Uncle of UK’s duchess Kate sentenced after hitting wife

LONDON (Reuters): The uncle of Kate Middleton, Britain’s Duchess of Cambridge, behaved “like a nasty drunk” when he hit his wife during a late-night argument last month, a magistrate said on Tuesday.

Gary Goldsmith, 52, was given a community order and told to attend 20 sessions of rehabilitation after admitting assaulting his wife, 47. He was also fined 5,000 pounds ($6,650).

Westminster magistrates court heard Goldsmith and his wife Julie-Ann were both drunk and were arguing on the doorstep of their Marylebone home after arriving back in a taxi from a night out in the early hours of the morning.

When his wife slapped him, Goldsmith hit her in the face and she fell down, hitting her head on the paving and briefly losing consciousness.

After the taxi-driver, who had seen the incident, got out of his cab and approached him, Goldsmith squared up to him”You were not immediately remorseful at what you had done despite your wife’s obvious distress,” Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot told him.

“In short, that night you were acting like a nasty drunk – not the happy drunk your friends or you describe.”

Goldsmith is the younger brother of Carole Middleton, the mother of the Duchess of Cambridge, wife of Prince William, the second-in-line to the throne.