The whirlwind romance that ended in allegations of domestic abuse: How PR executive Kate Greville and Ryan Giggs first met when he stared at her over table as she helped plan launch of Hotel Football

She was once prepared to invite ridicule, posing for photographers at Royal Ascot wearing a hat in the shape of a giant slab of stilton cheese for a PR client.

But as her career progressed, Kate Greville found herself catching the eye of Britain’s most decorated footballer.

Born and raised in Shropshire, Miss Greville lived with her GP father, Evan, and his second wife Sian after her parents split up.

The couple went on to have two further daughters – including Emma, Kate’s half-sister 12 years her junior who was dog-sitting on the night of the alleged headbutt.

Both Kate and Emma attended Ellesmere College – where boarding fees currently stand at £38,000-a-year – before moving to sixth form college in Shrewsbury for her A-levels.

After a degree in public relations at Leeds Beckett University, Kate worked on accounts such as The North Face and Chicago Town Pizza before getting her big break.

While working for Manchester public relations agency Tangerine in 2013, she was tasked with helping to plan the launch of ex-Manchester United stars Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville’s Hotel Football business.

Miss Greville was keen to stress her own interest in psychology, saying in her police interview – which was played to the jury at last summer’s trial – that she quickly picked up his interest in her, in part from how he always made a point of remembering her name.

She also recalled how Giggs – then nearing the end of his Old Trafford playing career – was ‘literally staring at me across a table’ during one media interview.

‘It was not a comfortable stare,’ she told the trial at Manchester Crown Court, which ended last August when the jury failed to reach any verdicts.

‘I was unnerved by it a little bit but it was also quite flattering at the time.’

After that, Giggs would repeatedly email her photographs of wherever he was, she told the jury.

At the time she was unhappily married to Damian Burke.

But when her mother Lynda asked her to get a signed shirt from Giggs, she ‘knew that would be the start of something’, she added.

When she met Giggs at a hotel for the shirt to be signed, she had just had an argument with Mr Burke and was ‘feeling very s***’, she told police.

They began spending more time together, and Giggs started to confide in her that his marriage was unhappy too.

In her police interview played to the jury last year, Miss Greville described her initial attraction to Giggs in the most gushing terms – he was her ‘saviour’, her ‘soul mate’, her ‘knight in shining armour’, she said.

‘It was more than a sexual thing,’ she added.

For his part, Mr Burke has kept a dignified silence – but when Giggs’ relationship with his wife was first publicised in 2016, a ‘mutual friend’ told a newspaper it was his view that ‘she always fancied herself as a WAG’.

Mr Burke was said to have added that ‘there were three of us in the relationship’ – and one of them was Ryan Giggs.

The couple had reportedly married in 2011 in a glitzy £40,000 ceremony in Ibiza, followed by a £5,000 honeymoon in Oman.

Miss Greville told police her husband was controlling towards her – and that by contrast, with Giggs it was ‘like he was my best friend’.

But at the same time there were ‘definite red flags’, in particular Giggs allegedly lying that he had ended his own marriage to wife Stacey.

‘It was just complete mind games,’ she said. ‘That went on for ages.’

They repeatedly broke up when she lost patience, she said, but Giggs would turn up at her apartment and demand to see her.

Miss Greville said when she ignored him, he shouted that she was ‘a whore’, demanding: ‘Have you got somebody in there?’

Finally in late 2015 Miss Greville – who earlier that year had left her husband – decided to move to an Abu Dhabi-based PR firm to ‘get away from him’, only for Giggs to ‘pursue’ her there, she said.

After they were publicly linked the following year, Miss Greville said she was ‘hounded’ by paparazzi.

Under cross-examination Miss Greville said the pair first had sex as early as December 2014 while on a work event at a hotel in London and she that left her husband Damian the following February.

She claimed that the first time Giggs was ‘aggressive’ to her was when he ‘flipped’ during a night out in Dubai in mid-2017.

In their hotel room that night she claimed Giggs grabbed her by the wrists ‘hard’ and ‘literally dragged’ her naked across the floor before he threw her belongings into the corridor.

Miss Greville said she was ‘left humiliated and embarrassed’ as she found herself with no clothes on in the middle of the corridor.

Giving evidence himself, Giggs admitted they had argued but denied hurting her, saying they made up and had ‘rough sex’.

Miss Greville later told a colleague an injury she sustained that night was a ‘sex bruise’.

However under cross-examination said this was a lie as she had been ’embarrassed’ and ‘didn’t want to admit’ that it had been sustained in an alleged assault by Giggs.

The following day, Miss Greville said she was on a sun lounger when she received an anonymous email from a man containing a naked photo of Giggs which he had allegedly found on his wife’s phone.

‘It was not a picture of his head, but it was him,’ she added, saying he had sent her the same picture just weeks earlier.

But she said whenever she tried to confront Giggs he would blame her.

He would say it was just lies and she needed to be ‘strong’ and ignore such claims about him, she said – causing her to become ‘paranoid’.

‘I was thinking, ‘God, is it me?’ ‘I was just gullible I guess.’

She said Giggs told her they could ‘start a family’ if she returned to the UK, telling her ‘you are the only person I want to be with.’

She moved back to Manchester at the start of 2018 where she was given the title ‘head of PR and communications’ at Giggs and Gary Neville’s business empire, GG Hospitality, with a six-figure salary and a central Manchester flat.

But now his attitude was ‘off’ with her, Miss Greville said, as if he felt ‘I have got her now’.

Later he found out that ‘he was dating another girl’, she added.

‘I was absolutely devastated.’

Miss Greville said they would still be ‘having sex all the time’ even during their regular splits.

‘He was just using me for sex,’ she added.

‘There was never a time when he did not want to have sex.’

Miss Greville said if she stopped replying to his calls and messages, he would imply that her job could be in jeopardy.

He would also ‘bombard’ her with messages, call up to 50 times in the space of an hour if he blocked her, and turn up at her gym and at her flat, smashing a lamp when they rowed, she claimed.

In one, Giggs sent messages accusing her of being ‘up to something’, adding ‘tick tock’ when she didn’t reply immediately.

But she later answered, telling him: ‘I’m at home on my own you idiot.’

Miss Greville said during a night out in London in December 2019 they had a row over how he was ‘manically’ flirting at other women while ignoring her.

Back at their luxury hotel that night, Miss Greville said: ‘I was going to sleep and he kicked me in the back so hard I fell off the bed.

‘He grabbed me again, dragged me into the suite but got my bag and my laptop and threw it at my head.’

Moments later, Giggs again became ‘really nice’ again, she said.

But the following morning she found a ‘massive lump on my head’.

However the jury heard how there was no allusion whatsoever to a bust-up in messages they swapped over the course of the following day – when Miss Greville was en route to a wedding.

Instead, the main topic of conversation was how she was ‘dying’ with a hangover.

Despite arriving home late that night due to TV commitments in London, Giggs still drove to Shrewsbury to pick her up after breakfast the following morning.

But according to Miss Greville, far from displaying chivalry, his actions were motivated by ‘guilt’.

At the start of 2020, during another trip to Dubai, Miss Greville claimed she tried to leave their hotel room after an argument, only for Giggs to stand in her way and ‘grab’ her bag from her arm.

Jurors were shown a photograph dated February 2020 which Miss Greville had taken which she said showed bruises on her arm and on her knee.

On their return to the UK she said she began making plans to go travelling without him.

But instead the first Covid lockdown was imposed, and she moved into his £1.7million mansion in Worsley, Greater Manchester after he promised they would buy a puppy.

She also left his firm, launching the UK office of Q Communications, her former employer in Abu Dhabi.

According to her LinkedIn profile from the time, she is ‘passionate about consumer communications and working alongside brands to help them achieve their business objectives, whether it be changing brand perceptions, raising brand awareness, driving footfall or increasing sales’.

Clients she listed in court include boutique hotel chain Relais & Chateaux and Michelin-starred Lancashire hotel and restaurant Northcote.

However she claimed Giggs would treat her ‘like his housemaid or his mum’, telling her she was stacking the dishwasher the wrong way, making the beds incorrectly, or complaining ‘if his tea was not ready on time’.

Miss Greville told how she began suffering bad skin and back pain which she put down to the stress of the relationship.

Around this time she began conducting online research into narcissistic personality disorders.

After he arrived from a night out after Covid restrictions were eased, she had ‘an intuition something was wrong’, she said.

‘I’ve never seen anyone so drunk,’ she added, describing how Giggs passed out on the bed.

Miss Greville said she took the opportunity to look at messages on his mobile phone for the first time as she knew his password – and found he had allegedly been with another on-off lover that evening.

But she said Giggs ‘begged’ her to stay, telling her ‘Let’s get engaged’ and saying he was going to buy her a ring from society jeweller Boodles.

It continued the cycle of making up then breaking up, the court heard.

In June 2020 Giggs exploded after she suggested someone else could give her a lift to Scotland he tried to back out as it was a nine-hour drive.

In an email, Giggs told Miss Greville – by then ‘desperate to be a mum’ – that she was ‘a horrible, horrible ****’ and didn’t ‘deserve to be a parent.’

Giggs also told her he hoped her company failed too, saying: ‘We’ll tell people what a horrible **** you really are.’

He also told her ‘Keep hiding behind anxiety too’ – a reference to panic attacks she had been suffering, she claimed.

Giggs finished the exchange by writing: ‘I am so f****** mad right now and I am scaring myself because I could do anything.

‘I actually hate you for what you’ve done to me today. Hate you.

‘HATE HATE HATE.’

However it was only after she was told that Giggs had taken another woman with whom she suspected he was cheating on her to meet his family that she resorted to checking his iPad – and learning the scale of his alleged infidelity.

‘There were eight women he was having affairs with over all the years he had been with me,’ she told police.

‘Full-on relationships with these women right from the very beginning, since 2014.

‘It was all there in black and white on his iPad.’

Miss Greville said she put together a ‘plan’ to make a clean break, secretly signing up for a new flat and looking into getting custody of their dog – a golden retriever puppy named Mac.

But after another row on November 1, 2010 she said she ‘blurted out’ that she had seen his messages – sparking the final chain of events which led to the alleged headbutt later that evening.

For his part, Giggs told his trial he had ‘never’ physically assaulted a woman, and denied seeking to turn Miss Greville a into a ‘slave’ to his ‘every need and demand’.

He described his ex-girlfriend as a ‘strong character’ and insisted there had been ‘examples when she tried to control our relationship’.

No details of her current partner emerged during the trial, but during the raking over of the years she spent ‘addicted’ to Giggs, she revealed that the new man in her life had given her the one thing she craved most of all – a baby, then aged just 12 weeks old.