His father has enjoyed a roll call of beautiful lovers, some of whom he has married – Catherine Deneuve and Marie Helvin among them – and many more, including Sixties models Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree, whom he has not. All while somehow remaining on good terms with pretty well all of them.
But Sascha Bailey, 29, youngest of legendary snapper David Bailey’s three offspring by his fourth and current wife, model Catherine Dyer, finds that kind of luck elusive. He is, I can disclose, coming to terms with the end of his ten-year marriage to Japanese lawyer Mimi Nishikawa, a decade his senior, without the slightest expectation that they’ll ever be exchanging fond words in the way that his father and Helvin still do.
Sascha, an art curator, explains that he had no inkling of how things would unravel. ‘I fled Japan, basically – the morning of October 16 2022,’ he tells me, before stressing that his choice of the word ‘flee’ is not overly dramatic. He adds that it took him ‘quite a long time’ to accept the flaws in the marriage. But, once he’d done so, he prepared accordingly. ‘I actually had a bag packed,’ he explains.
Sascha Bailey, 29, now has a new woman in his life – blonde Lucy Brown, 32
Sascha is coming to terms with the end of his ten-year marriage to Japanese lawyer Mimi Nishikawa, a decade his senior
He’s still licking his – proverbial – marital wounds. ‘I’m not in a particularly good place, but I’m trying to get myself back together. You know, one step at a time.’
Nishikawa does not respond to my calls for comment. But Sascha now has a new woman in his life – blonde Lucy Brown, 32.
She tells me that they started talking ‘as friends’ on his return from Japan. ‘He was very lost. He seemed almost shell-shocked. The stuff that he was telling me was like, red flag, red flag, red flag. It seemed that he was almost fearful of his partner.’
Lucy has also extricated herself from an awkward association. She was once assistant to far-Right ‘man of the people’, Tommy Robinson, with whom she covertly filmed BBC reporter John Sweeney splurging £220 on wine, spirits and champagne cocktails – and declaring that white, working-class male guests on Newsnight were as rare as ‘cannibals’ from the Amazon. So she can certainly handle a camera.