Sheherazade Goldsmith - Family and Personal Life

Family and Personal Life

During the 1990s, Goldsmith was known as a British "It Girl". An enthusiastic Internet poker player, she has been described as a survivor and a realist by her mother Viviane, while her sister Jasmine has called her "very organized and family-oriented." While at Aiglon College in 1993, at the age of 19, Goldsmith was briefly engaged to the youngest son of an Italian duke, Pio Catemario di Quadri. The engagement was called off in 1998.

She met her ex-husband, Zac Goldsmith, when he sent her a bouquet of roses with his telephone number at a pizzeria in South-West London. They married four months later, on 5 June 1999, at St Simon Zelotes church in Knightsbridge. The wedding was followed by a reception at The Ritz and a dance at the groom's childhood home, the Ormeley Lodge. The Goldsmiths lived in a terrace home in Fulham for about three years after their marriage. The oldest of their three children, a daughter named Uma, was born on 10 April 2000. Their second daughter, Thyra, was born in 2002, followed a year later by the Goldsmith's youngest child, son James. On 29 August 2009, the Goldsmiths announced they had separated and intended to divorce. According to the London Mail on Sunday reporter Katie Nicholl, "the couple have been living in separate homes since January when The Mail on Sunday was told that their marriage was in serious trouble."

She and her children divide their time between a London home and a farm in Devon. In 2008, they moved from their house in Chelsea to a new one in Richmond, the prospective parliamentary constituency for Zac. Goldsmith and her children take a four-hour train trip every weekend to commute to Devon and then return to London for the week. The family owns two dogs: a mongrel called Patch and an Irish wolfhound, Emily. Goldsmith grows all of her seasonal produce on their 300-acre (1.2 km2) farm in Devon, where she keeps cows, pigs, sheep, chickens and three herds of Dartmoor ponies as well as has a vegetable garden, apple trees, and a wildlife pond.

She divorced Zac Goldsmith on the grounds of admitted adultery in 2010.