Margaret Whigham was a sensation to British society when she arrived from America as a teenager in the 1920s. The daughter of a textile millionaire, she dazzled with her beauty (green eyes, fair skin, red lipstick), devil-may-care social strategy (she double-booked men for the evening), and nouveau riche accoutrement (she was chauffeured to and from school in a Rolls-Royce, skied at St. Moritz, and wore gowns from Norman Hartnell). Her romances were legend. After a teen dalliance with actor David Niven, she dated Pakistani diplomat Aly Khan, millionaire aviator Glen Kidston, publishing heir Max Aitken, and Prince George, Duke of Kent, before settling down for the first of two marriages. And her exploits—as debutante of the year in 1930 and prolific high-society partygoer—earned her international press coverage and a reference in Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.”

“She was the most photographed woman of her time, of her generation,” says Sarah Phelps, the writer who adapted Margaret’s story for A Very British Scandal, the miniseries coming to the U.S. April 22. “It was like Princess Diana, Kim Kardashian—this globally famous beauty.”

But by the early 1960s, Margaret’s fortunes had reversed on an epic scale. In 1943, she suffered a catastrophic fall that left her with 30 stitches and a broken vertebra, temporarily unable to walk. After ending a first marriage that yielded a son and daughter, she went on a dating streak that ended with a marriage to Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll—securing her family’s formal entry to aristocracy, and access to Inveraray, a proper castle in Scotland. 

But Ian Campbell would also be her doom. Margaret would realize her new husband, who was said to be a gambling and alcohol addict, was broke. “He spent the entire war pretty much in a prisoner of war camp, a death camp. He was a bad man before he went in,” says Phelps. “He was a fucking shocker when he came out.”

When A Very British Scandal premieres—with Claire Foy playing the fabulous socialite, and Paul Bettany playing Ian Campbell—it will likely be the first time that modern American audiences learn of the ill-fated socialite. Margaret’s marriage to Ian, and the nasty, heavily publicized breakup that followed—the longest and costliest divorce proceeding in British history at the time—dominate the show’s three episodes. The marriage’s meltdown was such a scorched-earth operation that Phelps says it could have easily carried an entire season of American Crime Story.

With Ian broke and unpredictable, her focus shifted to restoring her husband’s decrepit castle, likely believing it to be an investment in their future. She later discovered that her husband had led her to believe she had legal claim to the property, in reality it would be passed down to Ian’s sons from a prior marriage. According to The Grit in the Pearl, Ian and Margaret’s marriage spiraled into mutual infidelities. Ian had referred to Margaret as Satan. Margaret, meanwhile, allegedly attempted to forge letters claiming that Ian’s sons were illegitimate to discredit their rights of succession and likely so she’d be entitled to Inveraray.

The two began living separately, but the dramatics still escalated. Ian broke into into Margaret’s house and hired a locksmith to open a cabinet in which he found compromising photos. Photographs submitted to the Edinburgh court, according to The New York Times, “reportedly showed a naked man gratifying himself and pictured her, dressed in nothing but three strands of pearls, performing a sex act on a naked man in the mirrored gilt and silver bathroom of her Mayfair apartment.”

Ian filed for divorce, citing both the photos and a list of 88 men noted in her diary, men Ian suspected Margaret had slept with during their marriage. The number allegedly included cabinet members, Hollywood actors, and members of the royal family. “It was supposed to be a divorce hearing. But it became a trial,” says Phelps. During said courtroom saga, Margaret was asked about the men who appeared in her diary—some of whom were reportedly gay, which at that time was a punishable crime. Rather than clarifying the relationships, which would have outed her friends, Margaret refused to comment. 

As Phelps says, “She was on trial for being a sexual woman.” A Jesuit-educated judge named Lord Wheatley, who was related to Ian, presided, putting Margaret further under the microscope. “Wheatley is a Puritan,” Phelps explains. “The hill he is going to die on is putting the sexuality of women into a box marked ‘disgusting.’ He’s the one who absolutely destroys her…. He could have just given the judgment, ‘I find in favor of the plaintiff. This is the judgment, these are the cost.’ Ten minutes, max.”

Instead, after a court case that lasted 11 days, he dramatically ended the hearing with a 50,000-word judgment that took over three hours for him to read. One particularly damning line: “She is a highly sexed woman who has ceased to be satisfied with normal sexual activities and has started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite that can only be satisfied by a number of men.”

Phelps believes Margaret was subjected to a form of punishment akin to revenge porn. The judge did not release compromising images of her but did describe them in clear detail. “He took Margaret, hung a scarlet letter around her neck, and hung her out for the crowds to pick at her. If Margaret, Duchess of Argyll gets away with this, what will all women do?”

“I thought he was such a bastard,” Margaret told George Hume in a 1990 interview. “I told the truth. I was as good of a witness as I could be. Then he attacks me. You don’t attack if you’re a judge.” In 1977, speaking to Melvyn Bragg, she lamented, “I’ve had the most ghastly publicity in the world.” Indeed, in the aftermath of the trial, Margaret was referred to in British papers and tabloids by a series of unbecoming sobriquets, like “the Dirty Duchess” and “the Fellatio Duchess.”

“During this time, Margaret became a grandmother, and [newspapers are reporting about these] Polaroid photographs of her with a man’s dick in her mouth,” continues Phelps. “She was absolutely appalled…. There was no legal recourse. She tried the Law Lords, [which] decided that Ian is perfectly within his right to use as evidence against his wife material that he burgled from her house. Everywhere she turns, she just comes straight up against the thing of like, you have no recourse.”

Having sunk much of her fortune into Inveraray, she was also broke. And, as Phelps describes, it wasn’t just legal support that Margaret lacked.

“By the time her fall happens, there were plenty of people who were happy to facilitate that fall and make that fall a hell of a lot worse,” says Phelps. It seems Margaret’s nouveau riche status had always bothered London’s old-money scene, even as Margaret’s parents spent plenty of cash funding her societal rise—paying over 40,000 pounds for her coming-out party.

Just weeks after the divorce was finalized, with Margaret’s reputation ruined and her bank account drained, Ian went on to marry another wealthy woman and suffered a stroke in the South of France, before being transferred back to Scotland where he later died.

Margaret carried on, though her final chapters were still quite sad. “She is penniless,” says Phelps. “[She was evicted from a hotel]. Her penury grinds at her, worse and worse and worse.”

But even in poverty, Margaret refused to change her ways to appeal to the public. She published a haughty memoir, Forget Not, in which she offered entertaining tips and entitlement in reams—but nothing about the men she’d written about in her diary. She continued giving the occasional TV interview, usually with one of her many beloved poodles in tow. (“Always a poodle, only a poodle! That, and three strands of pearls,” she reportedly said at the time. “Together they are absolutely the essential things in life.”) She was also game to offer a hot-take dripping in condescension. “I don’t think anybody has real style or class any more,” Margaret told The New York Times. “Everyone’s got old and fat.”

But if there was one thing Margaret learned over the decades and her various scandals, it was that she could not and would not ever change.

“Unfortunately, I am only too aware that I am still the same gullible, impulsive, over-optimistic ‘Dumb Bunny,’” Margaret is quoted as saying by The Telegraph. “And I have given up hopes of any improvement.”

Says Phelps, “She’s sort of brilliant and tragic in a way, but also triumphant. Because imagine the guts after that judgment is published in the paper. It goes all around the world. And although the Polaroid photographs by this time have all faded…there’s endless fakes. Everybody knows what the photograph depicts. By the time she’s dead, her sobriquet will still be ‘Blowjob Duchess.’ Can you imagine the guts it takes to get up in the morning, put your poodle on its leash, put on your lipstick, put on your pearls, and take your poodle to the park? Imagine the courage that takes.”

“She’s a hot mess. But she’s iconic,” says Phelps, who is thrilled that U.S. viewers will learn of this unconventional woman when A Very British Scandal premieres. “[She was] a passionate woman with her own morality, because anybody that doesn’t give up their friends, that cuts a lot of ice with me.”

In 1990, three years before her death, Margaret reflected on the absurdly high highs and low lows of her life, in an interview quoted by The Telegraph.

“I do not forget. Neither the good years, in which I laughed and danced and lived upon a cloud of happiness; nor the bad years of near despair, when I learned what life and people and friendship really were.”

“What do you make of your life?” an interviewer asked her in 1990.

“Well, some ghastly mistakes,” she laughed. “Like everybody, I’d do anything to have it all over again. And it would be totally different.”