The hidden life of Camila Batmanghelidjh: why was her exoneration so widely ignored?

Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Less than 24 hours after the death of Camila Batmanghelidjh on New Year’s Day, Mojtaba Darazkan became a father for the first time. His wife was in labour when he got the news. Twenty years ago, as a lost, angry and rootless teenager, he had been taken under the wing of the charity she created, Kids Company. Without Batmanghelidjh, he wouldn’t be here now, he says: “Worst-case scenario? I’d be in prison.”

Darazkan, a teacher with a master’s in engineering, met Batmanghelidjh when he was a 17-year-old unaccompanied asylum seeker, starving in a tiny, freezing room in south London. He was ambitious and bright, but isolated; he struggled with his mental health and spoke little English. His overworked social workerwas decent, he says, but she also knew that social services couldn’t provide what he needed. She knew a charity that could, though.

That charity was Kids Company. They came to his home, topping up his energy meter and giving him Tesco vouchers to buy food. They organised English lessons and got him a part-time job washing dishes. They helped with his Home Office documents and provided a therapist. They supported him through his A-levels and bought him a train ticket so he could go for a university interview. When he got into university, his Kids Company key worker went with him on the train, with Darazkan’s suitcases and blankets packed in an Ikea bag. They are still in touch today. “Everything you’d do as a parent for your child, Kids Company did for me,” Darazkan says.

As thousands of others like Darazkan will attest, Kids Company in the early 2000s was an extraordinary place. It helped some of London’s most damaged young people, scarred by abuse, neglect, violence, addiction and crime. These children were not always easy to help: they could be angry, loud and in your face; withdrawn and disconnected. Many found an unexpected measure of emotional stability through Kids Company and, like Darazkan, went on to have jobs, families and futures. That was down to Batmanghelidjh.

Kids Companybegan in south London in 1996. Batmanghelidjh, an Iran-born charity worker who had trained as a therapist, set out her vision for the charity as protecting and supporting vulnerable youngsters by showing them unconditional love and care. Unlike other services, Kids Company would never turn away a child in need. While that might sound naive and sentimental, in practice it was resource-intensive, rigorous and exhausting.

“I worked the hardest I have ever worked, but I was energised by it,” says one former employee. Kids Company staff had the freedom to act decisively and problem-solve on the spot – it was their job to listen to the kids, make time for them, go the extra mile. “We’d often talk with social workers and the constraints around them were so rigid,” says Rachel Mugan, a former head of clinical operations at Kids Company. “They were always having to say: ‘We can’t do it, we don’t have the resources,’ or: ‘It doesn’t meet the criteria for the service.’”

When social work or NHS services refused to help, or gave up on or lost track of a difficult or aggressive teenager – which happened thousands of times – Kids Company would step in. Batmanghelidjh’s team would take legal action to force authorities to meet their obligations, which did not make the charity popular in town halls. “Camila taught us it was about love, but love with a steeliness,” says Mugan. “It was also about fun and mischief – breaking through the system and doing the unexpected.”

Batmanghelidjh’s idealism and charisma were magnetic to politicians, the media and celebrities, from Coldplay to Prince Charles. Her ascent was extraordinary – and would mark the great first act of her career. Between 2000 and 2015, Kids Company received at least £46m in grants, about 30% of its income (the rest was private donations). Batmanghelidjh was made a CBE, received several honorary degrees and was courted by David Cameron as part of his rebranding of the Conservative party (years before austerity was unleashed). For Cameron, she was a disruptor who symbolised his supposed vision of public services focused on “emotional quality”, rather than bureaucratic targets. In 2010, she briefly aligned herself to his “big society” idea, a move she soon regretted.

By 2014, the political and media worlds were in thrall to Batmanghelidjh. The education secretary, Michael Gove, praised the charity’s “inspirational work”. An ambitious former director of public prosecutions and aspiring Labour MP, Keir Starmer, agreed to chair an independent review of children’s services inspired by Batmanghelidjh.

But Kids Company was struggling. Austerity had created a new wave of children in dire need – and it remained a point of principle that they would not be turned away. The charity turned to the government for emergency funding. Worse was still to come.

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Batmanghelidjh’s second act would be one of tragedy: a brutal fall from grace that would destroy her reputation overnight. She would say later that she had not been greatly affected by it, because she had never cared what people thought of her. Others are less sure: “She hid the pain very well,” says her brother Bobby Batmanghelidjh. “She knew exactly what was happening to her. She knew she was collateral damage in a play happening elsewhere.”

In August 2015, Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company’s board of trustees agreed a £6m rescue deal with the Cabinet Office and a group of new philanthropic backers. Under the terms, Batmanghelidjh would quit as chief executive, much of the board would be replaced and the charity’s services would be dramatically cut back. That deal, which would have diminished Batmanghelidjh’s role significantly while retaining the charity’s core practice, was scuppered at the 11th hour when the BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that historical abuse allegations involving Kids Company were being investigated by the Metropolitan police. With potential donors spooked, Kids Company’s trustees concluded that the charity was no longer viable. It went into receivership five days later.

Scotland Yard completed its investigation six months later, in January 2016. It found no evidence of physical or sexual abuse, criminality or safeguarding failures. The 32 allegations were mostly hearsay and “vague in detail”, it concluded. Meanwhile, the House of Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs select committee (Pacac), chaired by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, rushed through an inquiry that concluded that Kids Company was financially incontinent, poorly governed and unable to demonstrate that the money it spent made any difference to the young people it supported.

Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company’s trustees vociferously contested the findings. The report – agreed before the Met’s statement, but published three days after it – suggested it was immaterial whether or not the abuse allegations were true or malicious: if Kids Company had been better run, it would have been able to ride out the shattering impact of the allegations.

However, a week after Pacac’s report was published, the Labour MP Paul Flynn – one of the committee’s most senior members and Batmanghelidjh’s most aggressive interrogators – made an astonishing admission. He and Jenkin had held a private meeting with a Kids Company trustee after the publication of the Pacac report. The trustee had presented them with evidence showing that, far from being negligent and badly governed, the board of Kids Company had provided rigorous oversight and scrutiny of the charity. Flynn was shocked. He told the Guardian that, while he still agreed with much of the Pacac report, he had since realised it was unbalanced and overcooked. “We rushed to judgment,” he said.

Kids Company’s media critics were reluctant to dwell on evidence that undermined the version of events they had pushed so vigorously for years

Still, the report’s findings continued to be reported – mostly unchallenged. They helped to underpin what fast became an entrenched media narrative: that Kids Company had been not only a financial mess, but also a giant confidence trick.

This view held that the charity’s board, like the succession of hapless politicians and deluded donors who awarded Kids Company grants, had been been mesmerised by the supernatural charms of Batmanghelidjh. Never mind that there were piles of official audits and academic research papers scrutinising Kids Company’s work and outcomes. “It was an education in how power worked – how something can be lauded one minute and knocked to bits the next,” says one former staffer.

The tabloids continued to publish salacious stories: Batmanghelidjh had a chauffeur; she had spent charity money on a swimming pool for her own use; she gave teenagers money that they spent on drugs. Batmanghelidjh, by now exiled in her flat in north-west London, where she spent her time trying to arrange support for children left high and dry by the collapse of Kids Company, would explain to anyone who enquired why these stories were false or taken out of context; that the spending was clinically justified.

Batmanghelidjh’s famous friends and supporters mostly fell silent, her brother Bobby says: “They were very concerned about reputational damage.” (Some continued to fund her work privately.) Former Kids Company staff were ostracised by colleagues from other charities. “It was like I was a leper,” one says. Some struggled to get job interviews afterwards; others found it hard to come terms with the hysterically distorted media image of Kids Company.

Few could have predicted how much more there was to come.

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In August 2017, two years after the closure of Kids Company, the official receiver (who is responsible for taking care of a company’s creditors after insolvency) applied to disqualify Batmanghelidjh and all of Kids Company’s former trustees from holding directorships of companies or charities for up to six years. Technically, the aim was to prove the allegation that Batmanghelidjh and the board (which included the BBC executive Alan Yentob) had mismanaged the charity so badly that they were unfit to hold similar positions in future. Three and a half years, 18,000 pages of evidence and £8m of public money later, the case against Kids Company was thrown out in February 2021. “They thought they were going to uncover something really juicy and salacious – effectively, theft of charity money. They didn’t find anything, because there wasn’t anything,” Batmanghelidjh’s barrister, Rupert Butler, said after the trial.

The judge, Mrs Justice Falk, concluded that there was no evidence that payments made to young people were unsupervised, unscrutinised or clinically unjustified. Kids Company was a challenging, financially high-risk operation, in common with many charities, she ruled, but it was not a failing organisation, nor was its board negligent or incompetent. The seven trustees – who did not include Batmanghelidjh, whom Falk praised separately – were “a highly impressive group of individuals” and entirely fit to hold future senior positions. In fact, she wrote in her ruling, the cause of Kids Company’s collapse was most likely not management incompetence, but “unfounded allegations” of sexual assault.

It was a near-total exoneration of Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company – and a complete disaster for the government. But instead of her third act being one of exoneration and vindication, the ruling went largely unnoticed. One reason was that it came out during the first Covid lockdown. Another was that Kids Company’s media critics were reluctant to dwell on evidence that undermined the version of events they had pushed so vigorously for years.

By this time, Batmanghelidjh was in poor health. Having spent the past six years, as one friend put it, “in a foxhole” dodging shells, the verdict did not bring her comfort. Even after the trial, she felt she could not be open about the work she has been doing since Kids Company – as a therapist and an adviser to schools and charities. Then, in February 2022, the Charity Commission published its long-delayed Kids Company report.

Given the comprehensiveness of the high court judgment, it was never clear what additional insights the charity regulator could bring. The answer seems to be that it tried, initially, to ignore many of the court’s findings. According to one source, the Kids Company trustees were forced to resort to a combination of injunctions, judicial reviews and actions for misrepresentation to force the commission to amend its draft report three times.

The final report essentially followed the broad outline of Falk’s ruling: that there was no evidence of misspending, dishonesty or bad faith. However, the charity had failed occasionally to pay its tax bill on time. This was, the commission said, evidence of “mismanagement in the administration of the charity”. It was one of a handful of relatively modest findings of fault after all this time, but the word “mismanagement” gave newspaper headline writers what they needed to attack the charity again.

While it is easy to see why Batmanghelidjh inspired such devotion, it is harder to understand why her downfall was widely accepted and her exoneration widely ignored. Perhaps it was “tall poppy” syndrome: Batmanghelidjh would ruthlessly exploit her connections with ministers and the media, which made rival charities resentful of Kids Company’s ability to hoover up grants and attention. Others believe her association with Cameron left her trapped in the middle of Tory party infighting in an election year – and ostracised from potential Labour allies.

Local authority social work leaders were furious at her support for a Centre for Social Justice thinktank report which graphically exposed serious shortcomings in child protection services. She did not shy from telling uncomfortable truths about child poverty to those in power. There was also a certain type of politician or policymaker, usually male, that did not take well to being told these uncomfortable truths – especially when they came from a “colourful, bombastic, engaging and creative” foreign-born woman, says one former staffer.

When reports of Batmanghelidjh’s death emerged last week, it was alarming how many people admitted on social media that they had been unaware she had been exonerated by the high court nearly three years ago. Mud sticks, as the saying goes. Her supporters and family hope to create a foundation to ensure her legacy lives on through teaching and education.

Adored, despised, always compelling, Batmanghelidjh was one of the most extraordinary public figures of the 21st century.