Ep 29 – THE WORLD’S TOP FEMALE BODYGUARD – Jacquie Davis

For over thirty years Jacquie Davis has survived as one of the top operators in a male-dominated profession — the secretive, often dangerous world of being a bodyguard — or to give the profession its proper name, close protection officers.

In 2019, Netflix released ‘Close’, an action thriller whose main character was inspired by Jacquie’s life story.

With so many close scrapes with death while risking everything for her clients, Jacquie is genuinely surprised to still be alive. She has been stabbed, thrown through a shop window, shot at several times, including by Kashmiri snipers, and chased through some of the world’s most dangerous countries. She has also freed a young British woman who was being held captive in Pakistan, and rescued men imprisoned by Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, in Iraq.

After leaving the police force in the 1970s Jacquie Davis worked as a CPO, where her training, which included combat training and a willingness to risk everything for ‘the client’, led her into increasingly life-threatening operations, so much so that she became recognized as the world’s top female bodyguard.

Jacquie’s first published book “The Circuit” is a fascinating account of one woman’s amazing experiences involving the dangerous job of rescuing children and adults around the world, to the more glittering world of guarding well-known celebrities such as Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Gerard Butler, Nicole Kidman, Bradley Cooper, Sarah Ferguson (formerly HRH The Dutchess of York), teenage heart-throb Justin Bieber and the Beckhams, to name but a few.

Jacquie Davis is trained to a very high level in counter-surveillance, firearms, restraint tactics, bomb search, defensive driving, hostage awareness and survival. However, her day-to-day client responsibilities are more about conflict management, strategic planning and tactics than the hyped and distorted Hollywood perception of bodyguards diving in front of bullets and high speed car chases.

In fact, Jacquie never looks after anyone unless there is a real and genuine threat to their life or well-being; that’s the difference between having a bodyguard for prestige, as some pop stars do, and for protection.

In today’s podcast, we catch up with Jacquie at the recent EP Forum in Las Vegas.