Meet the Paparazzo Who Took Those Awful Photos of Nigella Lawson

February’s issue of Vanity Fair features a pretty icky firsthand account of Nigella Lawson’s very public strangling at the hands of her estranged husband Charles Saatchi from the one person who probably knows more about the incident than Saatchi and Lawson: the paparazzo who took that unrelenting series photos of the couple at a London restaurant.

The paparazzo, identified only as “Jean-Paul,”told VF writer Kevin Goldman that he was just not minding his own business when he saw what he thought was just some wild (but harmless) gesticulation from Saatchi:

I saw her lurch violently backwards. I thought Charles was demonstrating something. It lasted about 30 seconds. Then he did it a second time, and it was so violent, with such force, that her head snapped backwards . . . I was taking pictures the whole time.

As he realizes that Saatchi is physically assaulting Lawson, Jean-Paul manages to snap a thousand photos, making the business of exploiting popular interest in celebrities by making photographic flipbooks of their daily lives seem even slimier than it already is.