He is known for being volatile, intense and brilliant, a man of uncompromising likes and dislikes who can be intoxicatingly charming but does not necessarily go out of his way to ingratiate himself with others. (He recently wrote a book titled “Be The Worst You Can Be: Life’s Too Long for Patience And Virtue.”)

His marriage to Ms. Lawson has been conducted in public, in its way, with each freely discussing the other in interviews. They have made a playful joke of their differences: she likes to go out; he doesn’t, not even to his own parties. She prepares elaborate feasts; he prefers to sit in bed, eating cereal. They have not hidden the fact that they argue frequently. “I’ll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness,” Ms. Lawson once told an interviewer.

Significantly, the photographs of the mock-strangling incident were published a week after the events took place, and it was only then that Ms. Lawson moved out of the house. So-called friends (again, quoted anonymously) said that Ms. Lawson believes that her husband has anger management issues and needs to get help. It is possible that seeing evidence of Mr. Saatchi’s behavior exposed so starkly in public has caused his wife to re-evaluate behavior that perhaps seemed normal to her before. It is also possible that she just feels embarrassed about how public the whole thing is.

“When you’re called a domestic goddess, that’s an awfully big title to live up to,” a longtime friend of the couple said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The worst thing is the negative publicity — making her look like she’s a victim, and also all these battered women who are now assuming she’s going to be the patron saint of battered women. I can’t imagine anything she would want less.”

The friend added that she has known Mr. Saatchi for several decades and that while he is indeed difficult, he is not physically violent. “Everyone is talking about it as if it was so terrible,” she said, referring to the incident at Scott’s. “But if it was so dreadful, why didn’t people go over and say something?”

Mr. Saatchi’s public comments, though, have provided ample ammunition for detractors. When Ms. Lawson moved out of the house, he said that everything was fine and that he had simply “told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled.”