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Imran Khan (70) was the playboy par excellence of the London of the happy 90s. The former Pakistani cricket idol, with one foot also among the Marbella jet set, came to have a luxurious apartment in Knightsbridge with lavish decoration, mirrors everywhere and a tiger painted on the wall. A friend went so far as to describe the master bedroom as "the bedroom of great expectations." And he wasn't wrong...

Actress Goldie Hawn, television presenters Stephanie Beacham and Kristiane Backer, model Marie Helvin, designer Susannah Constantine... And so on until you reach the coveted Jemima, daughter of billionaire financier James Goldsmith. The crush arose in a nightclub in Soho that could well have been the Tramp, considered then as "the extension of the living room of his house".

At 42, the unrepentant flirt believed the time had come to settle down and swore to be faithful to his very young wife, 21 years old, eager to give "moral certainty" to his life even if he had to abandon his studies at the University of Bristol and decided to follow in the wake of that irresistible man who was twice his age (more than one woman has stressed that Imran's secret was in his natural fragrance).

They married in Paris in 1995 in a religious ceremony performed in Urdu. They remarried civilly in Richmond. Jemima Khan not only took her husband's surname, but converted to Islam and decided to start a new life in Lahore, where she had to make her cultural adjustments and face prejudice because she was Jewish.

Imran and Jemima Khan with their son Sulaiman in Lahore.AP

But in the end she was accepted as one of the family. Over time she was the mother of two children (Sulaiman and Kasim), posed smiling in magazines andshe managed to attract her friend Princess Diana, both dedicated to their charitable missions. He learned Urdu, conformed to customs, discovered "the colorful and warm side" of Pakistani Punjab.

The problems began when Imran, who became a national myth after the victory over England in 1992, changed cricket for politics. Jemima, also heavily involved in social causes, helped her husband (educated at Oxford) to create the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistani Movement for Justice, PTI) party.

At the height of Imran's political career, Jemima was accused of smuggling antiquities into the UK for selling mosaics. It was, in his view, one of the first attempts to intimidate Imran. The fact is that she got fear in her body, she spent a long time in England for fear of being imprisoned and when the matter was clarified nothing was the same again.

Nine years lasted at the end of her Pakistani dream, broken according to her by Imran's increasingly exclusive dedication to politics. They remained good friends after the separation: they agreed that she would keep custody of the two children, who on vacation would spend time with the father again.

They wasted no time. Jemima was then paired with Hugh Grant while Imran took it out on Liz Hurley. Jemima then made the leap without a net with the comedian Russell Brand while rising whole as a journalist (director of The New Statesman and European correspondent of the American Vanity Fair) and as a television producer with Instinct Productions.

With his second wife, Reham, on their wedding day in 2015.

Imran married for the second time to a presenter with Pakistani and British blood, Reham Nayyar, in what he called "the worst mistake of my life". The marriage did not last even a year, and she retaliated by denouncing his life plagued by excesses, including his slips with Bollywood actresses and his supposedly unacknowledged paternities.

Before becoming prime minister in 2018, Imran suffered something of an enlightenment: he fell in love with his spiritual mentor, Bushra Bibi, following the path of Sufism. He married her without having seen her face, for she always wore it hidden under a niqab. Any resemblance to Jemima is purely coincidental, although he came in handy to accentuate the Islamic turn and his final metamorphosis into a politician with messianic traits.

Jemima denounced, by the way, an attempt to rob her house days before the notorious arrest of Imran Khan for corruption, on May 9. The attempted murder of her ex-husband last November coincided almost with her debut as a screenwriter with Whats Love Got to Do With It?, a letter of love and heartbreak to Pakistan that she knew, with controversy included for her statements about the royal family: "Deep down, Charles and Diana's was also an arranged marriage."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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