Last Saturday I wrote – in excoriating terms – about Lauryn Goodman, the former mistress of footballer Kyle Walker, who’d taken their four-year-old son Kairo to the England game against Denmark on Thursday night.
She had dressed him in an England shirt emblazoned with his father’s Number 2 – and the words ‘Daddy’.
Knowing Walker’s wife Annie would be there with three of her four sons with Kyle – Roman, 11, Rian, seven, and Reign, five – wearing almost identical shirts, I wrote: ‘What drives an ex-mistress to humiliate a football star’s wife? How could she be so cruel?’
And then I read Lauryn’s own account, as told to my colleague Katie Hind, of why she took Kairo to Frankfurt to watch his dad play that night. I felt… well… abashed and began to question my views of this tawdry saga.
Lauryn Goodman with son Kairo before watching his father Kyle Walker play against Denmark
Kairo was said to have been promised by his father he could be in the stands next time he played in a major tournament
According to Lauryn, when Kyle was playing for England in the Qatar World Cup in 2022 – and when she was secretly pregnant with their second child – he promised Kairo, via a FaceTime call, that he would make sure his son was in the stands next time he played in a major tournament.
Needless to say, Kyle – who earns around £9million a year playing for Manchester City – never kept that promise. Little Kairo was resigned to the fact that his best hope of seeing his dad during the tournament was in a packet of football cards for his Euros sticker book.
But Lauryn was determined to uphold her ex-lover’s Kyle promise, and so she took Kairo there herself, along with her grandfather – with no assistance from Daddy.
She insists that the reason she turned up at the Frankfurt game and sat on the other side of the stadium from Annie and her sons was not to draw attention to herself or make a point – although by doing so she accomplished both – was so Kairo wouldn’t be confused when Daddy ran to embrace Annie’s sons in the stands after the game, and not him.
As his dad played, she told the Mail that Kairo was shouting: ‘Yes Daddy… Brilliant shot, Daddy… My Daddy is in the right corner.’
But she added that she took him out of the stadium five minutes before the match ended to avoid Kairo having to witness his dad with another family. She didn’t want to ruin ‘his perfect day’.
It’s heart-breaking.
Lauryn is accused by her detractors of whom there are many – and here I must admit mea culpa! – of not helping but hurting her son by outing his father’s extra-marital affair so publicly.
There is some truth in that accusation – she’s a high-profile influencer and model who has garnered much publicity by going to Frankfurt.
But the question: Was this the act of the vengeful former mistress or that of a loving single mother trying to fulfil the dreams of her young son, whose dearest wish was to see his hero daddy playing live for England in the Euros as vice-captain?
Lauryn claims that Kyle’s betrayed wife Annie’s had set conditions if they were to mend their marriage. One was that Kyle has no contact with Kairo, nor his ten-month-old daughter with Lauryn, barely older than Annie and Kyle’s new baby son Rezon.
Kyle with wife Annie Kilner and one of their children after the match last Thursday
For Kyle to agree to such terms, if indeed he did, is not just cruel but cowardly.
What kind of father can betray his own flesh and blood in this way? And Annie too must bear some responsibility. However much it pains her, what mother can insist her husband no longer has contact with his children, even if they are born outside of their marriage?
Let’s not forget when Lauryn fell pregnant with Kairo, he and his long-suffering wife Annie were on a break. He had been thrown him out of the family home after numerous lurid allegations about his insatiable sexual appetite.
Lauryn claims that back then, she wasn’t Kyle’s mistress but his girlfriend, in what she believed to be a loving, meaningful relationship.
Yes, during the brief second fling, that led Lauryn falling pregnant with a baby girl, she was the mistress and he a married man – and there’s no excusing either of them for that behaviour.
Yet how heartbreaking for Lauryn to hear the man she loved later dismiss what they had as nothing but a moment of madness, as he tried to salvage things with his wife.
Rubbing salt into a raw wound, he said: ‘There was no relationship, would she even know how many sugars I have in my coffee, if I have sugar?’
It’s telling that Neanderthal Kyle thinks proof of a loving relationship is a woman knowing how he likes his coffee.
That takes the biscuit for hubris, with a splash of narcissism, all too common among football ‘aces’ like him.
At the heart of this psychodrama is just a small lad desperate for his father’s acknowledgment and love. How sad for Kairo if Annie upkeeps her alleged ban on contact, to be estranged from his father.
How awful for Annie’s kids too. It won’t be long before her eldest, Roman, now 11, will find out about the antics of his faithless father and the half-siblings he never knew about through social media and the schoolyard.
Not Lauryn, not Annie, but Kyle is the real monster here. He should take the blame for his cruelty towards them and the kids.
They will all suffer the aftermath of his weakness, his betrayal and his abandonment.
And if in years to come he tries to reconcile with them when he’s a washed-up nobody, having caused so much hurt, good luck to him.