For onlookers, it’s football’s most entertaining love scandal for years. Even if we profess ourselves to be above such things, we have all lapped up the details of Manchester City and England star Kyle Walker’s latest and most tangled domestic drama.
Yet for the two women at the centre of it — and especially Walker’s wife Annie Kilner — events are beginning to take an undeniably ugly turn.
Walker, to recap, is the electric-paced full back with 81 England caps to his name, who married his childhood sweetheart Annie, 31, in 2022 and has three children by her, aged 12, eight and six, with another on the way.
At the same time, it turns out, he has slept at least twice with former beautician and influencer Lauryn Goodman, 33, who now also has two children by him, aged three and five months.
It was the revelation of this youngest’s child’s paternity — by Lauryn, both privately to Annie and publicly in an interview with The Sun on Sunday two weeks ago — that caused WAG emotions to run high, and Kyle, 33, to issue a tearful mea culpa in a well-spun bid to win back the wronged Annie.
Walker married his childhood sweetheart Annie, 31, in 2022. Pictured: Kyle Walker and Annie Kilner at The Vincent Kompany Tackle4MCR Charity Dinner in 2019
At the same time, it turns out, he has slept at least twice with former beautician and influencer Lauryn Goodman. Pictured: Lauryn Goodman attending the Surviving Christmas with the Relatives World Premiere in 2018
Lauryn Goodman now also has two children by him, aged three and five months
Until now, it has been a classic tale of a footballing cad, two swishy-haired love rivals and a £3.5 million mansion in Prestbury, Cheshire, from which Kyle has now been evicted by Annie.
Now, however, it is beginning to turn into an ever-murkier all-out feud, with Annie complaining she has been the subject of a Fatal Attraction-style campaign by Lauryn.
Annie’s friends go so far as to say her love-rival is trying to ‘stalk’, ‘goad’, and ‘torture’ her on social media, citing stunts such as the setting up of an Instagram page for Lauryn and Walker’s three-year-old child, Kairo, with a biography which includes the social media tags ‘Mummy @lauryngoodman91 Daddy @kylewalker2.’ Not exactly a subtle hint.
Sources say Kyle has been paying maintenance for his two children with Lauryn.
It would seem she is apparently seeking to catapult herself into the blinged-up stratosphere of a footballer’s wife with funds from her former lover. She has not, yet, been wholly successful.
So, is it true to say Lauryn has been waging a ‘campaign’, as the Annie camp claim?
That suggestion arises from a series of alleged social media posts. On Annie’s birthday last summer, Lauryn is said to have tagged herself as being at the same venue where the WAG was holding her party, even though she was apparently nowhere near it. (Lauryn has now set her Instagram to private and has also been deleting posts, so it is not possible to confirm this.)
At this time Annie knew Lauryn had given birth to one child by her husband, so, if true, it seems like a highly provocative thing to do.
Kyle Walker is the electric-paced Manchester City full back with 81 England caps to his name
Lauryn Goodman was seen with her children after former flame Kyle Walker had a bombshell interview with The Sun
Kyle Walker’s ex Annie Kilner holds her huge bag with printed mixed emoji faces on it as she leaves the gym without her wedding ring
What’s more, the previous day, Lauryn had allegedly posted a video of herself in the Cheshire village where Annie lives, accompanied by a ‘shush’ emoji — the little yellow face with a finger on its lips — and the Chris Brown song Take You Down playing.
Lauryn was also photographed ‘house hunting in Cheshire’ in pre‑arranged paparazzi shots around this time.
In a similar vein, last week, Lauryn was again snapped by a fortuitously placed photographer while on holiday in the Dominican Republic. Her toddler son Kairo was seen ‘learning how to play football’ on the beach — a mini-me shot, bound to be a dagger to the heart of Kyle’s wife, and all the more so as Annie is currently seven months pregnant.
Yesterday the affair grew murkier still when news websites were handed a picture of Kyle with Kairo, and videos of him playing with the child — kicking a football and playing hide-and-seek — in what friends of Annie’s say is yet more evidence of Lauryn’s ‘campaign’.
Others will see them as Lauryn’s attempt to hit back at Kyle for the rather crass interview he gave at the weekend in which he claimed their daughter was the result of nothing more than a one-night stand and his ‘idiotic decisions’.
‘Kyle claimed he had barely any relationship with Lauryn in a desperate bid to win back Annie — who will be stunned by these images of their close family bond,’ a friend of Lauryn says.
A spokesman for Kyle declined to comment.
It is a saga that shows how isolated, and distinctly unsisterly, the life of a WAG can be.
Pregnant Annie Kilner steps out with a new puppy after leaving Kyle Walker
Annie complains she has been the subject of a Fatal Attraction-style campaign by Lauryn (pictured in 2017)
In the original interview revealing the name of her second child’s dad, Lauryn said she was the one who wanted everything to be public.
‘I didn’t want them [Kyle and Annie] to split up or cause harm, but it had to be out in the open for all of our sakes,’ she said then, explaining that she had FaceTimed with Annie in December last year and shown her their daughter’s DNA test.
Lauryn claimed she and Kyle had been in a long relationship and that Kyle had been leading a double life, playing the two women off against each other.
Kyle’s response, in an interview with The Sun on Sunday, was to call Annie his soul mate and desperately ask her to forgive him. He spoke sorrowfully of ‘idiot choices and idiot decisions’.
He also claimed, in a way which you may think stretches credulity, that he had slept with Lauryn only twice — the first time during a brief marital separation from Annie — with both infidelities resulting in a baby. Clearly, the message Kyle wanted to get across, was that there had never been a proper relationship with Lauryn.
‘There was no relationship. That is something Lauryn could never say. We’ve never been out for food, we’ve never been to the cinema,’ Kyle said. ‘To have a relationship with someone . . . would she even know how many sugars I have in my coffee, if I have sugars? She couldn’t tell you.’
Yesterday, via Instagram, Lauryn replied: ‘Flat white, no sugars please.’
A spokesman for Lauryn later said: ‘She is disappointed by his deluded version of events, which is dramatically different to her own recollection of their long-standing, intimate, loving and affectionate relationship.
Annie Kilner arrives for her morning Gym workout after leaving Kyle Walker
Kyle’s response, in an interview with The Sun on Sunday, was to call Annie (pictured) his soul mate and desperately ask her to forgive him
‘Having read back through many years of messages sent between them to assure herself her memory is accurate, she is confused as to how he has seemingly forgotten their many highly personal conversations and memories made with their children as a family.
‘The story he is putting out to the public is not the reality.’
Meanwhile Kyle’s spokesperson said: ‘Kyle has spoken fully and honestly about his mistakes and the true situation involving Lauryn. He’s instructed lawyers and will not be making any further comment on the wild and untrue stories she is promoting in the media in search of self-publicity and financial gain.’
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this compelling scandal is that Annie seems to be directing most of her anger at Lauryn rather than at her husband (who she has sent to live in a nearby apartment while she contemplates his shortcomings).
One of Annie’s friends talked this week about Lauryn ‘making Annie a single mother by sleeping with Kyle’. Note how there, Kyle is apparently absolved from blame.
On Monday night, Annie’s sister Sian — another highly-groomed young woman who looks like Annie’s twin — posted a long statement on social media accusing Lauryn of ‘evil’ behaviour.
Tagging Lauryn, Sian wrote: ‘@lauryngoodman91 When does your torment end? My sister, who is now 7 months pregnant, has faced your cruelty for almost 5 years now.
‘What’s your goal? To see how much stress you can put on a pregnant woman? To create a false victim narrative around what you did? You clearly lack empathy but this level of evil is out of control and harms everyone — especially the children.’
Annie’s sister Sian — another highly-groomed young woman who looks like Annie’s twin — posted a long statement on social media accusing Lauryn of ‘evil’ behaviour. Pictured: Annie and Sian together
Lauryn claimed she and Kyle had been in a long relationship and that Kyle had been leading a double life, playing the two women off against each other
Rubbishing Lauryn’s claim that she and Walker enjoyed a loving relationship, Sian added: ‘Stop accusing others; your true self is revealed. The so-called ’loving relationship’ is a facade. It’s not fooling anyone so why don’t you just give us all a break and stop.’
Friends of Annie also say that Lauryn, who has been friends with Kyle since he was 20, has twice attempted to befriend Annie in a way which, with hindsight, ‘looks a little bit Single White Female’, after the film in which one young woman becomes unhealthily obsessed with another.
In fact, the first contact between the two women was in 2019. In March of that year Kyle was again making idiotic decisions by playing away with a woman called Laura Brown, the former star of an MTV reality show Ex On The Beach. In the parlance of footballing sex scandals, Laura claimed she and Kyle had been ‘romping’; and, when Annie demanded proof, is said to have sent her a selfie she had taken inside the Walker-Kilner family home.
Annie promptly dumped Kyle, who begged her to take him back.
Lauryn was apparently among those who contacted Annie to offer sympathy.
By July, however Kyle and Lauryn were lovers — and she fell pregnant with Kairo.
In an interview in 2020, Annie said: ‘Last year he was unfaithful with a reality TV star. I found out a month later and was broken by it. He begged me to take him back, but by July he was at it again. Not even three months later and someone was pregnant. My youngest was one. Who does that?’
By November 2021, Annie and Kyle, who first started dating at school, were back together and soon got married. But, as Kyle has now admitted, in October 2022 he slept with Lauryn again, while in London seeking treatment for a groin strain.
Friends of Kyle say that Lauryn put him under enormous pressure in the months leading up to that phone call which has derailed his marriage
The second time Lauryn allegedly tried to befriend Annie was after calling her in December last year to tell her that her husband had fathered a second child with her. In a move that beggar’s belief, Lauryn even suggested they team up to give joint interviews about Kyle. Lauryn’s view, say friends of Annie, was that they were ‘both his victims’.
Meanwhile, friends of Kyle say that Lauryn put him under enormous pressure in the months leading up to that phone call which has derailed his marriage.
In his interview with The Sun, Kyle said: ‘Lauryn had me trapped in a corner from October, when she told me about the second child. She was in a position of control where if she asked me to jump, I would respond: ‘How high?’ ‘
‘This was to meet growing and unreasonable demands in return for not destroying my family.’
As to these ‘unreasonable demands’, Lauryn allegedly told him that he was not allowed to have more children with his wife, and should not buy a new house with her — with the ever-present threat that she would tell his wife about the second love-child if he stepped out of line.
Lauryn is also said to have objected to Kyle having the names of his children with Annie — Riaan, Reign and Roman — stitched onto his football boots because the names of his children with Lauryn were absent.
There was no response from Lauryn’s publicist to these allegations yesterday.
Although friends insist she is the wronged party, because he used her for sex, allegedly lied to her throughout, bought her numerous gifts and did a ‘doting dad routine’ with their children. One said; ‘She’s naive and has been foolish. She thought he loved her; he just wanted sex on tap.’
But the fallout from the affair continues.
The irony of it all is that the way the affair has been played over recent days, with Lauryn hiring her own publicist and taking multiple pot shots at the couple, has served to drive Kyle and Annie closer together.
I’m told: ‘Kyle and Annie put their children first. They will do what they can now and in the future to stay united, however that may look.’
Which doesn’t sound like the divorce everyone was expecting.
Perhaps all we can hope is that Annie, at the centre of a gossipy, swirling scandal not of her own making, is being well advised.
