Family and friends are squashed into the late Camila Batmanghelidjh’s neat, tiny, kaleidoscopically colourful flat in north-west London. There are tears and hugs. Dates are passed round and cups of tea. “One thing is for sure,” said Lindita Berila, who has dropped in to pay her respects, “everyone knew Camila was special.”
A few days previously, Batmanghelidjh had been here with colleagues helping to wrap thousands of Christmas presents to be delivered the next day to disadvantaged children. “She looked fabulous,” said her brother Bobby. “There was no indication she was going to leave us.”
Her death on New Year’s Day, at the age of 61, ended arguably one of the extraordinary modern public lives, encompassing gifted social entrepreneurship and leadership, celebrity and fame, a talent for politics, a precipitous media-fuelled fall from grace, a dramatic courtroom exoneration, and a below-the-radar late-life resurgence.
She was adored by staff, an inspirational figure, said Rachel Mugan, a former head of clinical operations at Batmanghelidjh’s charity, Kids Company, as she sat in her former boss’s front room. “Kids Company was in incredibly unified charity,” she recalled. “We always knew what we had to do – go out and love the children.”
A charismatic Iranian immigrant, Batmanghelidjh became a household name as a children’s campaigner, as well as a confidante of princes, prime ministers, pop stars and traumatised teens.
But her fall from grace was equally steep. Buoyed up by her fundraising, Kids Company became mired in financial problems. Damaging allegations of sexual abuse on its premises were eventually dismissed as baseless by the police but not before the charity, its fundraising ability in tatters, closed in August 2015, triggering vicious media attacks.
Mugan, who has set up her own charity, Free to Be Kids, added that the charity wasn’t perfect – no organisation ever is. But it made a difference to many of the children it cared for: “What Camila taught us was about love.”
There are still many who distrust the Kids Company legacy – an MPs report from 2017 set a critical tone, and a Charity Commission inquiry published a year ago concluded there had been administrative mismanagement at the charity. But many have sought to pay tribute to the services she created – and the tens of millions she raised – to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse and gang violence.
Danny Kruger, the Tory MP, tweeted: “Camila was an inspiration to me & many others working with vulnerable young people in the 2000s. The tragic end of Kids Co was a cautionary tale about charity & public money. But I honour her memory for the way she stressed creativity, relationships, & the potential in everyone.”
But for five years Kids Company was a byword for chaos and recklessness – and she was discredited. At least until her exoneration in 2021 after a two-year, £9.5m court case brought by the Official Receiver in a bid to comprehensively disqualify her. “I’m so glad that finally the facts won,” Batmanghelidjh told the Guardian at the time.
The judge concluded that there was no mismanagement at Kids Company, or misuse of charitable funds. She praised Batmanghelidjh’s “enormous dedication” and the “incredible work” of her charity. “Her devotion to the interests of the young people whom the charity served was apparent throughout and not in doubt,” she wrote.
But the stress and effort, as well as Covid, took its toll. Some of her friends, said her brother Ardi, 64, had effectively abandoned her when the media turned on her. “She hid the pain,” he said. “She was seriously hurt by her treatment. She was hurt by the falsehoods.”
She also had an auto-immune condition from childbirth which meant her body retained excess fluids. In her final months she was in and out of hospital, where she contracted a debilitating infection. Doctors were hopeful she would recover but she died in her sleep on New Year’s Day.
“She was the only person who ever understood me,” said Dion, 14, who came to her flat with his mother, Lindita, to pay tribute. Both were distraught. Batmanghelidjh had taken him aside and patiently taught him maths once week at home when, as a small child, his autism meant he had made no progress at school.
Ali Sam, 19, wept as he recalled Batmanghelidjh being there for him when his father died four years ago. She would speak to him through the window of her ground floor flat every day during lockdown when, as he puts it, he was in danger of going off the rails. “I owe so much to Camila. She was like a grandmother to me. She helped me so much,” he said.
“She told the truth, however difficult it was for others to see it,” said Bobby. He talked about plans to set up a charitable foundation in her name to fund the continuation of her work through teaching and education. He added: “Whatever we do, the focus will be kids.”
