Who is Madeline? The woman at centre of Lily Allen’s bombshell song

Lily Allen’s new album left the world reeling after she dropped some intimate details about her ex cheating on her with a woman named ‘Madeline’.

West End Girl leads us through an ‘autofictional’ retelling of her marriage to actor David Harbour, who she divorced in December.

Since the album dropped, one woman — Natalie Tippet — came forward to claim she is Madeline but asked for privacy.

Lily and David had been together since 2019 and tied the knot at a fun ceremony in Las Vegas in 2020.

After their split, rumours emerged that the Stranger Things actor may have had an affair for the majority of their marriage with a costume designer.

Lily, 40, confirmed this with her brutal step-by-step documenting of their relationship’s demise. So who is Madeline, really?

Who is Madeline?

On the track Tennis, Lily reads his texts and repeatedly asks ‘Who is Madeline’ before launching into the next track named after this mystery woman.

In the song, she pleads with Madeline for the ‘truth’ as she ‘can’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth’.

Lily tells the woman, ‘We had an arrangement. Be discreet, and don’t be blatant. There had to be payment; It had to be with strangers’.

The rather pointed use of the word stranger, given David’s best-known role, also suggests this was someone he and potentially Lily knew well.

A source previously revealed David and his mystery woman ‘weren’t very secretive about their relationship’, having ‘met on a movie’.

They also claimed he even flew the woman to the Stranger Things set in Atlanta during filming, which is hardly the ‘discreet’ no-emotions arrangement Lily described.

Who is Natalie Tippet?

While David and Lily have not revealed Madeline’s real name, Natalie Tippet has since claimed she is that very woman.

It’s alleged that the pair met on the Netflix movie We Have A Ghost, which began filming in August 2021, where Natalie worked as a costume designer.

She has also worked on The Channel, The Boogeyman, and is set costumer on the Emily Henry adaptation People We Meet on Vacation.

The Tab reported that she and David do follow each other on Instagram, but they don’t have any photos together on their profiles.

Natalie, 34, told The Mail on Sunday she has ‘a family and things to protect’ but said she had heard the song.

‘I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I understand this is going on,’ she continued. ‘It’s a little bit scary for me.’

The affair with David reportedly went on for three years of his marriage to Lily, although it is not known if they are still in touch now.

Meanwhile, the Marvel actor has been seen spending time with Lily’s two daughters – Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12 – at Universal Epic Universe theme park.

Footage of their day out was posted on TikTok with the user claiming it was taken after the album dropped.

Has David Harbour responded?

David, 50, has not spoken out since the split, but did state in an interview that he no longer dates ‘normal’ people as they don’t understand his industry.

He said: ‘I tried to date lawyers and business people in my twenties, but there’s something about being a carny freak that normal people don’t get.’

Lily closes the track with the American drawl of Madeline, telling her: ‘He told me you were aware this was going on, and that he had your full consent’. 

Natalie appeared to confirm the texts were real, saying she was aware Lily planned to use them in the song.

She added: ‘I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it at the moment.’

The cheating doesn’t seem to have stopped with his alleged affair with Natalie, however, as Lily accused David of having a Raya account.

In December, she was spotted on the celebrity dating app, apparently looking for her then-husband after the ‘agony’ of discovering he had one.

‘Lily was looking for women that were on Raya and cross-referencing them with women David follows on Instagram to try to figure out who he was seeing. She was doing her Wagatha thing,’ a source told Mail On Sunday in January.

The title was a reference to the infamous Wagatha Christie trial between WAGs Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, in which the former found the latter had been leaking stories about her to the media.

Since the split, Lily checked into a trauma centre as she became suicidal and almost relapsed on her sobriety.

She told Vogue: ‘I wanted to die. I’ve been into those places before against my will and I feel like that’s progress in itself. That’s strength. I knew that the things I was feeling were too extreme to be able to manage, and I was like, “I need some time away.”’

After returning to London earlier this year with her two daughters from her first marriage – Marnie, 12, and Ethel, 11 – Lily said her album explores the emotional fallout of the relationship.

‘There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,’ she explained. ‘It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.’

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Hi, I’m Alicia Adejobi, Metro’s acting entertainment editor.

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Now, she’s in a much better place. ‘Really not in the same space that I was when I wrote [these] songs,’ she said. ‘I have come a long way. I feel OK, actually.’

David has since gone on to date Ellie Fallon, an aspiring model 22 years his junior, while Lily describes her dating life since their split as ‘bitterly disappointing’.

This article was originally published on October 24, 2025.

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