9 months ago
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THESE are some of the hundreds of seedy text messages sent by Christian Horner to a female employee that were leaked yesterday.
Ranging from requests for selfies to jokes about Spanx, the texts emerged just hours after Horner was cleared of any wrongdoing.
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Geri found out about the messages while she was heading to BahrainGetty
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AFPThe Red Bull Boss had just returned to Bahrain for the F1 season opener and his wife Geri Halliwell flew out to join him amid reports her marriage is now “in question”.
Just a day after the internal Red Bull investigation cleared Horner of any “inappropriate behaviour”, which he has always denied, the vast trove of intimate texts was leaked online.
The messages suggest Horner pestered the woman for pictures behind his wife’s back as he asked her for selfies in her pyjamas.
Leaked images of the private messages sent by Horner have been shared widely on social media and published elsewhere.
And another exchange appears to show him sending her a snap of him in the airport after landing, to which she says it’ll be good for Horner to stretch his legs.
He agrees and seedily replies that it would be good to stretch hers.
Horner insists the woman can call him any time and says he doesn’t have a sleep mode.
The Red Bull boss also asks the woman if she’s still wearing spanx because she looks “very attractive” in them.
When the woman insists they’re just leggings, Horner says it’s what’s in them that counts.
In another message, the employee asks Horner if he “enjoyed his blast in Bahrain”.
Horner says it was “amazing” before saying he hopes she enjoyed it too.
Another exchange sees Horner ask the employee to delete their WhatsApp conversation – before messaging two more times to make sure she did.
The woman – who works with Horner at the all-conquering grand prix team’s Milton Keynes HQ – appears to tire of her boss’s pleas for pictures and sexy chat, according to the leaked WhatsApp dossier.
She asks him to stop – and in one text even asks how the dad would feel if Geri was behaving in the same way with one of her staff.
According to MailOnline she is “very unhappy” at the results of the internal probe which saw him cleared.
A source close to the woman said they feel she has been treated unfairly and that the situation is “disgusting”.
The unnamed source told the Mail: “My reaction to all this is that it is disgusting. In the words of Red Bull, Christian Horner has been cleared but I think many people look at that answer and can’t quite fathom out the truth behind it.
“It’s obviously not going to rest now because of these leaks. I wasn’t aware of the messages prior to them being picked up by the media and I have no idea at all who is responsible for the leak.”
Despite the bombshell messages, Horner looked unfazed this afternoon as he stood trackside in Bahrain for a test run ahead of tomorrow’s F1 season opener.
The dad, 50, was pictured with headphones around his neck as he chatted to Max Verstappen at the Bahrain International Circuit.
But he is understood to have left before the end of the practice for a meeting with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem, Sky F1 correspondent Ted Kravitz reported.
Earlier today, pictures showed F1 chief Horner chatting to colleagues as he sat at a table with them.
Geri apparently found out about the devastating leak while mid-air en route to Bahrain – and has not yet been seen in the paddock.
Sources close to the Spice Girl say she was “relieved and elated” when the case against her Horner was thrown out on Wednesday.
Ginger Spice Geri endured three weeks of torment in which she was said to have stood by her man after being left in “floods of tears” when the scandal first broke.
Now the singer has again been left “extremely humiliated” less than 24 hours after she thought Horner, who she wed in 2015, was in the clear.
Friends of Geri fear the latest bombshell will “destroy” the mum-of-two, who shares seven-year-old son Monty with Horner.
One pal told the Mail: “It has all come crashing down.
“The tears stopped when the judgment came in on Wednesday, now they absolutely will have started again. This will destroy her.
“All along Christian promised there was nothing in it.”
Horner was also left reeling after hundreds of WhatsApp messages were sent to F1 teams and media outlets.
Messages appeared to suggest Horner pestered the woman for pictures behind his wife’s back.
How Christian Horner's shock text were leaked
By Ben Hunt
IT was an anonymous email sent and designed for maximum impact.
It landed in my inbox almost 24 hours to the minute since Christian Horner was cleared of any wrongdoing following Red Bull’s internal investigation.
Other names included Liberty Media chief Greg Maffei, who owns the rights to F1. The FIA president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem and F1 CEO Stefano Dominacali.
The F1 team bosses were also included for good measure. As was Max Verstappen’s father, Jos.
It was from an anonymous sender, the title was simply the date – ‘Feb Twenty Nine’.
Inside it was a Google Drive link containing 79 files claiming to be the evidence from the independent investigation.
There is no way of knowing if they were real or fake yet irrespectively it sent another shockwave through the F1 paddock before this season had even started.
Horner was sitting on the team’s pitwall during second practice in Bahrain when the email dropped.
After the session, he walked out of the team’s garage and into the hospitality unit where he remained as the nuclear fallout began.
He’d survived the outcome of the internal investigation into improper conduct following a complaint from a female colleague.
One wonders whether he will survive this time after this very public humiliation – again, irrespective if they were indeed real or fake.
Just hours earlier, McLaren’s CEO Zak Brown and Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, called on the sport’s governing body, the FIA, demanding transparency.
“I just read the statement, which was pretty basic,” said Wolff. “My personal opinion is we can’t really look behind the curtain.
“There is a lady in an organisation that has spoken to HR and said there was an issue and it was investigated and yesterday the sport has received the message that it’s all fine, we’ve looked at it.
“I believe with the aspiration as a global sport, on such critical topics, it needs more transparency and I wonder what the sport’s position is?
“We’re competitors, we’re a team and we can have our own personal opinions or not. But it’s more like a general reaction or action that we as a sport need to assess, what is right in that situation and what is wrong.
“Are we talking with the right moral approach, with the values based on the speculation that is out there? As a sport, we cannot afford to leave things vague and opaque on critical topics like this, because this is going to catch us out.”
Brown added: “It’s the responsibility ultimately of the organisers of Formula One, the owners of Formula One, to make sure that all the racing teams and the personnel and the drivers and everyone else involved in the sport are operating in a manner in which we all live by.
“I don’t think it’s the teams’ roles and responsibilities. That’s up to FIA and Formula One to ultimately decide and ask what they feel gives them the level of transparency they need to ultimately come to their conclusion and we just have to count on them that they fulfil that obligation to all of us.”
The emailed file will only increase that pressure in the form of scrutiny on Horner – who has always denied the accusations.
It does also put Red Bull in a tricky position.
Should the emailed file be legitimate and have made up elements from the initial report, which had been thoroughly examined and presented by the independent KC, then surely this is nothing new to them and their decision to stick with their team principal remains.
To perform a u-turn on that simply now they have become public would possibly see criticism that they intended to keep their report private to save face.
Whatever the outcome, it is a mess for the world champions.
Reports of a wedge driven between Horner and Verstappen’s father have grown in recent weeks.
So it was interesting that Jos Verstappen was in the paddock and wearing a team jacket and seemed unmoved to the chaos happening around him.
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