EXCLUSIVEShocking twist in Ryan Giggs brother cuckolding scandal, revealed by KATIE KNIGHT - and final humiliation of the sordid saga
Not long ago the podcast host and football coach Rhodri Giggs had a telling exchange on social media.
The 48-year-old who's still – despite his very best efforts – better known as the younger brother of footballing legend Ryan, 51, often posts his views about the beautiful game on X, but on this particular occasion he caught the attention of trolls, who delighted in taunting him about a grim event in his past.
An event, that 14 years on, as the exchange proved, has lost none of its power to outrage and titillate, so jaw-dropping are the sordid details.
In the summer of 2011, it emerged that Rhodri had been cuckolded by no less than his older brother, who had been involved in an eight-year, on off, affair with his wife, Natasha.
At one point Natasha had fallen pregnant with Ryan's child, and he'd paid for her to have a termination – just two weeks before her wedding to Rhodri.
Along with the rest of the country, Rhodri, then 34, only discovered the truth when his mother-in-law arrived on his doorstep at 6am one Sunday morning with a copy of the newspaper to which her daughter – by then having fled to Spain – had sold her story for a tidy sum.
Is there a greater betrayal? It is hard to think of one, and it is surely no surprise to anyone that the brothers have barely spoken since.
Perhaps what is the bigger surprise, however, is that not only has Rhodri resoundingly moved on, but has done so with good humour.
Rhodri and his ex-wife Natasha on holiday. Natasha had an on-off affair with Ryan Giggs for eight years
Rhodri, left, and Ryan, middle, pictured as children. In their youth, Rhodri was the troublemaker while Ryan was the promising football player
'Mate, it was over 14 years ago and I've got two kids with someone else and made shed loads of money from it,' he replied to one goading comment online.
When his tormentor conceded defeat, Rhodri responded with grace. 'That's just banter pal. I'm a grown man, sh*t like that doesn't bother me one bit' he wrote. 'Can't be on X and not expect a little bit of shrapnel coming your way. All part of the fun.'
This sanguine approach is all the more startling when you also consider that, aside from his father Danny, 69, the wider Giggs family seem to have sided with Ryan over the affair.
As Rhodri told one podcast host three years ago. 'I don't speak to any of my family, none of them speak to me, they all speak to Ryan and they all live in Wales and go to Wales games and have nice food and nice hospitality.'
This was confirmed by Danny, speaking to the Mail this week, from his home in Cardiff: 'Rhodri and I speak regularly, and he comes down to see me, but we never discuss his brother,' he says. 'I don't mention it, it's done now.'
He added: 'I've not spoken to Giggsy for years but if he wants to get in touch I'm open to anything.'
It is an astonishing turn of events considering Rhodri, although by his own admission no angel and with a chequered past, nevertheless was undoubtedly the victim in the whole tawdry debacle.
'You'd think I had the affair,' he told one interviewer.
Rhodri says he hasn't spoken to his older brother, pictured playing for Manchester United, for a number of years, but he is 'open to anything'
Natasha terminated Ryan's baby just weeks before she married Rhodri in Las Vegas
Fourteen years later, however, he has emerged by far the more settled and contented of the two Giggs brothers.
He describes himself as 'the happiest he has ever been', extolling the pleasures of a simple life 'playing golf and seeing his children'. He has a 23-year-old daughter, from an earlier relationship, a son, Louis, now 17, with Natasha, and a nine-year-old with a new partner.
Ryan, meanwhile, has faced both legal and business woes: in 2020 he was arrested and charged with the assault and coercive control of his ex-girlfriend, Kate Greville, 38, and assault against her sister Emma – charges he denied.
The case led to him making the painful decision to step down as manager of his beloved Welsh football team in 2022 ahead of the trial that year.
And while he ultimately left court without a criminal record – jurors failed to reach a verdict after a four-week trial – his reputation was unsalvageable.
Jurors, and the general public, had listened aghast as he admitted being a liar, a serial cheat and a 'jealous bully' who sent vile, abusive and often foul-mouthed messages to his ex.
He also had to suffer the embarrassment of hearing an oration of toe-curling love poetry and sometimes X-rated texts that the pair sent each other, read out in court, including 'You are the jam in my doughnut, the truffle in my pasta and the salt in my tequila' and 'You make me as hard as a totem pole'.
A retrial was subsequently abandoned after Ms Greville declined to give evidence again.
Ryan Giggs and his ex-wife Satcey Cooke. The couple divorced in 2017, six years after his affair with Natasha came to light
Ryan and his current girlfriend Zara Charles, with whom he has one daughter, Cora
Since then, Ryan suffered the ignominy of several failed business ventures. While still co-owner of Salford City football club, three months ago it emerged that George's Dining Room, the restaurant he co-owned in Worsley, has closed with debts of £500,000. Another joint venture, Cafe Football in London, closed in 2019.
Quite the contrast with Rhodri then – but arguably the lives of the Giggs brothers have been an exercise in contrast from their teenage years. Born in Cardiff to 17-year-old unmarried parents Lynne Giggs and Danny Wilson who first played Rugby Union for Wales, then Rugby League, the family moved to Swinton, Manchester, when Rhodri was three.
The parental relationship was volatile, mired in accusations of Danny's infidelity and violence. 'There were many arguments, and too many of them became physical,' Ryan wrote in his 2005 autobiography 'Giggs' – and by the time the brothers were in their teens their dad had moved back to Cardiff. Rhodri later recalled that he did not see him again for the next 25 years.
It is around the same time that the Giggs brothers' paths started to part ways. By the time Rhodri was 11 – and already getting into trouble at school – Ryan had been scouted by Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson. (Rhodri remembers him pulling up outside the small cottage in which he still shared a bedroom with Ryan in his gold Mercedes).
The signing of 'Giggsy' as he was known by fans heralded the start of a glorious sporting career which saw him become one of the club's most decorated players ever, with a record 13 Premier League winners' medals.
Rhodri, meanwhile, seemed destined to be the troubled younger brother of popular tradition. Expelled from school aged 15, he was given a contract with Torquay football club, only to be fired after nine months for stealing money from the chairman's wallet.
After moving to London to become an estate agent, he was targeted by 'fake Sheikh' Mazher Mahmood, a newspaper reporter who disguised himself as a wealthy Arab businessman to dupe celebrities. He exposed Rhodri allegedly selling him drugs and organising prostitutes. Rhodri would later say he had done little more than provide Mahmood with drugs and ring an escort agency. 'I was an estate agent not a drug dealer,' he maintained.
No criminal charges were brought, and Rhodri later received a six figure compensation payout from newspaper group News International when he brought a civil claim after Mahmood himself was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and sentenced to 15 months in prison in October 2016.
Out of work, Rhodri was soon back in Manchester and back in trouble. He spent four months in prison in 2001 after getting into a fight outside a nightclub.
While it seemed that the younger Giggs boy had cemented his reputation as the family miscreant, we know that, behind closed doors, his older brother, was behaving pretty appallingly too.
In 2003, Rhodri, father to a young daughter and working as a football coach, met the then Natasha Lever – a 21-year-old mother of one – in renowned Manchester nightspot The Sugar Lounge.
She was, it later turned out, already sleeping with his older brother, whose wife Stacey was pregnant at the time with the first of their two children, Liberty, now 22.
Natasha subsequently fell pregnant with Rhodri's son, Louis, now 17, at which point Rhodri believes the affair ended for a time.
Around 2007, when Rhodri began to suspect Natasha was seeing someone else, he moved out, only to be persuaded by his mum Lynne that he was worrying about nothing.
In fact, the affair with Ryan was not only very much on but unfolding in his own home. 'The first house we got, I got home, and he was there with his mate,' he recalled on the Eventful Entrepreneurs podcast in December 2022. 'He never comes to my house. So I thought 'what's he doing here?' The pair, unbeknown to Rhodri at the time also met in houses and apartments to which Natasha had access via her work as an estate agent.
In June 2010, in a last ditch attempt to save the by now flailing relationship, a still oblivious Rhodri married Natasha in Vegas. Two weeks previously, Natasha had undergone a termination after discovering she was pregnant with Ryan's baby. The procedure was part paid for by £500 in cash, delivered by Ryan on his bicycle.
Just under a year later, Rhodri opened the door of the family home in Manchester at 6am to his mother-in-law, who handed him a copy of the newspaper to which Natasha had sold her story.
In it, Natasha – who was being represented by the late notorious publicity agent Max Clifford, confessed all about her eight year affair with Rhodri's brother. Her decision to go public was prompted by news that Giggs was two-timing her with a Welsh model called Imogen Thomas.
She had told her husband she needed to go to London for a scan, but had instead flown to Spain with their children and gone into hiding.
While Ryan's then-wife Stacey put on a brave face in public – she and the footballer went on to divorce six years later, in 2017 – it is not difficult to imagine the emotions that gripped Rhodri on learning of this heinous betrayal by both his wife and his brother, joined in time by his extended family.
He admits that for several years he was gripped by bitterness and fury as he came to terms with the extent of the deceit before realising he had to move on.
'What can you do?' he reflected. 'You ruin your life for it. Or you know, you bite the gum shield and just get through it.'
And get through it he has: as we have been, Rhodri has settled for a simpler life as a family man and co-hosts a football podcast as well as working as a football coach for a Soccer Academy which helps young kids on their path to professional clubs.
He is understood to have little contact with Natasha, who went on to have two more children, now aged ten and eight, with former boyfriend Mark Smith.
Last September, she found herself embroiled in yet more controversy when she married fireman Haroon Headley, who is reported to have left Nicola, his wife of 20 years and three children for her. The couple live together in Manchester.
There are signs, however, that Ryan is attempting to turn over a new leaf. He has a new partner: 37-lingerie model Zara Charles, with whom he had a child last November.
In a display of decency many may feel he did not deserve, his former wife Stacey publicly wished him well when he announced Zara's pregnancy, and the extended family are said to have spent Christmas together two years ago.
Will there ever be a day when the two Giggs boys bury the hatchet and do the same? Rhodri doesn't hold out much hope: 'I haven't got issues anymore. He's the one with the issues,' he reflected.
