When you walk into Lauryn Goodman’s millionaire’s mega-mansion, it isn’t expensive art or furniture that grabs your attention, but a pair of white towels placed neatly on a day bed.
Plain white, that is, apart from the letters K and W embroidered in gold — the initials of her famous former lover, footballer Kyle Walker. Despite their bitter and very public falling out, it’s clear he still looms large in Lauryn’s life.
Situated in genteel Sussex, Chez Goodman is a world of wooden flooring, full-length windows and plain walls. Bare apart from a small sofa in the corner, the main reception room is big enough to park a small aircraft.
Downstairs, there’s a dining table for eight. A huge television hangs on the wall.
Lauryn told the High Court in London earlier this month that she wanted financial maintenance worth the equivalent of a £350,000 salary
Plenty of room, then, for the three people who live there — Lauryn and her children with Walker, Kairo, four, and one-year-old Kinara — and all paid for by England’s multimillionaire right-back, a man who earns £160,000 per week.
With seven-bedrooms and a hydro pool in the garden, it’s the sort of home that would delight most footballing wives and girlfriends.
But not Lauryn Goodman, a 33-year-old ‘influencer’, whose galloping demands for cars, a gardener, a nanny — and a car for the nanny! — caused jaws around the country to hit the floor when, following an extraordinary legal fight with Walker, the astounding details were revealed on Tuesday.
It emerged that, over two days of legal theatre earlier this month, Lauryn told the High Court in London that she wanted financial maintenance worth the equivalent of a £350,000 salary.
She had demanded a £31,000 Astro Turf lawn claiming that daughter Kinara — or Keeks as she is known to her friends and family — is going to become a ‘Lioness’, an England women’s football star, and can already kick the ball from a crawling position.
Lauryn also argued that she needed £500 a month to maintain a hot tub solely for the children’s use, another £500 a month for a gardener and £1,440 a month for a cleaner.
If normal mortals were incredulous, Lauryn, it must be said, had not expected such colourful details to emerge, hoping they would remain legally confidential — or the outraged reaction that soon followed.
Annie Walker threw her husband out of the family home in January after receiving a message from Lauryn telling her that Kyle is her daughter’s father
Following an application by newspapers including the Mail, the courts decided that the publicity she had already generated in her dispute with Walker meant she forfeited her right to further privacy. And the widespread ridicule has left her shaken.
Today, as she licks her wounds, she confesses to the Mail that she has spent days weeping and now fears that Kyle Walker and his wife, Annie Kilner, want her to disappear from their lives — and from the headlines— for good.
‘They’re about to ruin me for ever,’ she says. ‘I have two children that I need to support.’
‘They want the narrative that I’m buried and my kids are forgotten,’ she continued. ‘But I can’t do that to my kids. I can’t let them bury me.’
She is determined to continue her career in the public eye and adamant that Walker should acknowledge her two children — and visit them.
Right now, however, that seems somewhat unlikely.
Sources close to Lauryn concede that Walker is ‘really, really angry with her’ — and those reading the details of her demands might be tempted to sympathise.
Take, for example, her demand that Walker buy her not just a £70,000 Mercedes, but another £30,000 car for a nanny who couldn’t even drive.
Then there’s Lauryn’s sparsely furnished house which, the court heard, had been very much her choice. Lauryn, I can reveal, had already turned down a £1.9 million house on the grounds that it wasn’t as nice as the one where Walker’s wife, Annie, lives with his four other children.
Lauryn Goodman shares two children with the footballer, Kairo, four, and Kinara, one
Kyle later agreed to buy the home near Lauryn’s sister, Chloe and father. This would have been convenient — except that she’s fallen out with both of them, too.
The whole saga has been as compelling as it was unedifying.
It emerged that Lauryn had asked Kyle and Annie’s neighbour to spy on the couple over the garden fence at their £3.5 million mansion in Cheshire, saying she was ‘ready to finish them’, whatever that meant.
It was also said in court that Lauryn tried, and failed, to force Kyle to face her in court within 12 hours of the whistle at the Euros final in Berlin, meaning he would not have been able to celebrate — or, in the event, commiserate — with his team mates.
Sources close to Lauryn, meanwhile, say that Walker made an unsuccessful bid to postpone the hearing until later in the year.
So appalled with Lauryn was Judge Edward Hess that he found himself warming to Walker, describing him — despite his well-publicised romantic misdemeanours — as ‘grounded and reasonable’.
For their part, friends of Lauryn believe she didn’t get a fair hearing because her opponent in court was a world-famous footballer who had been recently watched by millions.
Lauryn herself tells me that her fight is about doing the right thing for her children. And that her sole reason for fighting for a life of luxury is all in the name of them.
‘My kids should have what Kyle and Annie’s kids have,’ she says. ‘They have Astro Turf in their garden so why shouldn’t mine? The law states that they should have the same.’
The bewildering sequence of events began in 2019 when, while on a break from Annie, Kyle got Lauryn pregnant with Kairo. He and Annie got back together shortly afterwards and married. But in the winter of 2022 Lauryn was once again pregnant with Kyle’s baby and the following summer, his only daughter was born.
On December 27 last year she messaged Annie with a breezy bombshell, writing: ‘Hey it’s Lauryn I just wanted to quickly tell you that Kyle is the father of our daughter.’
Annie threw Walker out of the family home two weeks later.
Adding fuel to the fire, he then told his side of the story in a newspaper interview, profusely apologising to his childhood sweetheart Annie, who was pregnant with their fourth child at the time. He described his relationship with Lauryn as involving ‘stupid choices’ and ‘mistakes’.
Cue the furious reaction from Lauryn, who hit back saying that his words were ‘unimaginably cruel’ on her children.
That prompted a very public and extraordinary row, which saw the Walkers hiring a PR to brief the media.
The influencer holds Kairo, wearing a ‘Daddy’ football shirt, in Frankfurt, ahead of England’s Euros game against Denmark
There were also set-up pictures, including one when a photographer was tipped off that Annie was handing their eldest son over to Kyle in a car park near their Cheshire home.
The Walkers have been adamant that Kyle does not have a relationship with Kairo or Kinara and, also, that they were furious when Lauryn dressed her children in England tops with Daddy emblazoned across the back.
One statement handed to me by Team Walker read: ‘The fact she (Lauryn) has brought attention to her son in a Daddy 2 top when he has not been involved in the child’s life emotionally nor been to any of his matches in the past is baffling.’
For her part, Lauryn thought the words were cruel and unnecessary.
Sources familiar with both sides point out that the real victims at the heart of this war are six children — Kyle’s sons with Annie, Roman, 12, Riaan, eight, Reign, six, and baby Rezon as well as Kairo and Kinara.
‘They will all grow up and read what has been written about their warring parents,’ one friend told the Mail.
‘It will be heartbreaking for them but it has become a row that both sides have become so embroiled in that it has got completely out of control. It is a mess, you just feel so sorry for those children.’
Indeed. I first met Lauryn in January when she invited me to her house for an interview. As she cradled little Kinara, who was wearing a designer babygro, it would have taken someone with a heart of stone not to think about how tough her life will be after being thrown into the limelight by her mother at barely six months old.
But far from the monster she is being described as today, I found Lauryn kind, engaging, funny and a good mother. She cried and cried when recounting Walker’s refusal to see the children. They weren’t crocodile tears.
However, I also got my own small insight into the demands she has made on Walker.
Her electric gate had broken and rather than attempt to get it fixed herself, I watched as she insisted her ex fund someone to do such chores around the house.
She got the call from her lawyer who delivered the good news that Walker had agreed! Lauryn was elated.
I also joined Lauryn, her doting grandfather John, and little Kairo to watch the Euros England v Denmark game in Frankfurt. Later, we went for a curry and despite being up since the early hours, the four-year-old’s manners were beautiful. He was a joy to be around.
Meanwhile, the Mail can reveal, Lauryn was ready to cash in on her romance with Kyle by agreeing to appear on an ITV reality TV show in a deal which would have earned her a five-figure sum.
It would have shown Kairo and Kinara without their faces blurred, and astonishingly, Lauryn asked the broadcaster for a daily appearance fee for her son which would have made her thousands.
The project was called off in June after fears that the looming court battle was making it difficult to continue for legal reasons. She is currently filming Channel 4’s reality show Celebs Go Dating, for which she is being paid £55,000, but not to find love. Instead, she confided in friends, it’s for the fee and media exposure.
Friends of Kyle say they are confused as to what Lauryn truly wants. She insists that she isn’t in love with him and, according to friends, admits that she ‘doesn’t really like’ him any more.
However, those who have spent significant amounts of time with Lauryn say: ‘Despite her bravado, if you scratch the surface, she is still totally besotted with Kyle and the lifestyle she hoped he was going to give to her.
‘She knows she can’t have him so she wants to make things as difficult as possible for him, Annie and their relationship.’
Friends say they think the only thing that will make her move on from Kyle is another footballing boyfriend — something they say she has been pursuing on high-end dating apps.
Some months ago she even came across England star Trent Alexander-Arnold online. It is understood that, after ‘matching’ with him on Raya, they exchanged messages for a short while.
Meanwhile, Team Walker believe that she has become ‘obsessed’ with both Kyle and Annie.
The Walkers hope that the court case and Lauryn being lambasted by the judge will mean that the whole bitter saga will go away.
It is though, unlikely.
Lauryn has hired the services of former News of the World assistant editor Ian Edmondson to represent her.
He is also Rebekah Vardy’s PR after she hired him during the Wagatha Christie court case. He has a reputation for being aggressive and is believed to be using his connections with the red-top press to influence editors to be more sympathetic to Lauryn.
One source close to the Walkers tell me that they hope Lauryn will move on and build a new life with her children.
Sadly, the KW embroidered towels left around her family home suggest a different story.
