts, Julia says he was “on his knees begging me not to leave him and saying how sorry he was”.
She added: “Then when things eventually calmed down – and this is where it really hurts – Richard said: ‘What’s the problem? Everybody does it. Anyway, she’s leaving the country so it’s never going to last.”
Richard promised his fling was over but Julia, who was still in recovery from thyroid cancer, said he carried on seeing Lucie behind her back.
When he was diagnosed with a thoracic aortic aneurysm in Doha in 2017 he returned to Britain to see a consultant and his wife went with him.
He needed an operation to fix the aorta in his heart and Julia looked after him.
But she claims Keys was even cheating on her then.
She said: “Richard told me a mutual friend was going to take him to hospital, instead of Josh (their son) and me.
“But it was Lucie and Richard’s sister.
“Richard had a meal the night before his life-saving operation with his sister and girlfriend, not me who’d been married to him for 36 years. And that was after he’d been begging me to have him back.’
Daughter’s pain
Daughter Jemma said the two-year nightmare plunged her into the depths of a long battle with alcoholism.
She was charged with harassment after sending a string of abusive texts to Lucie which referred to her as ‘the filthiest sl** and a ‘Qatar w****’. But the charges were later dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service.
She said in 2018: “All I can say is that it was 18 months down the line from finding out about the affair – which was the most awful betrayal – and I’d hit the lowest, darkest point of my addiction.
“The revelation had come so completely out of the blue. I was under the illusion Lucie was the complete opposite of the person she’s turned out to be – there was never any inkling she’d do something like this.
“Dad had been my idol all my life and, although I still love him, I don’t know who he is anymore. I have nothing to say to him.”
Richard later denied he left his wife while she was recovering from cancer.
He told the Athletic: “I’ll mention the unmentionable for you. Did I leave my wife fighting cancer? No. I don’t know what happened.
“I don’t know why our marriage ended the way it did, but my wife was fighting cancer for seven years before I left her and she had been in remission for seven years.
“I know how hard it was for her when things went wrong. I wasn’t going to start engaging in a tit-for-tat, he-said, she-said, respond to everything that was said about me.
“If people believe that I walked away with my wife fighting cancer with a friend of my daughter’s, I can’t change that now. Tell a lie twice and it becomes the truth. Tell it on social media and it haunts you forever.”
He also claimed his marriage to Julia collapsed amid his daughter’s alcohol problems. In a blog post he also denied that Lucie and Jemma were ever friends.
He wrote in 2018: “Sadly my daughter’s problems have haunted our family for 15 years or more.
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“Those that know us well would tell you that we have tried everything to help her. We’ve spent in excess of £250,000 on rehab. I have never come up short on any family matters.
“Jemma’s issues are at the core of my marriage break-up. My wife and I disagree on her treatment. Quite simply – I refuse to enable her with her problems any further. Those with addictions will understand what I mean.”
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
