He faces seven charges involving six women between 1999 and 2009: three of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault, the last reduced from indecent assault by the judge after he found there was insufficient evidence for the original count. Brand denies them all. On Monday his barrister made his final speech to the jury. As soon as Tuesday, after the judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, has summed up, eight men and four women will retire to decide whether he is guilty.

The jury has not yet reached its verdicts, and the law of contempt, quite rightly, forbids me from telling you what I think they should be. What I can tell you is what was said in court, as fully and fairly as I can manage.

Begin with the defendant, since it was his week.

Brand told the jury, under questioning from his own counsel, Ian Winter KC, that the 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches programme and the Times reports that triggered all this had been “devastating”. “My entire life has been consumed by these events, these allegations, these accusations,” he said, at the expense of his marriage, his children and his health. He said Great Ormond Street Hospital had barred him from staying with his baby son during open-heart surgery, citing “the material published”. Asked whether he had persuaded anybody with relevant evidence to speak for him, he said: “I have not.” Asked whether any of them would “touch you with a bargepole”, he said: “No.” For a man who once sold out arenas, it was a bleak little exchange.

He did not pretend to have been a choirboy. “I’ve been persuasive, seductive, begging and flirting,” he said, “and dedicated a lot of my life to what seems now beyond reckless philandering, and idiocy.” He agreed he had been “obsessed with sex”. “As I became more successful and famous,” he said, “I was very comfortable allowing that to facilitate sexual access.” He accepted that was wrong. His marriage to Katy Perry in 2010 brought “staggering fame”. Of his ambition, reported by a former friend, to sleep with 5,000 women, he said he did not remember it, but that “it’s entirely possible it’s the kind of badinage I would have engaged in when I was 24”. And on consent, the one word that matters in this case, he was emphatic. “Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and indeed in many ways more important than sex itself.”

He then went through the women. Of the woman who says he raped her in a hotel in Bournemouth during the 1999 Labour Party conference, he said he remembered her as “loquacious” and “interesting”, and that when he went back to her room he thought there was “at least the possibility of sex”. Asked whether he raped her, he said no. Asked whether he thought “no” meant “yes”, he said: “I know what no means.”

Of the 2004 Soho party, where a woman says he grabbed her breasts and forced her to perform oral sex in a lavatory cubicle, he recalled a friend introducing them with the words: “There’s a bird here who really wants to meet you, mate.” He said he told her: “You are really, really beautiful, understand you’re really looking forward to meeting me.” She had “very prominent eyes”, was “wide-eyed”, flirting enthusiastically, and “happy” to “fool around”. He denied grabbing her breasts, which would have been “disgusting behaviour”. Asked whether she might not have consented to going into the cubicle, he said: “There’s absolutely no question.” He ended the encounter, he said, with the words “let’s wrap this up”. And to the suggestion that someone would have noticed, he offered a line that will haunt the media industry for years: “In media, in the early 2000s, people going in and out of bathrooms didn’t attract a huge amount of attention.”

Of the young MTV worker who says he tried to drag her into the men’s toilets at work in 2001, he said he had “absolutely not” intended anything non-consensual. Of the 21-year-old fan from his 2009 Hammersmith Apollo show, he said they had a “memorable” encounter in his dressing room, that he had been “excited and enthusiastic” to see her again, and that the sex at his Hampstead home a week later was consensual. He denied that she had asked him to stop.

Then the prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, stood up, and it was not an easy afternoon. She asked whether his only hobbies were sex and comedy. “West Ham, animals, veganism,” he replied. She asked whether all he cared about was “getting yourself off”. “I had a variety of complex concerns like any human being,” he said. She took him to his phone. A “T” next to the Hammersmith woman’s name, he explained, stood for “tart”, his code for casual hook-ups. “AP” stood for “anal play”, which, he said, she had performed “upon first meeting me”. Two asterisks meant: “Never, ever forget this individual, this is a memorable encounter.” She read from his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, including a caption announcing that he had decided “to act gay to attract girls”. It was, he said, “a joke”. She suggested he had “never asked” one woman “if she was up for it”: “You just did it.” “It’s not true,” he said, “that’s not what happened.” She suggested that his account had grown far more detailed since his police interviews, in which he had said he could not remember several of the women. He accepted that some details were inconsistent, and said that reading the evidence and revisiting the places had brought memories back. At one point the judge intervened: “You knew consent was the million dollar question.” Brand replied: “I can tell the truth that I wasn’t looking at sex talk in that way.” At the end, asked once more about the charges, he said: “Not guilty is my plea in every single case.”

The defence called two more witnesses, after a fashion. Two of Brand’s former partners provided written statements saying that he had been “unfaithful” and “promiscuous”, but had never done anything intimate with them without their consent. And his wife, Laura, told the jury that he was “caring and kind”, that “I feel very seen by him”, and that he had never made her do anything sexual she did not want.

That was the evidence. Now to the contradictions, because every case has them and this one has plenty, on both sides.

The defence put a series of inconsistencies to the women, and it is only fair to list them. The Bournemouth complainant told police Brand had been in his underwear, “budgie smugglers” jumping about “like an ostrich”, in Mr Winter’s account of her evidence; her own photographs from that night show him in trousers. She also kept a photograph of him blowing her a kiss, which the defence called “completely inconsistent” with an allegation of rape. The Soho complainant told friends and her sister at the time that Brand had tried to force himself on her but that she had got away; she first described it as rape after the 2023 documentary. Her explanation: “I didn’t want people to judge me. I felt ashamed.” The Hammersmith complainant, under cross-examination, agreed she had been a “huge” fan who “completely adored him”, that she went to his house expecting sex, that she had a partner at the time, and that going had been a “huge mistake”. In her texts afterwards she told Brand he had treated her “like an animal”, but not that he had raped her. “I didn’t consent to what happened to me,” she told the court. Brand’s former personal assistant, called by the Crown, described his “insane sexual appetite” but said she never saw him break the law. And none of the six women went to the police until after the documentary.

But the inconsistencies do not all run one way, and the jury has heard evidence that the defence has had to work much harder to explain. The Channel 4 complainant, who says Brand put his head in her lap and demanded a massage in 2009, reported it to her line manager the next day, and a colleague backed up her account of his associates urging her on. The radio station complainant’s texts at the time survive: “He was a superstar,” she wrote, and “I thought nothing would happen to him.” The Soho complainant’s sister described Brand’s eyes, as she was told of it, going “completely blank”, as if he had “been possessed”. The Hammersmith complainant told friends and her parents at the time, and Brand did, on her evidence, text her afterwards (“Because you are dirty and I want to push you further”) and then apologise. Brand himself admitted the phone codes, the use of fame for “sexual access”, and that his memory had improved markedly between the police station and the witness box. None of this is proof of guilt; it is what the jury must weigh against the defence’s points, and it would be dishonest to report one list without the other.

Then came the closing speeches, and they were as stark a contrast as you will hear in an English court.

Ms Karmy-Jones went first, on Friday. The six women, she said, did not know each other, had sought no limelight and had nothing to gain “apart from perhaps some closure”. Each described the same pattern: a charming man who then “snapped, from charming to frightening to nasty”. “He didn’t listen when I said no, he didn’t listen, he didn’t care,” she said, summarising their accounts, “pulling, pushing, tugging, thrusting.” “In the rape cases he just kept on going until he achieved his ultimate aim and ejaculated.” Brand’s habit of handing women his contact details afterwards was, she suggested, what “today… might be known as gaslighting”. Women, she said, “were disposable; they didn’t matter to him. He didn’t even need to know their names. They were just a means to an end,” the “amusements” in what Brand himself had once called his “playground of orgasms”. “So long as they had a vagina and a heartbeat,” she said, “he could get what he wanted.”

On what the women could or could not remember wearing: “Ultimately does it really matter? The defence, I’m sure, will tell you it does.” The experience of being raped, she suggested, “may be something that looms a little bit larger in your mind” than “the intricacies of outfit changes”. Of the Bournemouth complainant she asked: “Is that woman some sort of lunatic who would make this story up, reimagine this event after watching a documentary?” The documentary, she said, was no “magic force”; the women had simply “realised they are not alone”. Brand “couldn’t really remember anything when he was interviewed”, she said, “in stark contrast to now when he suddenly seems to remember all sorts of details”. His defence was “a lot of half-truths” that had been “spun into lies”. She read from My Booky Wook (“I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way”) and suggested that consent, to Brand, was “just an obstacle to be removed, or perhaps to ignore”. Then she asked the jury to sit in silence for twenty seconds, the length of the MTV encounter. “Pulling, not just a gentle grab of the arm and a ‘come in’,” she said. “Twenty seconds of this.” “There really shouldn’t be any doubt in your mind that Russell Brand knew full well this was not consensual. We invite you to find him guilty on all counts.”

On Monday, Mr Winter replied, and he went for the documentary with both barrels. Journalists, he said, had “poisoned the well of justice”, and done so deliberately. “They poisoned the wells in the hope and intention that other people come forward and make allegations against him.” The women, he said, were “not random, not independent” but “thoroughly contaminated”, and that “they all came forward for reasons connected to the TV programme”. They might sincerely believe their accounts now, but that was “the precise consequence of the poisoning of the well”. The delays, of up to 24 years, were “monstrous”, and left the jury in “a quagmire of doubt and inaccurate recollection”. And none of the women, he noted, had come forward during the #MeToo movement, when “it could not have been more publicised”.

Then he turned to Brand’s behaviour. Every complainant, he said, had described Brand behaving “normally” afterwards. “That, we suggest, is something that simply cannot have occurred if he is guilty.” “He obviously genuinely believed that they were consenting.” There was “no evidence he is some sort of psychopath who rapes people and thinks it’s normal”. “You would have to be a psychopath,” he said, “to be raping someone and asking them if they were enjoying it.” Brand had left his real email address, posed for photographs, kissed women goodbye. “Rapists do not leave their address.” He respected it, Mr Winter said, “when a woman says no, so that makes him someone who is not a rapist”. What Brand had wanted from sex, he said, was “approbation and adoration”. And then the line that will be on the front pages. “Living a highly promiscuous life is entirely lawful however morally distasteful you may find it. Disgusting, distasteful, immoral, who cares? It’s irrelevant to your consideration.” Brand “had an immense amount of sex and none of it was unlawful”. “Why is it,” he asked, “that only three rapes in 10 years?”

He told the jury that Brand’s wife “fell in love with that man in full knowledge of what he was doing” and had married him and had three children with him, which she would hardly have done if he were “guilty as charged”. The prosecution’s use of My Booky Wook was a “bid of desperation”; the line about acting gay to attract girls was obviously a joke. “The joke is that it didn’t work.” And the details, he reminded the jury, are everything: “When they add up, they make you sure; when they don’t, they are the doubt.”

On Tuesday, Mr Justice Bennathan is expected to sum up the evidence and give the jury its legal directions: that the burden of proof lies entirely on the prosecution, that they must be sure of guilt before they convict, that they must consider each count and each woman separately, that delay in reporting is not in itself a sign that a complaint is false, and that they must put out of their minds everything they have seen, read or heard outside that courtroom, the documentary included. Then the jury will go out. For now the judge has said he will accept only unanimous verdicts. If, after a substantial period, the jurors cannot all agree, he may later tell them he will accept a majority of at least ten to two. If they still cannot agree on a count, the Crown can seek a retrial on it. If Brand is convicted of rape, he faces a long prison sentence. If he is acquitted, he walks out of Southwark a free man, into a world that long ago made up its mind about him.

Which brings me to the only thing I am allowed to say about all this, and the thing that matters most. In this country, a man is innocent unless, not until, he is proven guilty. That one little word is the whole of English justice. “Until” assumes the verdict and merely waits for it. “Unless” means what it says.

If the jury is sure that Russell Brand is guilty, then let them throw the book at him. The booky wooky, even. Forgive me; I could not resist. But until twelve people who have heard every word of the evidence tell us otherwise, he is entitled to exactly the same presumption as you or I would be. Ignore the headlines, ignore the hashtags, and ignore the people who decided this case three years ago on the strength of a television programme.

“We have received information and active enquiries are ongoing, but these are at a very early stage,” a force spokesperson said on Thursday. “All enquiries are evidence led, with the needs of victim survivors at the heart of those enquiries.” Beyond that, the police would say nothing at all: not what the information was, not who supplied it (could it be another random nutjob or one of the many Epstein accusers whom I’ve debunked as fantasists over the years?), not whether any offence is suspected, and not whether anybody is a suspect. Buckingham Palace said it does not speak for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and could not comment. The former prince has always denied any wrongdoing.

The Scottish Daily Express, which first reported the inquiries alongside the BBC, said they relate to claims that women were trafficked to Balmoral, yet, of course, provided no evidence. Police Scotland has not confirmed that. It is worth holding on to the distinction, because in the Epstein affair the gap between “police have received information” and “police have found evidence” is where reputations go to die.

What is established is this. Epstein and Maxwell visited the estate in Aberdeenshire, reportedly in 1999, at Andrew’s invitation. That was the year Maxwell is said by the press to have introduced the two men - they keep repeating this myth, despite it being thoroughly debunked (Epstein was in fact introduced to Andrew by Lynn Forester de Rothschild). A photograph shown at Maxwell’s trial in New York in 2021 appears to show her and Epstein sitting outside the Glen Beg log cabin on the estate, looking for all the world like a couple of tourists who have taken a wrong turning on the way to Aviemore. Images released by the US Justice Department this year appear to show Andrew and Epstein together on a shooting trip. US flight records, according to a Press Association report last year, list Andrew and Maxwell as passengers on a flight from Luton to Edinburgh on 1 September 2006, though Epstein himself is not on the manifest, and there is no indication that the flight forms part of the Scottish inquiries. Police Scotland had already appealed in February for information about Epstein’s private jet using Edinburgh Airport.

Then there is the email. Among the three million pages the Justice Department released in January is a message dated 16 August 2001 from an account calling itself “The Invisible Man” and signed “A”. “I am up here at Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family,” it says. “Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?” Maxwell’s reply, inconveniently for sensationalism-focused journalists, demonstrates the very opposite of sex trafficking: “So sorry to disappoint you, however the truth must be told. I have only been able to find appropriate friends.” The writer also mentions having just left “the RN”; Andrew left the Royal Navy in July of that year.

None of this amounts to evidence of a crime. Being photographed with Jeffrey Epstein at a log cabin is not an offence. Neither is taking him shooting, though the grouse may feel differently.

The Balmoral inquiries are the latest in a remarkable year for the former Duke of York. In October last year the King stripped his brother of his royal titles, and he is now plain Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. On 19 February this year, Thames Valley Police arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office, over allegations that he passed confidential information to Epstein while serving as Britain’s trade envoy. He was questioned, released under investigation and has not been charged; he denies wrongdoing. The Metropolitan Police and Surrey Police are also examining material from the Epstein files. Sifting three million pages of American documents for anything that might amount to a British offence, the National Police Chiefs’ Council warns, will take time.

It will. I know, because I have spent the past six years doing something similar.

Since 2020 I have been investigating the Epstein affair, interviewing key witnesses, reading the court filings, the depositions, the flight logs, the unsealed documents and now the Justice Department’s vast release, and comparing what they actually say with what the newspapers say they say. The result is my book, Naked Lies. The most important thing I have learned is that the Epstein story has two layers: the documented one, of a convicted sex offender, a woman serving twenty years for trafficking and a great many rich people who should have known better; and the legend that has grown up around it, in which every name is a suspect, every photograph a confession and every claim a fact. Nowhere are the two more often confused than in the case of Andrew.

Which brings us to Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, who took her own life in Western Australia in April last year, was the woman whose allegations did more than anyone’s to destroy Andrew’s public life. She said that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to have sex with him three times when she was 17: at Maxwell’s house in London in 2001, at Epstein’s mansion in New York, and at an orgy on Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little St James. Andrew denied it, insisted he had no recollection of ever meeting her, and in 2022 settled her civil lawsuit for a sum reported to run into millions, without admitting liability. Her story has since been treated by much of the press as settled fact. It is not, and it never was.

Consider New Mexico. In 2011 Giuffre wrote a 139-page manuscript, The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, which later entered the court record in her defamation action against Maxwell. In it, she described spending two days alone with Andrew at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch outside Santa Fe, riding horses with him and massaging him “at least a couple of times a day”. In it, she placed her third sexual encounter with Andrew not on a Caribbean island but at the ranch. “My third encounter with Prince Andrew,” she wrote, “occurred at Zorro Ranch.”

The trouble is that she had given a quite different account of where that encounter took place, and it was the island version that she maintained in her sworn statements and in public for the rest of her life. One of those accounts was untrue, and Giuffre knew which one. When the discrepancy was raised, her explanation was that a tabloid reporter had advised her to fictionalise parts of her story to avoid being sued. In 2019 her own lawyers conceded in a court filing that the manuscript was “fictionalized”. Even her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, published last October, opens with the claim that she had “never told my whole story”, despite the existence of the 139-page manuscript in which she told a different one.

New Mexico was not an isolated slip. Giuffre accused the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, repeatedly and in detail, of sexually abusing her, including in a Netflix documentary. In 2022, settling his defamation claim, she said she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him. She also named the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and the former Senate majority leader George Mitchell as men she had been directed to have sex with; both flatly denied ever meeting her, and neither was ever charged with anything. And she was not called as a witness at Maxwell’s trial, where her account would have been tested under cross-examination.

Thursday’s statement is “very early stage”. Police Scotland has received information. It has not said what that information is, or whether it can be corroborated, or whether it has anything to do with Andrew at all, rather than with Epstein and Maxwell. It may lead somewhere. It may lead nowhere, as so much of the Epstein material has.

Andrew’s judgement in staying friends with Epstein after his 2008 conviction was foolish, and his 2019 Newsnight interview remains a masterclass in how not to defend yourself. But bad judgement is not a crime, and nor is a shooting party in the Highlands. If detectives in Aberdeenshire find evidence that women were trafficked to Balmoral, those responsible should answer for it, whoever they are. If they do not, a great many people who have already decided otherwise will owe somebody an apology.

They will not, of course, offer one. In the Epstein affair, they never do.

So it is perhaps worth asking an unfashionable question. Not “Is Elizabeth Holmes guilty?”, because a jury has answered that, at least in part, and the appeal courts have agreed with it. But this: is the Elizabeth Holmes of popular legend the same woman who was actually convicted? Or has Silicon Valley, an industry that has made a religion of “fake it till you make it”, found itself a convenient sacrificial lamb, or perhaps a sacrificial unicorn, to carry its sins into the wilderness?

First, the facts, as stubborn as ever.

Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 in 2003 to found Theranos, which promised to run hundreds of blood tests from a single drop pricked from a finger, using a machine she eventually named the Edison. By 2014 the company was valued at around $9 billion and her stake at roughly $4.5 billion. She had a board that looked like a state funeral: George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, William Perry, Sam Nunn. She had a deal with Walgreens. She had investors including Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family and Betsy DeVos. What she did not have was a machine that did what she said it did.

In October 2015 John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal revealed that most of Theranos’s tests were in fact being run on modified commercial machines, mostly made by Siemens, and that the Edisons were unreliable. The company collapsed. Theranos voided two years of Edison results. Holmes settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018, and that year she and her former partner and company president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were indicted.

Now here is the bit that the legend tends to skip. Holmes went on trial in San Jose in 2021 on eleven counts. In January 2022 the jury found her guilty on four: one of conspiracy to defraud investors and three of wire fraud against investors. It found her not guilty on four others: the conspiracy to defraud patients and the wire fraud counts relating to patients and doctors. On the remaining three investor counts it could not agree, and the government later dropped them. In other words, the jury that heard every word of the evidence did not convict Elizabeth Holmes of defrauding a single patient.

Read that twice, because if you have watched The Dropout, or the evening news, or listened to anybody at a dinner party since about 2018, you will almost certainly believe the opposite. The popular image of Holmes is of a woman who knowingly handed sick people false results that put their lives in danger. There was harrowing evidence about inaccurate results, and nobody sensible would call a faulty blood test a trifle. But on the specific charges of defrauding patients, twelve Californians, having heard every word, said: not guilty. Somewhere along the line, that verdict got lost in the edit.

What was proven was serious enough, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. The jury heard that Holmes told investors Theranos’s technology was being used by the military in the field, when it was not. It heard that she sent investors validation reports bearing the logos of Pfizer and Schering-Plough, which those companies had not written or endorsed. It heard about financial projections that were, to put it charitably, fantastical. That is fraud, and the jury called it fraud, and in February 2025 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld both the convictions and the sentence. Her bid for a fresh trial was rejected. In November 2022 Judge Edward Davila had sentenced her to eleven years and three months, and she and Balwani were ordered to repay some $452 million. Balwani, tried separately, was convicted on all twelve counts against him and got nearly thirteen years. Nobody can say she got off lightly.

But consider who her victims actually were. Not pensioners in Ohio. Not widows with their life savings. They were some of the richest and best-advised people on earth: Murdoch, who put in about $121 million; the Waltons; the DeVos family; private equity funds and family offices with whole departments whose sole job is to check that the thing they are buying exists. Several of them, it emerged, never saw independent validation of the technology, never asked for it, and invested largely because Henry Kissinger was on the board and the founder had a nice line in turtlenecks. I have every sympathy for anybody who has been lied to. But one does wonder how many of those billionaires would have read past the first page of the prospectus for a second-hand Vauxhall.

And this is where the “scapegoat” question bites. Silicon Valley is built on promises that have not yet come true. Founders routinely tell investors their product is further along than it is, their user numbers are about to explode, and their technology will change the world by next Tuesday. Some of them are right and become gods. Others are wrong and become footnotes. Holmes was wrong, spectacularly and expensively, and some of what she said crossed the line from optimism into lies. But she was hardly the only founder in that valley whose pitch outran her product. She was, however, young, female, photogenic and alone at the top, which made her a far better story than the blokes in fleeces who burned through billions and simply failed. The Wall Street Journal broke the story; Hollywood made it a parable.

She even told us where she got the idea. Holmes named her machine after her hero, Thomas Edison, and the choice is more revealing than she perhaps intended. In September 1878 Edison told the newspapers that he had cracked the problem of the electric light and would have it lighting lower Manhattan within weeks. He had done nothing of the sort. He had not yet produced a bulb that would burn for more than a few minutes. But the announcement sent the shares of the gas companies tumbling, and the money of J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts came pouring into the new Edison Electric Light Company on the strength of a promise. It took him more than a year of frantic trial and error before a carbon filament glowed for some thirteen hours at Menlo Park in October 1879. Edison faked it, and then, just in time, he made it. Nobody calls him a fraudster. They put his face on the history books, and on the side of a blood-testing machine.

Since going to prison, Holmes has, if anything, become a stranger figure still. She reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, a minimum-security facility outside Houston, in May 2023, two years after giving birth to her first child and months after the second. The Bureau of Prisons has repeatedly moved her release date forward, and in March this year Judge Davila granted a further reduction under a retroactive change to the sentencing guidelines, while observing that “the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused by Holmes’s fraud speak for themselves”. She is now due to move to a halfway house in Austin on 23 August 2027, with a projected release date of 22 February 2030. In December 2025 she asked President Trump to commute the rest of her sentence. The request is listed as “pending”. Given this President’s enthusiasm for pardoning people who annoyed the Justice Department, I would not bet the Edison against it.

Meanwhile an account in her name on X has posted thousands of times since she rejoined the platform last year, about books, free speech, her children and her innocence. Its biography reads, rather beautifully, “Mostly my words, posted by others.” Since prisoners cannot use the internet, one assumes that others are doing a great deal of the posting. Who they are, the Bureau of Prisons cannot say. According to the new film, the man with the keys is her partner, Billy Evans, who holds her power of attorney.

Which brings me to somebody I know rather better than I know Elizabeth Holmes.

Earlier this year I spent a few weeks staying with and her family at their home in California. Jessica, for those few who have not come across her, writes the Substack House Inhabit, and she is quite simply a machine. I have met a great many journalists/writers in my time, most of whom are idle, some of whom just jump onto stories, essentially rewriting articles to cash in. Jessica is neither. She is writing when you go to bed and writing when you get up, chasing sources at all hours, and somehow the house is still full of laughter. Her husband, Mike, and their four children are among the warmest, funniest, most intelligent, interesting and genuine people I have ever had the pleasure of being imposed upon by. I went for a visit and left feeling like part of the furniture. A bout of depression was eased considerably through a time out in their writing room that comes fitted out with a huge bunkbed, sunset viewing at the beach, and even a trip to Mexico (I suspect that my out-of-character negative mind at the time may have been draining, even annoying for her - but I’m grateful for how much my time in her and her family’s company helped to reset my mind).

What makes Jessica remarkable is that she goes to the heart of a story when everybody else is content to circle it. She covered the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, the Depp and Heard circus and the Weinstein case, and she has done more than almost anybody to drag the Holmes story out of the Hollywood edit and back into the light. She has visited Elizabeth in prison, which is not a thing one does lightly. Federal prison security, it turns out, has firm views on metal, and so Jessica, on what she describes as “a blistering Sunday in Texas”, took a pair of scissors to the underwire of “my only good supportive designer bra so I could pass through security to visit Elizabeth in federal prison”. She called it “entirely worth the destruction of expensive French lingerie”. There are journalists who would not sacrifice their lunch break for a story. Jessica sacrificed her best bra. That is what I call support journalism.

I mention Jessica not only because I didn’t really thank her enough, but because her reporting is not hagiography, and because, when it comes to the Holmes case, I truly believe you need to head over to her Substack and read her extensive coverage. She quotes investors who say Holmes was never controlled by anybody and has shown no remorse, alongside former colleagues who believe her real crime was “failure, not deceit”. She points out that Holmes never sold her shares, at a time when they were worth billions, which is a curious thing for a woman supposedly planning to take the money and run. And she argues that “much of what we think we know about Elizabeth Holmes is the product of repetition”. If you want the inside story, rather than the miniseries, go and read her at jessicareedkraus.substack.com. You will not agree with all of it. You will learn something on every page.

And so to the film.

You Can See Everything is not a documentary in the usual sense; it is a Nathan Fielder production, which means it is part documentary, part social experiment and part very long, very awkward silence. In April 2023 Holmes and Evans invited Fielder and Oppenheim to live with them and their children in their San Diego beach house for the 34 days before she went to prison. The title is her promise: there would be nothing hidden. The film runs nearly three hours, and the first half consists largely of Fielder sitting opposite Holmes and asking her, with the deadpan of a Methodist undertaker, the questions everybody else has been too polite to ask.

Her answers are extraordinary. “All I know is my truth,” she says. She tells him the Edison “wasn’t a lie”, because the technology would have worked once the science caught up. She tells him she has never told a lie in her life, not even a white one. And in the moment that has already become a meme, she holds his gaze with those great unblinking blue eyes and asks: “Why would I ever deceive you?” Fielder shows her Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” and she concludes, gravely, that the two men are “talking past each other”. Which, in fairness, is a very good summary of the entire Theranos affair.

Then the film turns. Two years into her sentence, Evans begins to limit the crew’s access, to interject on her behalf and, according to Fielder, to seek money from the production. He is developing a laser blood-testing device of his own called Haemanthus, which he insists is “not Theranos 2.0”, a phrase I suspect will be carved on his tombstone. With Holmes now behind bars, Fielder brings in Amanda Seyfried, who played her in The Dropout, to act out the scenes he could no longer film, and the whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors: an actress playing a woman who many believe was always playing a part, directed by a comedian who plays himself. Fielder has since said that Holmes “seems so genuine at times” but that he came away thinking, “Okay, I know she’s a liar.”

Is it any good? Mostly, yes. Critics have fallen over themselves; it sits at 97 on Metacritic, and Variety called it a “one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus”, which is a mouthful but about right. The first half is funny, queasy and brilliant. The second sags under the weight of its own cleverness, and Time’s critic was not wrong to say it sometimes feels “more like a product they’ve brought to market” than art, which, given the subject, is almost too neat. Its great achievement is that it refuses to tell you what to think. Holmes emerges as either a woman so convinced by her own story that she cannot see the gap between what she believed and what was true, or the most accomplished performer in America. Possibly both. The film, wisely, does not pretend to know.

Nor do I. Elizabeth Holmes lied to investors and was rightly convicted of it. But she was acquitted of defrauding patients, the charge that most people still believe she was found guilty of. She was surrounded and endorsed by some of the most powerful men in America, almost none of whom have suffered for it. And she was turned into a symbol of everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley by an industry that has carried on doing many of the same things without her.

A fraudster? By the verdict of a jury, yes. A scapegoat? Quite possibly that too. The two are not mutually exclusive. And in a valley where everybody fakes it until they make it, the unforgivable thing Holmes did may have been not faking it, but failing to make it - or perhaps running out of time to make it.

Which leaves the question that nobody can answer, and which haunts every frame of Fielder’s film. Had she been given more time, more money, a few more years before the Wall Street Journal came knocking, could she have done it? Could the girl who idolised Edison have found her filament, a way to run a full battery of tests from a single drop of blood and change medicine for good? Many scientists will tell you that the physics was always against her, that a drop from a finger is simply too small and too messy for what she promised. Edison’s doubters told him much the same. The difference is that he got to the finish line before his investors ran out of patience, and she did not.

Somewhere in a prison camp in Texas, Elizabeth Holmes still insists that the Edison “wasn’t a lie”, that it simply arrived before the science did. She may be deluding herself. She may be right. We will never know, because the light went out before the bulb was lit.

Every morning for three weeks a car has drawn up outside Southwark Crown Court, and out has climbed a man with the hair of a disgraced Regency poet and the vocabulary of a thesaurus that has been left out in the rain, holding his wife’s hand. The photographers bellow. He says something gnomic: “Today is the day for truth and justice.” Then he goes inside, sits in a glass box and listens while strangers describe, in close and harrowing detail, things they say he did to them twenty years ago. In the evening, as often as not, he and his wife sit on a porch and talk to the internet about Jesus.

This week he came out of the glass box and into the witness box, and the trial of Russell Brand moved into its final act.

Brand, 51, faces seven charges involving six women between 1999 and 2009: three of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault. He denies every one of them. That last charge is not the one he went into court facing. The original count of indecent assault has gone, replaced by a lesser one, and I shall explain why in a moment. A jury of eight men and four women, sworn in on 13 October after six prospective jurors were excused because they could remember the 2023 Channel 4 documentary that set all this in motion, will hear the defence’s closing speech on Monday. Mr Justice Bennathan expects them to retire to consider their verdicts on Tuesday, 3 November, and he will accept only unanimous verdicts.

Let me say at once what I can and cannot do in this column, because it is rather the point of it. I can tell you what the jury has heard. I can tell you what each side has said. I cannot tell you which of the women I believe, or which of the allegations I think will stand up, because the law of contempt forbids it while the jury is still out, and quite right too. What I can tell you is that Southwark has produced, over three weeks, some of the most extraordinary evidence heard in an English courtroom in years, and that almost none of it resembles the story the rest of us were told in 2023.

First, the case for the Crown.

The prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, opened on 14 October by calling Brand a “ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator” whose desire for sex was “indiscriminate and voracious”. “To the defendant,” she said, “women were simply a means to an end.” She reminded the jury that he had once told a live audience he was attracted to women aged “16 to death”. The first witness, Mark Pinheiro, a former cabaret partner and housemate, said Brand had told him he hoped to sleep with 5,000 girls. The defence, in the person of Ian Winter KC, suggested his evidence was inconsistent.

The first complainant says Brand raped her in a hotel room in Bournemouth in 1999, during the Labour Party conference, after they met at a cabaret event. “I thought he was a gay man,” she told police; she had felt “sexually safe with him”. She described his tongue as “lizard-like” and said he turned “monster-like”. “He did rape me, he did push me on the bed.” She said that afterwards he dressed and wrote down his email address as if nothing had happened. Mr Winter suggested she had “fallen under his spell”, that the encounter was consensual and that she had come to regret it. “I did not fall under the spell,” she replied, “and I did not find him attractive.” He pressed her on whether she had resisted or said no; she said she had said no, had told police so, and had been unable to struggle or breathe properly. Photographs she took of Brand that night were shown to the jury. She had told police he was in his underwear; the pictures show him in trousers. The defence also put to her that the 2023 documentary had coloured her memory of the night, which she rejected. Counsel and witness then argued about the precise meaning of the word “flirting”, the sort of exchange that only happens in an English courtroom, and which would have had Jane Austen reaching for her smelling salts.

The second complainant, then working at MTV Europe in London, says that in 2001 a “wild-eyed” Brand grabbed her arm in the office and tried to pull her into the men’s toilets. “Come on, come in with me,” she recalled him saying. She freed herself in about twenty seconds. Mr Winter called it “a minor incident”.

The third, also at MTV, says that at a Soho birthday party in July 2004, within a minute of meeting her, “he literally just grabbed my boobs in the middle of the conversation”, then pulled her into a toilet cubicle and forced her to perform oral sex, saying “come on, come on, don’t be a spoilsport”. “It happened so fast,” she said. “I just froze.” Her sister told the court that, as she later described it, Brand’s eyes went “completely blank”, as if he had “been possessed”. Mr Winter told her: “Let’s be clear, he did not do that to you,” and called what she described “physically impossible”. He suggested she had gone into the toilet willingly, and that if she had been groped in the middle of a bar, somebody would have seen it. She denied being star-struck: “I wasn’t a giddy schoolgirl.” The defence pointed out that at the time she had told friends and her sister that Brand had tried to force himself on her but that she had got away, and that she first described it as rape only after the 2023 documentary and the newspaper reports. Her explanation: “I didn’t want people to judge me. I felt ashamed.”

The fourth, who worked at a London radio station in 2004 or 2005, says Brand pressed her against a corridor wall, gave her “sloppy” kisses and groped her breasts and bottom while his entourage stood by. She begged them to intervene; nobody did. She gave evidence in tears, said she had nothing to gain, and described a “culture of fear” in which women were rated on their looks by colleagues and a complaint would have been met with the observation that she was “lucky”. Text messages she sent at the time read: “He was a superstar,” and “I thought nothing would happen to him.” Asked why she had not come forward sooner, she spoke of a toxic workplace, of the fear of not being believed, and of her mortgage.

The fifth, a Channel 4 employee, says that in 2009, while recording a radio advertisement, Brand laid his head in her lap and demanded a massage, his face moving towards her groin until she could feel his breath on her. Two of his associates, she said, told her he would not carry on recording unless she did it, and shrugged and gestured to urge her on; others laughed. She said she was “repulsed”. She reported it to her line manager the following day, and a colleague backed up her account of the associates’ behaviour. Of all the complaints, hers is the one made at the time, to somebody in authority, which is worth remembering the next time someone asks why none of these women spoke up.

The sixth was 21 and a fan. She says Brand picked her out after his Scandalous show at the Hammersmith Apollo in February 2009; a friend recalled him telling the audience, in effect, that if they fancied him and he asked them up to his dressing room, they should come. Security staff took her backstage. A week or so later she went to his house in Hampstead expecting consensual sex, and says it turned into anal rape. Estate agent’s photographs of the bedroom and bathroom, taken about eight months later, were shown to the jury, and she identified them as the rooms where it happened. Months afterwards, she said, she ran from him at the Edinburgh Fringe. He later texted her: “Because you are dirty and I want to push you further.” She replied that he had treated her “like an animal”. He apologised.

Her cross-examination was the most revealing of the whole Crown case. She agreed she had been a “huge” fan who “completely adored him”, that she had gone to his house willingly expecting sex, that she knew of his reputation (The Sun had named him “Shagger of the Year” three years running) and that she had a partner she loved at the time. Going there, she said, had been a “huge mistake”. Mr Winter put it to her that, young and infatuated, she “went along with” what Brand wanted, and that he had “pushed you and probably had treated you like an animal, but he didn’t rape you”. When she said Brand “didn’t act like he’d done something criminal” afterwards, Mr Winter replied: “That’s because you consented.” He noted that in her texts she had told Brand he had treated her like an animal, not that he had raped her. She agreed. “I didn’t agree to do that,” she said. “I didn’t consent to what happened to me.” She said she had been in pain and terrified she had contracted HIV, that she had told friends and her parents at the time, and that the questioning made her feel she had brought it on herself. She went to the police in 2025, because, she said, she no longer wanted to carry the guilt and the shame.

The Crown’s final witness was a former personal assistant, whose statement was read to the jury. She called Brand “a peacock” with an “insane sexual appetite”, who loved wandering around in his underpants and would ask, “May I go and have sex now?” Women came to his flat and his dressing rooms, often women he did not know. She was once told not to take his mother or his girlfriend to the dressing room because he was having sex in it. He “never seemed happy after sex, more so depressed”. She left because she was “sick of him and feeling burnt out”. She had seen bad behaviour normalised before, she said, but “this was on another level”. And then, the line the defence will no doubt be quoting on Monday: she never saw him break the law, and nobody ever told her that he had.

Which brings us to the charge that was dropped.

On Tuesday 27 October, at the close of the prosecution case, Mr Justice Bennathan ruled on the 2001 MTV allegation. “In respect of count 2,” he told the jury, “I have reached the decision there is insufficient evidence of indecent assault.” Because the incident pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act 2003, Brand was charged under the old 1956 law, under which an indecent assault requires an assault in circumstances of indecency. On the complainant’s own account, Brand grabbed her arm and tried to pull her towards the men’s lavatory, and she broke free within twenty seconds. Nothing indecent actually happened; the question was what he intended to happen. So the judge directed a formal verdict of not guilty on indecent assault, delivered by one juror in what he candidly called a “slightly artificial process”, and the Crown added a new count of attempted indecent assault on the same facts, to which Brand pleaded not guilty. It is not quite the acquittal some of his supporters online have been celebrating. It is, however, the first time in three years that any part of the case against Russell Brand has been tested by a judge and found wanting, and it is the only result anybody has yet had in a courtroom.

The same day, the jury heard the prepared statements Brand gave to police in four interviews between November 2023 and July 2025. In each he said he had “never engaged in any non-consensual sexual activity”. He described a life of kissing hundreds of fans, having sex in lavatories and ending encounters abruptly, a lifestyle he called “very promiscuous”, which he said had been “unfavourably reframed” as crime. Of several of the women he said he had no memory at all.

Then, on Wednesday, Brand went into the witness box himself, for more than four hours, which is three hours and fifty minutes longer than most people have ever heard him be serious.

He began by answering “no” to each charge as his barrister read it out. “Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and indeed in many ways more important than sex itself,” he said. He told the jury the allegations had been “devastating”, that “my entire life has been consumed by these events, these allegations, these accusations”, and that they had cost him his health and very nearly his marriage. He said Great Ormond Street Hospital had barred him from staying with his baby son during open-heart surgery, citing “the material published”. Asked whether he had persuaded anybody with relevant evidence to testify on his behalf, he said: “I have not.” Asked whether any of them would “touch you with a bargepole”, he said: “No.” It is a measure of how far a man can fall that the most famous comedian of his generation could not find one old friend willing to walk into Southwark and say a kind word for him.

He then went through the women one by one. The Bournemouth woman he remembered as “loquacious” and “interesting”; asked whether he had raped her, he said no, and asked whether he thought no meant yes, he said: “I know what no means.” He denied pretending to be gay to get women into bed. Of the 2004 Soho party, he said a friend had introduced the woman by saying “there’s a bird here who really wants to meet you, mate”; that he would have told her she was beautiful; that he spoke to her for less than a minute and went into the lavatory with her to “fool around”; and that grabbing her breasts would have been “disgusting behaviour” that did not arouse him. Asked whether she might not have consented to going into the cubicle, he said: “There’s absolutely no question.” Asked whether she had performed oral sex on him there, he said no. Of the MTV office, he said he had “absolutely not” intended anything non-consensual.

The Hammersmith fan he did remember, eventually. He told police he could not recall her; in court he said he had refreshed his memory, and described a “memorable” sexual encounter in his dressing room, after which he had been “excited and enthusiastic” to see her again. He confirmed that he used to “pick out people” from the audience to invite to the upstairs bar. He said they had later had consensual sex at his house in Hampstead, and denied that she had asked him to stop. Asked whether his memory was “a little selective”, he said no.

Then Ms Karmy-Jones stood up, and the afternoon turned into something nobody who was there will forget. She read the jury passages from his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, including a caption in which he says he decided “to act gay to attract girls”. It was, he said, “a joke”. She asked him about his phone. He explained that a “T” beside one woman’s name stood for “tart”, his code for casual hook-ups; that “AP” meant “anal play”; and that two asterisks meant: “Never, ever forget this individual, this is a memorable encounter.” The 5,000 women he did not recall, but it was “entirely possible it’s the kind of badinage I would have engaged in when I was 24”. He agreed that much of his early life had been “beyond reckless philandering and idiocy”; that he had been obsessed with sex, though not so desperate that he could not function without it; and that “as I became more successful and famous I was very comfortable allowing that to facilitate sexual access”, which, he accepted, was wrong. He described himself as “moderately famous” in 2004, “very famous” by 2009, and, after marrying Katy Perry in 2010, possessed of “staggering fame”.

She put it to him that he had “never asked” one of the women “if she was up for it”: “You just did it.” “It’s not true,” he said, “that’s not what happened.” She suggested his account had grown more detailed since his police interviews, and he accepted that some details were inconsistent, explaining that reading the disclosed evidence, watching the interviews and revisiting the places had brought memories back. He denied tailoring his evidence to fit the women’s. At one point the judge himself intervened. “You knew,” he said, “consent was the million dollar question.” Brand replied: “I can tell the truth that I wasn’t looking at sex talk in that way.” At the end of the day he was asked once more whether he had committed any of the crimes. “Not guilty,” he said, “is my plea in every single case.”

On Thursday his wife, Laura, gave evidence. She first went out with Brand in 2006, when she was 19 and he was 31, and their relationship became sexual “at my own pace”. They split in 2007, when she discovered he was seeing other women; she was “a little heartbroken”. They reconnected in 2015 and married in 2017. She described him as “caring and kind”, a wonderful father and an attentive husband: “I feel very seen by him.” Under cross-examination, Ms Karmy-Jones produced a 2020 podcast, Made By Mammas, in which Mrs Brand had said she had “not seen [Brand] for years” when they met again; she insisted they had remained close. When Mr Winter asked her what she thought of the truth of the allegations, the judge stopped him, observing that she was not an expert witness. When he tried again by way of a question about her husband’s character, Ms Karmy-Jones called it “wholly unacceptable”, and the jury was sent out.

And on Friday the Crown closed. Ms Karmy-Jones told the jury the six women did not know each other, had sought no limelight and had nothing to gain “except perhaps some closure”. Each, she said, described the same pattern: a charming man, then “a personality change, a pivot”, then a man who “didn’t listen when I said no, he didn’t listen, he didn’t care”, who in the rape cases “just kept on going until he achieved his ultimate aim”. They were not “jealous women spurned”, and it did not matter that they could not remember what they had been wearing. The documentary, she said, was no “magic force” that had planted false memories; the women had simply “realised they are not alone”. Brand, who had remembered so little in his police interviews, now seemed to “remember lots”: his defence was “a lot of half-truths, but spun into lies”. She quoted his line about consent being “more important than sex itself” and asked whether it rang true, then read from My Booky Wook: “I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way.” Consent, she suggested, was to him “just an obstacle to be removed, or perhaps to ignore”. Mrs Brand was “undoubtedly lovely”, she said, but she was not there. And then she asked the jury to sit in silence for twenty seconds, the length of one of the alleged encounters. They did.

On Monday, Mr Winter will reply. On Tuesday, the jury goes out.

Notice what almost every one of these accounts has in common. In most, nobody disputes that Brand and the woman met, or, in some, that there was sexual contact. The fight is over consent: whether it was given, whether it was withdrawn, whether it was communicated, and whether a woman who went somewhere willingly, or said nothing at the time, or described events differently to friends than she later did to police, can be sure twenty years on where the line was crossed. The defence has pointed to underwear that turned out to be trousers, to a first account of escape that became an account of rape, to a text that said “animal” rather than “rape”, to a former assistant who never saw a crime, and to a documentary that came before every one of the complaints. The Crown has pointed to six strangers telling strikingly similar stories, to a contemporaneous complaint to Channel 4, to texts and sisters and friends, to a defendant whose memory improved markedly between the police station and the witness box, and to a phone in which women were catalogued with letters and asterisks. Those are precisely the questions twelve jurors must now answer. It is not only Russell Brand on trial at Southwark. It is the very nature of consent itself.

That is the case. The jury will decide it. I will not.

But notice one thing about that summary. I have been able to tell you the defendant’s name, his age, his hairdo, his wife’s name and her podcast, his memoir, his phone codes, his former addictions, his religious conversion and the precise wording of his denials. I have been unable to tell you a single identifying detail about any of the six women, and if I tried, I would be committing a criminal offence. Since the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992, complainants in sexual cases have enjoyed lifelong anonymity from the moment they make an allegation. The accused enjoys nothing of the sort. He is named on arrest, sometimes before, and his name is then carried around the world like a severed head on a pike.

There are good reasons for complainant anonymity, and I want to be fair to them, because they are serious. Sexual offences are among the least reported crimes there are. Few women would walk into a police station if they knew their name, and the most intimate details of the worst night of their lives, would be on the front of the Daily Star next morning. Victims who are named are hounded. Victims who are not named are more likely to come forward. And the law is right to tell juries, as it does, that a delay in reporting is not in itself a sign of a false complaint, because people who have been assaulted very often say nothing for years.

All true. But consider the other side of the ledger, which our legislators have tended to leave blank.

When the accusers are anonymous and the accused is not, the scrutiny runs only one way. A journalist may dig into the defendant’s past, his old stand-up routines, his ex-girlfriends, his radio show, his bizarre politics, his baptism in the Thames and his views on vaccines, and publish the lot. A journalist may not, by law, so much as hint at who the complainants are, and therefore cannot scrutinise them at all. Inside the courtroom, both sides are tested. That is what cross-examination is for, and as the past three weeks have shown, it is a brutal and necessary business. Outside it, where most of the public actually forms its views, only one person is ever on trial.

And in Brand’s case, the public verdict arrived long before this one. In September 2023 Channel 4’s Dispatches, together with The Times and the Sunday Times, broadcast and published anonymous allegations against him. YouTube cut off his advertising revenue. His agent dropped him. His publisher paused his books. Great Ormond Street, if Brand’s evidence is right, barred him from his own baby’s bedside. Brand, who had been described in the press as a “comedian” for fifteen years, was by the end of that week described almost exclusively as an “alleged rapist”. None of this was done by a court. And here is a curious detail that emerged at the trial and has received remarkably little attention: according to Reuters, none of the six women whose allegations the jury is now considering was among the anonymous women in that original programme. They came forward afterwards. The documentary that made Brand a pariah is, in the strict sense, not the case he is facing at all.

Mr Justice Bennathan has been admirably blunt about it. He told jurors that the documentary was “one-sided and dramatic in manner”, that the allegations in it had “never been tested in any court”, and that they must try the case on the evidence before them and nothing else. The defence is entitled to argue, as it has, that the film shaped how the women remembered things. The prosecution is equally entitled to argue that the film simply gave six women the courage to speak. That is precisely the sort of question twelve people in a jury box are there to answer. It is not a question a television producer, or a man on X with a frog for an avatar, is equipped to settle.

We have been here before, and it did not end well. In 2014 the BBC filmed a police raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home from a helicopter. He was never arrested, never charged, and won substantial damages for breach of privacy. Paul Gambaccini spent a year on police bail for nothing. Harvey Proctor and the late Lord Brittan were accused of monstrous crimes by Carl Beech, a fantasist who enjoyed complainant anonymity right up until the day he was convicted of perverting the course of justice and jailed for eighteen years. The men he smeared had their names in every paper in the land. His was protected by law.

Parliament once understood this. Between 1976 and 1988, men accused of rape in England and Wales were also entitled to anonymity unless convicted. The protection was scrapped, largely on the argument that naming a defendant can encourage other victims to come forward, which it sometimes does. That is a real argument and I do not dismiss it. But it is an argument for naming people when they are charged, not for naming them on the strength of a documentary, and it does nothing to answer the basic unfairness of a system in which one party is shielded from the gaze of the entire world and the other is stripped naked in front of it.

There is a further absurdity, and it is this very column. While the trial runs, the newspapers that did more than anyone to turn Brand into a pariah must behave like Trappist monks, reporting only what is said in court. Meanwhile Brand himself has spent the trial broadcasting a weekly show called Sunday Service with the Brands to an audience larger than most national newspapers, opening one episode with a prayer asking God to “guard my lips”, and promising not to “refer to the events in the trial, so that truth and justice is served for everyone”. “Truth and justice,” he said, “are the only things that can save me.” His wife has told viewers they pray every morning before court and read psalms in the car on the way in. I make no comment on the sincerity of any of this; a man is entitled to pray, and his wife is entitled to stand by him. I merely observe that it would once have been thought odd for a defendant in his own rape trial to be releasing hour-long devotional videos, and that it is a curious state of affairs when the accused has a larger platform than either the prosecution or the press. The modern trial takes place in three rooms at once: the courtroom at Southwark, where the rules are strict and ancient; the newspapers, which are muzzled; and the internet, where there are no rules at all, and where Brand’s supporters and detractors reached their verdicts years ago and are now merely shouting them at each other.

Look at how this trial has been reported, and how trials like it are always reported. The juiciest line of the day goes in the headline, wrapped in a pair of quotation marks that are doing more work than any barrister at Southwark: “BRAND FORCED ME INTO TOILET”. “STAR’S ‘TART’ CODE”. The quotation marks are the newspaper’s legal fig leaf. They mean “somebody said this”, not “this happened”. But nobody reads the quotation marks. They read the words, and the words read like a verdict. The cross-examination that followed, in which the same account was picked at, questioned and occasionally contradicted, turns up in paragraph fourteen, if it turns up at all, below the photograph of the defendant looking shifty on the court steps. Everybody looks shifty on court steps. It is the steps.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a business model. An allegation of rape against a famous man sells newspapers; the words “the defence suggested she was mistaken” do not. A complainant’s evidence, given on a Tuesday, gets the front page. The defendant’s denial, given three weeks later, gets a few lines on page nine, by which time the reader has long since made up his mind. And a sexual allegation, by its nature, is almost always one person’s word against another’s, about something that happened behind a closed door with nobody else watching, years or decades ago. That is precisely why we have juries, rules of evidence and cross-examination. It is also precisely the nuance that a tabloid headline is designed to strip away. The headline cannot say “one woman says this happened and one man says it didn’t, and twelve people will have to work out which of them to believe”. So it simply prints what she said, in capital letters, and lets the reader do the convicting.

The presumption of innocence is supposed to be the golden thread running through English criminal law; that is how the House of Lords described it in 1935, and it is written into Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It means that a man is innocent until twelve of his fellow citizens are sure he is guilty. It does not mean innocent until a newspaper decides otherwise, or innocent until a hashtag starts trending, or innocent until his agent stops returning his calls. But that is what it has quietly come to mean. By the time a famous man walks into a crown court today, the presumption has been reversed in every forum except the one that counts. He has lost his job, his income, his friends and, in Brand’s case, apparently his place at his son’s hospital bedside. The jury is told to put all that out of its mind. The rest of the country is told nothing of the kind.

And the mob does not wait. Social media has given every man with a phone a seat on the jury and none of the obligations: no oath, no evidence, no duty to listen to both sides, and no requirement to be unanimous, or even literate. Remember Christopher Jefferies, the retired Bristol schoolteacher arrested in 2010 over the murder of his tenant, Joanna Yeates. The tabloids monstered him for his eccentric hair and his fondness for poetry, and published every piece of lurid gossip they could find. He was entirely innocent. Another man was convicted. Eight newspapers paid him libel damages, and two were found guilty of contempt of court. Nobody paid for the thousands of people who had convicted him in pubs and comment sections in the meantime, because nobody ever does. The mob never apologises. It simply moves on to the next name.

None of this is an argument that the women in this case, or in any case, should not be heard. They should, and they have been, at length, in a courtroom, under oath, which is exactly where allegations belong. It is an argument that a newspaper, a television documentary and a mob on X are not courts, and that every time we treat them as if they were, we weaken the one protection that every one of us, famous or otherwise, would want on the day the knock came at our own door.

So here is my modest proposal, which I offer without expectation that anyone in Westminster will read it. Keep complainant anonymity, because the reasons for it are good. But restore pre-charge anonymity for suspects, so that a man is not destroyed by an accusation that may never reach a court. And let us all, journalists most of all, rediscover the old-fashioned habit of waiting for the jury before we hang a man from the lamp post of public opinion. If Brand is guilty, he will go to prison, as he should, and the women will have been vindicated in the only forum that counts. If he is not, then a great many people owe him an apology that he is unlikely ever to receive.

Either way, from Tuesday the twelve people in that jury room are the only ones whose opinion actually matters. The rest of us, myself included, should have the humility to admit that we were not in the hotel room in Bournemouth, or the cubicle in Soho, or the bedroom in Hampstead, and that we do not know.

Which is, after all, why we have trials.

Storage units are where Americans keep the things they cannot bear to throw away and would rather not look at. Row upon row of corrugated-steel boxes on the edge of town, holding a broken exercise bike, a late mother’s crockery and twelve years of tax returns. The 5ft by 10ft unit in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, three miles from the gated community where Thomas Markle lived for the best part of fourteen years, held, according to the Daily Mail, rather more than that.

The Mail, which has spent most of the past decade acting as the Markle family’s unofficial notice-board, says it has now reported the Duchess of Sussex’s father to the FBI. Its reporter went down to Rosarito, ten miles south of the US border, heard that Markle had rented a unit and stopped paying for it, and was let in after two years of missed payments. Receipts, the paper says, show he rented it in 2017. Among the family mementoes, letters and photographs, the Mail says, were magazines printed in Asia that depict children being sexually abused, books about paedophilia, and loose photographs of naked Asian girls, some of whom look conspicuously young.

Let me be clear about two things before we go on. The first is that possessing images of children being sexually abused is not a lapse of taste or a family embarrassment. It is among the vilest crimes a human being can commit, because every one of those images is a crime scene with a real child in it. If Thomas Markle Sr is guilty, his age, his missing leg and his famous daughter should count for precisely nothing.

The second is that he has not been charged with anything, let alone convicted. He denies all of it. Nobody yet knows what is on any of the devices, and a newspaper reporter rummaging through an abandoned locker is not a forensic examiner. I have spent much of this saga urging everybody to wait for the evidence. That still applies. But it would be dishonest to pretend that the evidence, or at least something that looks a great deal like it, has not started to arrive by the boxful.

First, the man. Thomas Wayne Markle was born in Pennsylvania in 1944 and spent four decades lighting American television. He lit General Hospital and Married… with Children and won two Daytime Emmys, which is two more than most of the people now passing judgment on him. He had Samantha and Thomas Jr with his first wife, Roslyn Loveless, and Meghan with his second, Doria Ragland, whom he divorced in 1987, when he was 43. By most accounts, once including Meghan’s, he was a devoted father, helped along by a $750,000 lottery win in 1990. By 2016 he had filed for bankruptcy for the second time, which may go some way to explaining his later career as a supplier of photographs.

He moved to Rosarito in 2011 and lived in a rented house in the gated community of San Antonio del Mar, which is now being rebuilt. Locals told the Mail he was rarely seen, apart from the odd trip to an expat bar, a minimarket and Walmart. “Frankly, he seemed to live like a hermit,” said one. “Nobody in all the years he was here really got to know him.” It was from there that he wrecked his relationship with his youngest daughter. Days before the royal wedding in May 2018, he was caught secretly working with a paparazzi photographer to stage supposedly candid pictures, at the very moment Prince Harry was begging the press to leave his future father-in-law alone. Then came two heart attacks, he missed the wedding, and the then Prince of Wales walked the bride down the aisle at Windsor. Mr Markle never got back in the room. He gave interviews to anybody with a microphone, and in 2019 let the Mail on Sunday print a private letter from his daughter, which he called “a dagger to the heart”. She sued the paper and won.

In January 2025 he moved to Cebu in the Philippines, where his son Thomas Jr looked after him. That December his left leg was amputated after a blood clot turned it black. In May he was flown back to America, leaving his belongings with his son, and he now lives in a rehabilitation centre in central Florida, learning to walk again.

Then, last week, the Sun published Thomas Jr’s account. In July, he says, while looking through four boxes of his father’s things for a phone for his fiancée, Rose, he found “hundreds, if not thousands” of images and videos of child sexual abuse on hard drives and phones, including, it is alleged, videos of girls no older than ten or eleven involved in sex acts, a 15-minute video of naked girls on his father’s old phone, and pictures of children as young as toddlers. One 35mm photograph reportedly shows a bearded man resembling his father having sex with a young Asian girl.

“When I found this material I was horrified and I had no option but to report my dad,” he said. “I have supported, cared for him and helped him for years, but that stops now. I won’t speak to my father ever again unless I’m called to give evidence against him.” He went further. “I’m so, so sorry Meghan. I now know I have been protecting the wrong person for the past nine years. Having seen what I’ve seen, I believe the man I’ve been defending and caring for is a monster.”

The father’s response, delivered from Florida to the Daily Mail (where else?), was unequivocal. “Sick lies.” “I have never downloaded anything like that in my life.” The accusation was “the worst thing anyone could accuse me of.” Of the photograph, he said: “I have never been in a photograph like that.” He said he would do “whatever it takes” to clear his name, and that the computers had not been in his hands since he left Mexico with his son in 2025.

Then, two days later, in a further interview with the same paper, he volunteered that he had paid for sex in the Philippines when he was single. “I never had sex with anyone under the age of 18,” he said. “I like Asian women but that is not a crime.” It is not. Paying for sex with adults is grubby, but it is not what he is accused of. As a defence strategy, however, it has the air of a man who has been told by his lawyer to stop talking and has taken it as a challenge.

Samantha, never knowingly understated, called her brother’s claims “disgusting lies” with “no merit whatsoever”. She took to X to claim, without a shred of evidence, that he had been paid $80,000 to do this to their father, and that he had turned on the old man only after being caught out over money. When the Mail knocked on her door this week to ask about the Mexican locker, Samantha could be seen in the background, but it was her boyfriend, Mark Phillips, who did the talking. “The only statement that you’re going to get is that Thomas Markle doesn’t even have fingerprints on the stuff in the Philippines,” he said. “He didn’t even ever touch it the whole time it was there, he can’t be charged. Markle never had it in Mexico either… The FBI has no jurisdiction in Mexico. Thomas Markle Sr hasn’t lived in the States in 10 years. Even if there was bad [material] then the statute of limitations ran out five years ago. This is all bulls**t.”

Whether any of that is good law, I leave to the lawyers. As public relations, it is a catastrophe. When a family’s defence moves, in a single breath, from “he never had it” to “even if he did, you can’t touch him for it”, it has rather lost the thread.

Now to the locker, because what the Mail says it found there changes the shape of this story.

There are 20 boxes. Among them are 31 black-and-white prints, roughly ten inches by eight, most of which appear to date from when Markle was in his forties or fifties. Nearly half appear to show the same girl. In one, a bearded Markle, in a polo shirt and jeans, sits on a hotel bed beside her, cigarette in hand, staring into the camera; she is smiling, in a white lacy top and dark jeans, clutching a small bag. In another, taken in what looks like the same room, she is naked, leaning forward, a heart-shaped pendant around her neck. Sixteen more prints show various other naked girls. The Mail is careful to say there is no evidence that Markle had sex with any of them, and we do not know how old any of them were. That will matter.

There are 35mm negatives that show, in the Mail’s words, apparently random, voyeuristic pictures of children on a beach, and others of a woman bound and “hogtied” while a man directs the shoot. There are more than 50 videotapes, with titles such as “Boys – Brother and Sister – Russian XX” and “Manila Nites”. Nobody yet knows what is on them.

There are the books, which deserve a moment, because they are not all of a kind. Some would be found on the shelves of any second-hand bookshop. The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, by Irving and Amy Wallace, was a bestseller in 1981 and sat in many a downstairs lavatory, though its index, with headings such as “incest”, “baby fetish” and “men who enjoyed girls 16 years old or younger”, reads rather differently in this context. The Invisible Children, by Gitta Sereny, is a serious, campaigning piece of investigative journalism about child prostitution, written by one of the great reporters of the last century, and owning it proves nothing except an interest in the subject. Stews and Strumpets, from 1961, is a history of prostitution.

Others are much harder to explain away. Victorian Children, published in 1972, is full of pictures of semi-naked youngsters in suggestive poses, and was co-authored by the English photographer Graham Ovenden, who was jailed in 2013 for abusing children as young as six in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose personal collection a judge later ordered to be destroyed. There is David Hamilton’s Private Collection, the work of the photographer whose soft-focus pictures of young girls were once sold in every high-street poster shop, and who killed himself in 2016 after several women accused him of raping them when they were teenagers, which he denied. There is Young Aphrodites, the photographic companion to a 1963 Greek film about a 12-year-old girl raped by a shepherd. There is Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality, a 1962 book by the sexologist Robert Masters with a whole chapter on paedophilia, since criticised for brushing aside the harm done to victims. There is Le Fairy, a soft-cover book printed in the Far East containing naked photographs of girls who appear to be pre-pubescent. And there is Hollywood Lolitas: The Nymphet Syndrome in the Movies, of which Markle apparently owned at least two copies. The other, the Mail says, was in one of the boxes the police took away in the Philippines.

That last detail matters more than it might seem. It links the hoard in Mexico, which he rented, paid for and visited, with the boxes in Cebu, which his family insist he never touched.

Then there is the hardware. Seven hard drives, stripped out of computers. Four pen drives. Two digital cameras from the early 2000s and two cameras made for children. An old Apple computer. An old computer tower bearing a paper note reading “Overheated… Virus!”, together with instructions for running WinCleaner, a program that wipes hard drives clean, and an activation code. And a paper plate on which somebody has written “DARK WEB” in red ink, alongside a list of web addresses. What is on any of these devices, nobody yet knows. That, again, is for the forensic examiners. But it is not, you would have to concede, the usual contents of a pensioner’s lock-up.

Who had access? The Mail is told that Markle visited the unit a couple of times a month in the early years, bringing things in and taking others away; that he was last seen there in March 2024, when he renewed the lease for three months; and that neither Thomas Jr nor anybody else ever went there. If that is true, it rather complicates the theory, which I was prepared to entertain and which his defenders have pushed hard, that the whole thing is a stitch-up by a vengeful son. It is one thing to imagine a man planting material in boxes in his own house in Cebu. It is quite another to imagine him planting it, years earlier, in a padlocked unit in another country that he never visited.

There is a proper caveat, though, and it is not a small one. The material in Mexico was not found by police. It was found, handled and photographed by a newspaper. Whatever else that is, it is not how evidence is supposed to be gathered, and any defence lawyer worth his fee will spend a happy afternoon asking a jury who touched what, and when. That the Mail, which only last week was Thomas Markle’s favourite confessional, is now the one reporting him to the FBI tells you something about how this family’s relationship with the press works. It also tells you something about how well the actual investigating authorities have been doing their job, if the newspapers keep getting there first.

So what are the authorities doing? In the Philippines, quite a lot. Police seized the boxes and a laptop, and on Thursday a court in Cebu granted them a warrant to open the devices and examine what is on them, who owned them and who used them. The regional prosecutor says it will not take long to establish whether a crime has been committed. If Markle were charged and convicted, he could face ten to twelve years in prison. The Interior Secretary, Jonvic Remulla, has already announced that “all signs point to a possible sex offender of the grossest kind”, which is a remarkable thing for a politician to say about a man who has not been charged, before the forensic results are in. One does not have to have any sympathy for Thomas Markle to think that a government minister ought to wait for his own detectives. The FBI says it is aware of the allegations and will support the Philippine authorities, and is said to be poised to join the investigation.

And then there is London, where the story stops being merely sordid and turns into a British farce.

It is now understood that the letter the Metropolitan Police received in January 2019 was written by Roslyn Loveless, Markle’s late first wife, the mother of Samantha and Thomas Jr. Let that sink in for a moment. The woman whose children are now at war over these allegations appears to have been the first to raise the alarm, seven years ago. Her granddaughter, Noelle Rasmussen, who is, of all people, Samantha’s daughter, told the Telegraph last week that her grandmother “would go to the ends of the earth to protect you”, that she herself had felt uneasy around Markle as a child because “your body tells you when something’s off”, and that she supported both her uncle’s decision to go to the police and Meghan’s decision to keep her children away. She has not said that he ever abused her.

What did the Met do with the letter? Commander Adam Slonecki, who runs its Protection Command, has now explained. It was addressed to the Fixated Threats Assessment Centre, the unit that deals with stalkers and obsessives who pose a danger to public figures. “The author of the letter suggested they were writing to raise concerns relating to the security of the Duchess of Sussex,” he said. “While the letter did not actually contain any information specifically related to security matters, it did contain a number of claims about alleged offending outside the United Kingdom. The letter was assessed and subsequently passed to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for their awareness. The details of the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies.”

Read that twice. Britain’s most famous police force received a letter from a man’s former wife accusing him of serious offences abroad. It concluded, correctly, that the letter had nothing to do with anybody’s security. And then, instead of passing the allegations to the FBI, or the Mexican police, in whose jurisdiction Markle was living, it posted them to a royal private office “for their awareness”, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. The Met has now referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and the IOPC has confirmed that it will carry out an independent investigation into the force’s “failure to pass on allegations of serious offending… to relevant overseas authorities at the time”. It has also sent back to the Met, to deal with itself, a second matter, “relating to an alleged data breach where information was passed on to a third party”. The third party being the Sussexes.

So, in a single envelope, Scotland Yard managed to fail to tell the people it should have told and to tell the people it should not have. It now says that “a number of referrals to relevant overseas law enforcement agencies” will be made “in the coming days”. In the coming days. Nearly eight years after the letter arrived. If the allegations in it turn out to be true, the failure to act on them will be a scandal in its own right, and it will not be a Markle scandal. It will be Scotland Yard’s.

Which brings us to the Duchess.

On 23 October she issued a statement. “I am deeply distressed at the news that has come to light in the last 24 hours, and my thoughts are with any children who may have been harmed,” she said. “I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications’ distortion over the years, any distance from my father and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them. I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families. Although the breadth of what has now been uncovered is more sickening than one could ever imagine, my sincerest hope is that justice will be fully served and that the priority remains the safety and protection of innocent children.”

She said she had been given assurances that the “troubling and disturbing” allegations were being investigated and had been advised that speaking out might jeopardise a legal case. She originally dated the letter to 2018. It was in fact 2019, and her camp now says she simply misremembered, which is plausible and does not much matter.

What matters more is this. I have been as rude about the Duchess of Sussex as anybody, and I dare say I shall be again. But if what was in that locker is what the Mail says it is, then on the central question she may well turn out to have been right, and the rest of us, who spent years casting her father as a lonely, wronged old man frozen out by a heartless daughter, wrong. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the sort of thing columnists rarely say at all.

It does not, however, make the questions go away. The first is the obvious one. “I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families,” she says. But if you genuinely believed, in 2019, that your father might be a danger to children, and seven years went by without a knock on his door, did nobody in the Sussex household think to ask the Met why? Did anybody pick up the phone to the FBI? Perhaps they did. If so, now would be a very good time to say so.

The second is the story we were told in the meantime. In 2021 the Duchess sat opposite Oprah Winfrey, before an audience of tens of millions, and explained that she had cut off her father because he had lied about the paparazzi pictures. In December 2022, in the couple’s Netflix series, she described herself as having “been a daddy’s girl my whole life”, and Prince Harry, reflecting on her estrangement, said: “She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father.” According to People, he went further, blaming himself: “If Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.” By then, nearly four years had passed since the Met posted the letter to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. His office. Either Harry knew and chose to tell the world a different, rather more self-flattering story, or Meghan never told him, which would be a remarkable thing to keep from the man whose office received the letter and whose children she says she was protecting. There may be an innocent explanation, such as lawyers’ advice or a reluctance to accuse a man publicly of crimes nobody had proved. But neither of them has yet offered one.

The third is last December. When her father lay in a hospital bed in the Philippines with his leg freshly amputated, the world was told, via a Sussex spokesman, that Meghan had “reached out”. It was a tender little phrase, and most of us pictured a get-well card. What she actually reached out with, it turns out, was a letter, delivered to his bedside by hospital staff while he was photographed and filmed receiving it. The letter reportedly told him that she, and the authorities, knew he had abused young girls, and that he would never meet Archie, now seven, or Lilibet, five. His response this week: “If Meghan says that’s what she wrote, then she’s probably right.” Two things strike me about this. If that account is accurate, the authorities knew nothing of the sort; by the Met’s own admission, they had done nothing at all. And a letter of that kind, served on a hospital bed in front of a camera, may have been entirely justified, but it was not “reaching out”. It was a writ with a ribbon on it. Allowing the world to believe otherwise is precisely the kind of spin the Sussexes complain about when newspapers do it.

And then there is the accuser, Thomas Jr, who until last week was the weakest link in this whole story. He is 60, a former window fitter from Grants Pass, Oregon, with a colourful record. In January 2017 he was arrested after a drunken row with his then fiancée, during which, it was reported, he held a gun to her head; I can find no report of a conviction. In January 2019 he was arrested for drink-driving. Weeks before the royal wedding he wrote an open letter to Prince Harry calling his sister a “jaded, shallow, conceited woman”, and he spent the next several years firmly in his father’s corner, nursing him after his 2022 stroke and briefing the Mail from the hospital corridor. He reported his discovery to the FBI in July and heard nothing for three months, then turned up in Cebu with a man from the Sun at his elbow. Samantha says it is all about money. None of that makes him a liar. It made him an accuser whose word needed testing, and I said so. What has changed is that, if the Mail is right, his word is no longer all there is.

So where does that leave us? Exactly where it should have left us all along: with the evidence. In Cebu, the forensic examiners now have a warrant and a timetable. In Mexico, there is a locker full of hard drives that somebody with a badge, rather than a press card, needs to look at. In London, the police watchdog is investigating the police. And in a rehabilitation centre in Florida, an 82-year-old man with one leg insists that none of it is what it looks like.

He may yet be right. The devices may contain nothing. The girls in the photographs may all have been adults. The magazines may be less than the Mail says. The books, after all, are only books. If so, a great many people, in Florida, in Cebu, in the Sussex household, at Scotland Yard and in more than one newsroom, will have a great deal of explaining to do.

But I would not put money on it. When this story broke it smelled like a kipper left on a radiator: a tabloid splash, an accuser with an axe to grind, a family that has turned the public feud into a cottage industry. It still smells. The trouble is that the smell is now coming from a storage unit in Rosarito, and it is not the Sussexes who rented it.

Thomas Markle stopped paying for that unit two years ago. Things put into storage, it turns out, have a way of outlasting the excuses.

And then there is the other, perhaps more conspiratorial yet not impossible explanation.

Could the items found in the storage unit have been planted there?…

In last week’s episode we covered Epstein’s final arrest and his ultimate ambition to create his very own harem. In next week’s episode we’ll be listening to my fascinating, at times shocking audio interview with Jeffrey’s brother. But today, let’s dive into his first days in prison and a sinister incident that you may not have heard about before.

Following his arrest at a New Jersey private airport, 66-year-old Jeffrey was bundled into a van and transported as a pre-trial detainee. His new temporary home would be far removed from that to which he was accustomed; luxurious, well-buffed white yachts and private plane trips were replaced in the blink of an eye by a one-way trip to jail. Past the coffee shops and delis, past the rows of stone-stepped front doors of grey townhouses, and over the Hackensack River. Arriving in Manhattan, escorted by a number of NYPD police cars, sirens blaring, the van rolled to a stop before the thick anchor grey rear doors of the Manhattan Correctional Centre.

Just four days earlier, a jury of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York returned a two-count indictment charging Epstein with sex trafficking. The indictment, based on allegations made by a string of women, claimed that from at least 2002 through to 2005, the billionaire had enticed and recruited young females, some of whom he allegedly knew were underage, to provide him with massages and sexual services in exchange for cash.

The indictment further alleged that, working with employees and associates, he had created a “vast network of underage victims to sexually exploit in New York and Florida”. Rumour and politically-motivated speculation swiftly flooded social media with an ever-growing, but unsubstantiated list of “big names”. Democrats accused Donald Trump. Republicans accused Bill and Hillary Clinton. Anti-monarchists readied the pyre for Prince Andrew. Trump fans picked up their pitchforks to march on Trump critic Tom Hanks. Conspiracy theorists bayed for the blood of Bill Gates. Overnight, innocent politicians, businessmen and celebrities found themselves fiercely hounded by the internet lynch mob.

Continue reading the full transcript below, or listen to the full episode by clicking the video…

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Beatrice Keul is a Swiss former model and beauty contestant, now in her mid-fifties, who lives in Zurich. In 1992 she placed third in the Miss Switzerland competition, which is a perfectly respectable achievement, though you would not know it from the American press, which now routinely describes her as “a former Miss Switzerland”. She worked in banking in Zurich and modelled part-time, and she went on to compete for Miss Europe. In November 1993 she flew to the United States on an all-expenses-paid trip to take part in the American Dream Pageant, a contest with events in Atlantic City and New York that had a partnership with Donald Trump, then a 47-year-old property developer with a weakness for beauty pageants and his own name in gold letters.

She has documents from that trip, and that matters. She has said she found them in a box while preparing to move house: an invitation, plane tickets, a commemorative plaque and photographs of herself with Trump. The New York Times has reported that she supplied photographs and paperwork confirming her participation. So we can be confident that she was there and that she met him. Nobody sensible disputes that.

What happened next is the question, and it depends on which year you ask her.

And the media refuse to report the following uncomfortable facts…

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This week, French prosecutors quietly closed an investigation into the death of a man most people outside Paris had never heard of. The announcement will not have troubled the man in a darkened bedroom somewhere who keeps a spreadsheet titled, I imagine, “THE EPSTEIN CURSE”, in capital letters and possibly red ink, listing everyone connected with the late financier who has had the temerity to die. He added this name back in July. He will not, I am fairly sure, be taking it off.

The name is Daniel Siad, a French modelling scout who was found dead at his home in Colombes, a suburb north-west of Paris, in July. He was 69.

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Tonight they will be reaching for it again. Aleksandar Vučić, the strongman who has run Serbia for more than a decade, first as prime minister and then as president, has been beaten at the polls by a movement of students. Not by a party. Not by a rival oligarch. By students, led by a cardiologist called Ilija Srdanović, with a list of 250 candidates made up largely of professors, actors and farmers whom nobody had heard of a year ago. On preliminary results the Student List took around 52 per cent of the vote and somewhere between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in parliament, a clear majority. Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party trailed on about 32 per cent. And Vučić, to his credit, conceded. I confess I did not expect him to. Strongmen are not, as a rule, gracious losers; they tend to regard elections the way a cat regards a bath, as something that happens to other creatures.

It is worth remembering how this began, because it began with something so ordinary that it ought to shame every government in Europe. On 1 November 2024 the concrete canopy over the entrance of the newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16 people. Serbians, who are not fools, concluded that a station renovated at great public expense does not usually fall on people’s heads unless somebody, somewhere, has been pocketing the money. The students took to the streets, demanding transparency and justice. They were joined by their teachers, their parents, farmers, lawyers and pensioners. For nearly two years the protests rolled on, at times bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets of Belgrade, in what became the largest protest movement in the country’s modern history.

Vučić’s response was a masterclass in the Kremlin school of political management. The protesters, he said, were being manipulated by “foreign powers”. They were funded by foreign agents in Croatia and Montenegro. They were trying to “topple Serbia”. And his friends in Moscow helpfully chimed in. In the summer of 2025 Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, declared that “we cannot rule out that well-known methods are being used there to provoke colour revolutions”, and added, with touching faith, that “we have no doubt that the current Serbian leadership will be able to restore law and order”, which in Kremlin-speak generally means with truncheons. It is the same script Moscow has used about Georgia, about Armenia, about Moldova and, most famously, about Ukraine, where the Maidan revolution of 2014, in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians stood in the snow for months to get rid of a president who had sold them out to the Kremlin, is still described on Russian television as a “Nazi coup” organised by the CIA. The idea that ordinary people might simply be fed up with corrupt and thuggish government does not seem to have occurred to anyone in the Kremlin. Perhaps because it is a thought that keeps them awake at night.

Well, the students of Serbia have now done something no coup ever does. They have won an election. It is a little hard to claim that a CIA plot has been carried out by a cardiologist and a list of village schoolteachers via the ballot box, though I have no doubt Russian state television will give it a go, probably with a diagram and a man in a fur hat pointing at it.

Vučić is not, I should say, a simple Kremlin puppet. He is something more slippery: a man who has spent years sitting on the fence between East and West, with one buttock in Brussels and the other in Moscow, collecting cheap gas from Russia, investment from China and accession talks from the EU, and promising each of them that he really loves them best, like a bigamist with three anniversaries and a very carefully kept diary. Serbia refused to join Western sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. In May 2025 Vučić turned up in Moscow for Putin’s Victory Day parade, which is not the sort of thing one does if one is trying to impress the European Commission. Moscow regarded him as its most dependable friend in the Balkans and a useful thorn in NATO’s side. And now he is gone, or at least about to be.

If you are keeping score, and in Kyiv we most certainly are, this has been a calamitous year for Putin’s friends.

In April, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most devoted Kremlin admirer, was thrown out of office in Hungary after sixteen years. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 138 of the 199 seats, a two-thirds constitutional majority, and Fidesz was reduced to 55. This was the man who had spent years blocking European aid to Ukraine, who trotted off to Moscow to talk oil and gas with Putin while the bombs fell on Kharkiv, so often that he must have qualified for Aeroflot gold status, and who was so cherished by the American right that JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for him. In January, as the polls turned against him, Orbán accused Ukraine of a “coordinated series of Ukrainian measures to interfere in the Hungarian elections” and summoned Kyiv’s ambassador. It is a measure of the man that he had decided, in advance, that if he lost, it would be Zelensky’s fault. He lost. The Hungarians seem to have concluded that the threat to their democracy was coming not from Kyiv but from the Prime Minister’s office.

In June, Armenia went to the polls with Moscow working openly against its Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, who has been edging his country away from Russia and towards Europe. Reuters reported, citing Western intelligence sources, that Russia had run a covert campaign to back pro-Russian candidates, and researchers tracked the same Storm-1516 disinformation network that has been busily spreading lies about Ukraine. Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won anyway, with about 50 per cent of the vote and a majority of seats, against a pro-Russian bloc led by the billionaire Samvel Karapetyan. Karapetyan cried fraud, which is the democratic equivalent of kicking over the Monopoly board when your sister buys Mayfair. And Moscow, naturally, accused the West of interfering.

Notice a pattern? When the Kremlin’s candidates win, it is democracy. When they lose, it is Western interference. When the Kremlin interferes, it is protecting “compatriots”. The only constant is that the people who actually vote are never allowed to have made up their own minds. The Kremlin’s attitude to democracy is rather like a pub-quiz cheat’s attitude to the answer sheet: perfectly fair, so long as he is the one holding it.

So what does all this mean for Ukraine and the West? Potentially, a great deal. Orbán’s departure removes the single most effective saboteur of European support for Ukraine; for years Hungary’s veto held up sanctions packages and aid while Budapest bargained for concessions. A Serbian government elected on a platform of fighting corruption and cleaning up the state has every reason to look west rather than east, and Belgrade’s long, lazy flirtation with Moscow may finally end. Armenia is drifting steadily out of Russia’s orbit. Each of these defeats tells the Kremlin something it does not want to hear: that its soft power is curdling, that its gas no longer buys loyalty, and that people who have watched what Russia has done to Ukraine are not queuing up to be Moscow’s next “brother nation”.

But let us not get carried away. Putin still has friends in the club. Robert Fico runs Slovakia and has made a career out of opposing military aid to Kyiv. Andrej Babiš, no great enthusiast for arming Ukraine, returned to power in the Czech Republic last year. And then there is the friend Putin values above all others, who happens to live in the White House.

While Europe’s voters have been showing Putin’s allies the door, Donald Trump has been holding it open for Putin himself, with the eager deference of a hotel doorman who has been promised a very large tip. In August last year American soldiers knelt to smooth the red carpet for him in Anchorage. This month Trump came off the phone with the Kremlin having agreed to buy several million tonnes of Russian diesel, and his Treasury promptly suspended sanctions on Russian oil products that he had imposed only weeks earlier. When Zelensky objected, Trump accused him of not wanting peace and suggested Ukraine get “a new leader who can make a deal”. He has said he is open to Putin’s proposal for a summit with Xi Jinping in Shenzhen to settle the war, three men around a table with no Ukrainian in the room. His envoys are reported to be discussing a multibillion-dollar deal over Lukoil’s foreign assets with Moscow. And it was Trump who backed Orbán for re-election and sent his Vice President to Budapest to campaign for him, which tells you roughly what a Trump endorsement is worth on the European continent: about as much as a Ryanair apology. So while one by one Putin’s friends in Europe are being shown the door by their own voters, the most powerful man in the world has been busy hanging a welcome sign on his own. It is the one great consolation the Kremlin has left, and it is a very large one.

The other prize is now in sight.

In France, the country has spent the past month convulsed by riots, looting and a student protest movement of its own, which began, like Serbia’s, with complaints about crumbling public buildings. The difference is that in France the beneficiary looks like being not the students, but the far right. A poll published in Le Figaro last week put Marine Le Pen on 34 to 38 per cent in the first round of next April’s presidential election, and showed her beating Jean-Luc Mélenchon by 68 to 32 in a run-off. Le Pen’s party took a loan of more than €9 million from a Russian bank in 2014 and only finished paying it off in 2023. She once said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal, flew to Moscow to be photographed with Putin a month before the 2017 election, and has opposed sending Ukraine long-range weapons. She has since condemned the invasion and softened her tone, as the polls required, in much the way a fox might take up vegetarianism shortly before applying for a job at the henhouse. But a Le Pen presidency would put a woman with a long record of sympathy for the Kremlin in charge of Europe’s only nuclear-armed member of the EU, its biggest military power and the country that has co-led Europe’s “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine. Losing Orbán would be a small price for Putin to pay for gaining the Élysée.

Here, then, is the lesson of 2026, and it is one Ukrainians learned long ago. Democracy is the one weapon Russia cannot match. Putin can bomb power stations, buy politicians, run bot farms and spread lies about yachts and Bugattis. What he cannot do is make people like him, which must be awfully galling for a man who has had himself photographed bare-chested on horseback for precisely that purpose. When ordinary people are allowed to vote freely, in Budapest, Yerevan or Belgrade, they keep choosing not to be ruled by his friends. That is why the Kremlin hates elections it cannot control, and why it insists, every time it loses one, that somebody else must have rigged it.

The students of Novi Sad began with a simple demand: that the people who let a roof fall on their neighbours be held to account. They have ended by bringing down a government, peacefully, at the ballot box. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about that. Somewhere in the Kremlin tonight, somebody will be drafting a statement about a Western-backed colour revolution.

I hope the students frame it.

I live in Kyiv. I have lived here since May 2022, which means I have spent four and a half years watching two wars at once. The first is fought with Shaheds, glide bombs and ballistic missiles, and I hear it most nights when the siren goes. The second is fought with memes, bots, deepfakes and the confident pronouncements of people in Ohio, Essex and Queensland who have never set foot in Ukraine and could not tell you whether Odesa is a city, a cheese or a Marvel villain. It is the second war that worries me more. Russia is losing the first, slowly and at enormous cost. It is winning the second, and the second is how it hopes to win the first.

Let me show you how it works.

In late 2024 a story went viral claiming that Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s First Lady, had bought a $4.8 million Bugatti with American aid money. It came complete with a video of a supposed Bugatti salesman confirming the sale. The salesman did not exist; he appears to have been generated by AI. The story was published on a website posing as an American newspaper, part of a Russia-based network the BBC linked to John Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Moscow and who once described his work as “a game” and “a little payback”. Bugatti denied the whole thing and threatened legal action. By then it had been seen by at least 12 million people on X.

There was the one about Zelensky buying two superyachts with American money, which a future Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, helped to spread. There was the one about Zelenska blowing $1.1 million in a single afternoon at Cartier in New York. There was the fake BBC video claiming Ukraine had sold Western weapons to Hamas, and another fake video of Azov fighters burning an effigy of Trump. Every one of them was invented. Every one of them was debunked. Every one of them is still believed by millions of people who never saw the correction, because corrections, like the second half of a Leonard Cohen concert, are never quite as well attended.

This is not an accident. It is an industry. Researchers call one of these operations Storm-1516, which sounds like a Tom Clancy novel and has a similar relationship with the truth. Another, called Doppelganger, built pixel-perfect clones of the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Le Monde and filled them with Kremlin lies; the US Justice Department seized 32 of its domains in 2024. Another, known as the Pravda network, published some 3.6 million articles in 2024 across 150 websites in dozens of languages, which almost nobody reads. It does not need human readers. It is written for the machines. In March 2025, NewsGuard tested ten of the leading AI chatbots and found that they repeated the network’s false narratives a third of the time. Six of the ten told users, as fact, that Zelensky had banned Trump’s Truth Social in Ukraine. It was never available there. The Kremlin is no longer just lying to you. It is lying to your computer, so your computer can lie to you on its behalf, politely and in full sentences.

And then there is the American end of the pipe. In September 2024 the Justice Department charged two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s television channel, with secretly funnelling nearly $10 million into a Tennessee company called Tenet Media, which paid well-known right-wing American influencers to make videos. The influencers, prosecutors said, did not know where the money came from. One can only marvel at the ability of grown men to receive vast sums from a mysterious European benefactor named “Eduard” and fail to ask a single question.

Last November, X briefly rolled out a feature showing the country each account was based in. It was a little like turning on the lights at a nightclub at two in the morning. A swathe of fiercely patriotic “America First” accounts turned out to be operating from Eastern Europe, Nigeria, Thailand and Hong Kong. One with more than 400,000 followers and “America First” in its bio was traced to a non-EU country in Eastern Europe. X removed some of the data within hours, saying it was “not 100%” accurate. Quite. There is no evidence that a particular state ran those specific accounts. But it showed, beyond argument, that a great many of the voices telling Americans what to think about their own country, and mine, were nowhere near either.

The man who owns the platform has not exactly helped. In early 2025 Elon Musk repeated Trump’s claim that Zelensky had a 4 per cent approval rating, was corrected by his own site’s Community Notes, and announced that he would “fix” the system, because governments and the media were “gaming” it. He accused Zelensky of wanting a “forever war” and called it “evil”. By one newspaper’s count his posts about Zelensky drew more than 600 million views in a matter of weeks. When the richest man in the world owns the printing press, stands on the roof shouting through a megaphone, and disables the smoke alarms, it is hard to be surprised when the building fills with smoke.

So let us do what the algorithm will not, and take the lies one at a time.

“Ukraine is run by Nazis”? No, it is run by a Jewish president, elected with 73 per cent of the vote, whose grandfather fought Hitler in the Red Army and whose relatives died in the Holocaust. In the 2019 election every far-right party in the country stood together on a single ticket and won 2.15 per cent and one seat in 424. That is fewer fascists than you would find below the line on most British newspaper websites.

“Azov proves it’s a fascist state”. Azov is one brigade among hundreds. In 2014, as a volunteer battalion, it let in too many football hooligans, as one of its own founders told me with refreshing candour when I was news editor of the Kyiv Post. It has since been vetted and absorbed into the National Guard, and it is best known for bravely holding out for weeks in the Azovstal steelworks under unimaginable bombardment. If one controversial regiment made a country Nazi, Britain would have been “denazified” several times over.

“Russia was provoked by NATO”. Russia, which supposedly could not bear the alliance on its border, invaded a country whose western frontier touches four NATO members, and when Finland joined in 2023 and added 1,300 kilometres of NATO frontier at a stroke, Moscow barely looked up from its newspaper. You do not keep a neighbour off your doorstep by moving your doorstep under his feet.

“The war began as a civil war in the Donbas”. Igor Girkin, the former Russian FSB officer who led the armed seizure of Sloviansk in 2014, later boasted that he “pulled the trigger of this war”, and said that without his men crossing from Russia the whole thing would have fizzled out. He is now in a Russian prison, not for starting the war, but for complaining that Putin was running it badly.

“There was a genocide of Russian speakers”. In March 2022 the International Court of Justice said it had seen no evidence of any such thing, and ordered Russia to stop its invasion. Russia did not stop. Zelensky himself grew up speaking Russian, as did much of the army now shooting at Russians, and millions have switched to Ukrainian since 2022 out of what can only be called linguistic disgust.

“The 2014 revolution was a coup”. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, some of whom I’ve interviewed, stood in the frozen squares for months after their Moscow-loving puppet president tore up a deal with the EU at Moscow’s bidding. His police shot protesters dead. He fled to Russia. Parliament, including members of his own party, voted him out. If that was a coup, it was the first in history carried out by the electorate.

“Zelensky is illegitimate because he won’t hold an election”. Ukraine’s constitution forbids elections under martial law. Britain held no general election between 1935 and 1945, and nobody called Churchill a usurper.

“The Pentagon was running bioweapons labs”. In March 2022 Moscow told the UN Security Council that America was preparing to spread pathogens using migratory birds and bats. One pictures squadrons of pigeons in tiny goggles being briefed by a man from Langley. The UN said it knew of no biological weapons programme. The labs were dreary Soviet-era public-health facilities that American money had made safer.

“Ukraine is corrupt”. Yes, there is widespread corruption here, and I have reported on it. The difference is that when Kyiv tried to clip the wings of its anti-corruption bureau in 2025, young Ukrainians filled the squares in the middle of a war and the government backed down within days. The bureau then brought down two ministers and the president’s own chief of staff. In Russia, the man who exposed corruption, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned with Novichok and died in an Arctic penal colony.

Every one of these claims has been taken apart, again and again, with documents, votes, court rulings and the testimony of the very men who started the war. None of it matters to the algorithm, which rewards the lie because the lie gets more clicks. A study by researchers at MIT found that false stories on Twitter were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. The truth is still putting its boots on while the lie is halfway to Washington.

And it is in Washington that the lie has found its most powerful home.

Russia does not operate alone. Its Shahed drones were designed in Iran and are now mass-produced in Tatarstan. North Korea has sent millions of artillery shells, ballistic missiles that have landed on Kyiv, and more than 10,000 soldiers to fight in Kursk. China, while posing as a neutral peacemaker, has supplied the bulk of the machine tools and microelectronics that keep Russia’s arms factories running, and Beijing’s own online networks dutifully amplify the Kremlin’s lines about NATO “provocation”. It is an axis of the world’s most repressive regimes, and its propaganda arm, at least in the West, now has a surprisingly reliable ally.

You would think the President of the United States, of all people, would be immune to this stuff. You would think a man who this year went to war with Iran would hesitate before cosying up to Iran’s closest military partner, a regime which, according to Ukrainian intelligence backed by Western sources speaking to Reuters, photographed a Saudi air base from space days before an Iranian strike wounded American servicemen there. You would be wrong.

Instead Trump has done what he always does when something goes badly: found somebody else to blame. His war with Iran sent American diesel prices through the roof. Someone had to be responsible, and it could not possibly be him. So it was Ukraine, for the impertinence of bombing the Russian refineries that fuel the tanks invading it. Zelensky, Trump wrote this month, “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did”. He then bought several million tonnes of Russian diesel, suspended sanctions he had imposed three weeks earlier, and suggested Ukraine get “a new leader who can make a deal”. He did not suggest one for Russia. He never does.

None of this is new, and anyone surprised by it has not been paying attention. In 1987 Trump went to Moscow as a guest of the Soviet state travel agency and came home to buy full-page newspaper advertisements attacking America’s allies. In 2008 he sold a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, more than twice what he had paid four years earlier, the same year his son told a conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets”. During the 2016 campaign his company was still pursuing a Trump Tower in Moscow, while the candidate said, “Russia, if you’re listening,” and his campaign chairman shared internal polling data with a man the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee later identified as a Russian intelligence officer. In Helsinki in 2018, standing beside Putin, he took the Russian president’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies. In 2019 he was impeached for holding back military aid to Ukraine while asking Zelensky to “do us a favor”. In February 2022, as Russian tanks massed on the border, he called Putin’s move “genius” and “savvy”. In February 2025 he called Zelensky “a dictator without elections” and blamed Ukraine for a war it did not start; his administration voted at the UN alongside Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a resolution condemning the invasion; and a few days later he and his Vice President ambushed Zelensky in the Oval Office on live television. In August 2025 American soldiers knelt to smooth the red carpet for Putin in Anchorage. Now his envoys are reported to be negotiating with Moscow over a multibillion-dollar deal for Lukoil’s foreign assets, though nobody has shown that they stand to profit personally.

I do not know what Putin has on Trump, and I suspect the answer is less sinister and more embarrassing than the conspiracy theorists hope: flattery. Trump likes strongmen because he would like to be one, and Putin, a former KGB officer trained in recruiting the vain, has played him like a cheap ukulele for a decade. But the result is the same. The leader of the free world now repeats, almost word for word, talking points that were drafted in Moscow and laundered through X. The Kremlin’s propaganda no longer needs to reach the White House by stealth. It walks in through the front door, takes a seat in the Oval Office and gets its own pen.

Here is why it matters, and why I cannot treat it as a joke, however much I would like to. Propaganda is not a sideshow to this war. It is the war’s oxygen. Every time a congressman delays a vote on air defence because he read that Zelensky bought a yacht, a Patriot battery does not arrive. Every time an American voter decides that Ukraine started it, a politician somewhere feels a little safer cutting the aid. And every time that happens, somebody in Kharkiv or Dnipro or Odesa goes to bed and does not wake up. I have seen what a glide bomb does to a block of flats. I have seen the people under the blankets on the pavement. You do not forget the shoes. There are always shoes.

Putin is a man who has invaded two neighbours, flattened Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol, poisoned his opponents in English cathedral cities, deported Ukrainian children by the thousands and earned an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. Zelensky is a former comedian who was offered a ride out of Kyiv in 2022 and asked for ammunition instead. That an entire online ecosystem has managed to persuade millions of Westerners that the first is a misunderstood statesman and the second is the devil is the most remarkable feat of propaganda since the Soviet Union convinced half the Western intelligentsia that Stalin was a kindly uncle with a pipe. Goebbels would have been green with envy. He would also, I suspect, have been on X.

The good news is that the antidote is cheap. It is called reading. Read past the headline. Check who posted it, and from where. Ask why a man in Nigeria cares so much about American gas prices, or why a website called the Chicago Chronicle has not printed a newspaper since 1907. Ask, before you share that video of a Ukrainian general’s mansion, who benefits if you believe it. The answer, almost every time, is a man in the Kremlin who would quite like your country to be next.

Even by those standards, the past month has been something special. On Saturday 17 October, according to the Interior Ministry, 550,000 people marched in 110 cities across France; the organisers said 800,000. By nightfall Paris was full of tear gas, burning cars and smashed shopfronts. In Marseille protesters breached the town hall and looted shops, and a fire engine was set alight. In Lyon a tourist office was torched. In Limoges, the historic town hall was largely destroyed by fire. Around a thousand police officers and gendarmes were injured. Nearly 2,400 people were arrested in a single day, and more than 6,800 have been taken into custody since the trouble began, most of them minors. Riots have spread to Belgium and Italy. Donald Trump, never one to miss a European misfortune, announced that “France is burning!” For once, he was not entirely exaggerating.

It started with some teenagers complaining about their school.

On 21 September, pupils at the Lycée Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a suburb south-east of Paris, walked out the day after a teachers’ strike. Their grievances were not revolutionary. Teachers who had left were not being replaced. Classes were overcrowded. The buildings were crumbling. During the heatwave, classrooms had reportedly reached 40 degrees, which is roughly the temperature at which I start to lose the will to live, let alone revise for my baccalauréat. And there was Parcoursup, the dreaded national university-admissions algorithm, which reduces every French teenager’s future to a ranking on a website and which causes more anxiety among the young than anything since acne. The high-school union listed four demands: replace the missing staff, fix the “dilapidated” schools, lighten the overloaded timetables and do something about the stress of Parcoursup. If you can find anything sinister in that, you have a more fevered imagination than I do.

It spread like wildfire through the poorer suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, and then across the country. By the start of October more than a thousand lycées were affected. Then the trade unions joined in, then the university students, then the nurses and the firefighters and the farmers and the pensioners, and the protest about crumbling schools became a protest about everything: wages, pensions, prices, taxes, public services and a government that has borrowed so much money that France’s borrowing costs are at their highest in more than twenty years. And then, as night follows day and as surely as a Frenchman follows a strike, the remnants of the “yellow vest” movement turned up, followed by the people who were never interested in schools at all.

This is the depressingly familiar part, and it is not only French. I have watched it happen in city after city, cause after cause. A genuine grievance brings decent people on to the streets. Then, after dark, come the others: masked young men in black who have no interest whatsoever in the cause, except as cover. In 2011 a police shooting in Tottenham was the spark for riots across England, and within forty-eight hours the most urgent political demand of the rioters appeared to be a flat-screen television from Currys. In 2020 the killing of George Floyd sent millions of Americans out to protest peacefully against police brutality – them many of the people who joined them in the evenings took the opportunity to hunt down white business owners and clear out the local Apple store and Foot Locker. In 2023, after a police officer shot a teenager called Nahel in Nanterre, French suburbs burned for a week and the looters helped themselves to trainers and phones. Macron’s response at the time was to blame video games, which went down about as well as you would expect.

The pattern this time has been the same. At the Lycée Vauquelin in Paris, masked men attacked the school; the head teacher said not one of them was a pupil. Twenty-four schools had been burned or ransacked by early October, which is a curious way to campaign for better school buildings. And on 17 October, while half a million people marched peacefully, gangs in black smashed shopfronts and walked off with wine and electronics. I am sure they were deeply concerned about the shortage of maths teachers in Créteil. Nothing says “I care about the future of French education” like a stolen bottle of Bordeaux and a pair of trainers you will be wearing in a police cell by Monday.

I am going to be unfashionably blunt. A great many of the people who hijack these protests are not activists. They are bored, they are angry about nothing in particular, and they have discovered that burning a car is more entertaining than anything else on offer in their lives. Riot as a leisure activity. Arson as a hobby. It is a sort of grim extreme sport, live-streamed on TikTok, in which the prize is a new iPhone and the opportunity to post a video of a burning bus. It has no politics, no demands and no conscience, and every time it happens it wrecks the cause of the people who marched in good faith.

Not that the state has covered itself in glory either. Human rights groups have documented some appalling injuries to children: a 15-year-old in Lens who lost a hand to a police grenade, a 16-year-old in Tours who lost the use of an eye, apparently to a rubber bullet, a 14-year-old with a broken jaw. Amnesty International has called the use of force “disproportionate”, and the UN has asked France to calm down. The police watchdog is investigating. When you set out to stop teenagers blocking the gates of their own school and end up blinding them, something has gone badly wrong.

Which brings me to Emmanuel Macron, and here I must declare a bias. I like Macron. I have always rather liked him, in the way one likes a clever, faintly insufferable cousin who turns out to be right about most things. On the issue I care about most, he has been magnificent. When much of Europe dithered over Ukraine, Macron refused to rule out sending European troops, pushed for European rearmament, and has spent much of the past two years trying to build a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine whether or not Washington bothers to turn up. In Kyiv, where I live, that counts for a great deal. He sees, as few European leaders do, that Russia is not a problem that will go away if we ignore it hard enough.

But Macron has a fatal flaw, and this crisis has exposed it brutally. He is very good at the big picture and hopeless at the small one. He can give a three-hour speech on European strategic autonomy without notes, but he seems never to have noticed that the roof of the school in Créteil was leaking. He governs like a philosopher-king from somewhere far above the clouds, the “Jupiterian” president of his own description, and for a month, while his country’s teenagers walked out of school in their hundreds of thousands, Jupiter stayed on Olympus. He has gone through prime ministers at a rate that would embarrass the Conservative Party. It was not until the country was on fire that he went on television, on Sunday 18 October, to express his “anger and shame”, promise that those who “destroyed, smashed and looted” would “pay for their crimes”, acknowledge that the protesters had “legitimate demands”, and announce that “lessons will be learned”. By Thursday he was blaming the “seditious” ultra-left for trying to “bring down the Republic” and banning protests in the centres of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Grenoble. He is not wrong about the ultra-left, and the government says its intelligence services describe the movement as partly organised by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, which denies it. But it is a little late to discover that schools matter when they are already alight.

Here is my angle, and it is not a cheerful one. The real winner of this autumn is neither the students, nor the unions, nor the looters, nor Macron. It is Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen has spent a decade presenting herself as the candidate of order, and every burning car on the evening news is a free party political broadcast. “We are experiencing a crisis of confidence,” she said this week, calling Macron “without credibility or authority” and condemning the “hijacking of this anger by thugs who are sowing chaos”. Her protégé, Jordan Bardella, told the French to “wake up” and make “the right political choices”. The French appear to be listening. A poll published in Le Figaro this week, taken hours after the riots, put Le Pen on 34 to 38 per cent in the first round of next April’s presidential election, double Mélenchon’s score, and showed her beating him by 68 to 32 in a run-off. In July a Paris appeal court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds but cut her ban from office in a way that means she can stand, provided she can campaign in an electronic ankle tag. If that sounds like a minor inconvenience, consider that this time last year she was supposed to be out of the race altogether.

I have nothing against a French politician promising to restore order. What worries me is what else comes with Le Pen. In 2014 her party took a loan of more than €9 million from a Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank, after French banks declined to lend to it; it was repaid only in 2023. She later said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal. In 2017, a month before the first round of the presidential election, she flew to Moscow and was photographed with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. In 2022 her party had to pulp campaign leaflets showing her shaking his hand. She has since condemned the invasion of Ukraine and toned down her rhetoric, as the polls required, but she has opposed sending Ukraine long-range weapons and western troops, and her instinct has always been that France’s quarrel with Russia is somebody else’s business. A President Le Pen would not need to love Putin. She would only need to stop Macron’s coalition of the willing in its tracks, and Europe’s support for Ukraine would collapse like a soufflé in a draught.

So think about the chain of events. A group of teenagers in Créteil asked for a working roof and a maths teacher. Their protest was hijacked by the ultra-left and by thugs who wanted trainers and a bonfire. The thugs gave the far right the pictures it needed. The far right is now the favourite to win the presidency. And the presidency, in a few months’ time, may pass to a woman who once took Russian money, once said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal and once flew to the Kremlin for a photograph. The looter in Paris who stole a pair of Nikes on Saturday night may have done more for Vladimir Putin than the entire staff of Russia Today.

What happens next? The unions are planning a national day of action on 5 November. The yellow vests are expected back on the streets this weekend. The bans on protests in city centres will be tested. Macron has convened his defence council, as though the enemy were foreign rather than sitting in his own lycées. The students, meanwhile, have gone on their autumn half-term holiday, which may do more to calm things than anything the government has managed, since nothing kills revolutionary fervour quite like a week at your grandmother’s in the Dordogne.

If Macron wants to rescue the last six months of his presidency, he could do worse than to go back to where this began. Fix the schools. Pay the teachers. Mend the roofs. Scrap or reform Parcoursup. Give the kids who started all this a win, and separate them, publicly and generously, from the people who burned down their schools in their name. That is how you take the oxygen away from Le Pen. Banning protests and blaming Mélenchon will not do it.

The French invented the modern idea of the citizen standing up to the state. It would be a bitter irony if this autumn’s revolution, which began with teenagers asking for a decent education, ended with France electing a president whose old friends live in the Kremlin. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Or, as the looters would have it, liberté, égalité, Nike Air Max.

Moving forward, you’ll get the following from me on my Substack: Weekly Epstein scandal podcast episodes including my exclusive interviews with witnesses (you can listen to the latest episode below); breaking news coverage and analysis; investigations into cold cases; a monthly newsletter covering political scandals; a monthly report on my experiences here in wartime Ukraine; new true crime interviews and podcasts (upcoming: The Murder of Ann Widdecombe, The truth behind the West Memphis 3 murders, a graphic breakdown of the Clancy murder case, and DO NO HARM: The Untold Lucy Letby Story), and this new monthly newsletter covering every high profile criminal case from the past four weeks.

If you missed my latest article in The Spectator, where I dish out some facts about the controversial Cornell University rape allegations, you can read it by clicking here.

Now, without further delay, it’s time for you to grab a coffee and dive into the most shocking true crime stories and updates from the past four weeks.

RUSSELL BRAND ON TRIAL

Russell Brand’s trial at Southwark Crown Court has heard allegations from six women who accuse the British comedian and actor of rape and sexual assault over a decade-long period between 1999 and 2009. Brand, 51, denies all seven charges and maintains that his sexual encounters were consensual.

The charges comprise three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault. Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC described Brand as a “ruthless, calculated and manipulative” sexual predator, arguing that the women came forward independently and did not know one another. Brand’s defence disputes the allegations.

The allegations span several episodes during Brand’s rise to fame. The first complainant alleges that he raped her in a hotel room following an event connected to the 1999 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth. A second woman, who worked at MTV, alleges that in 2001 Brand grabbed her arm and attempted to drag her into a men’s toilet, from which she managed to escape.

A third woman alleges that Brand grabbed her breasts in a Soho bar in 2004 before pulling her into a toilet and orally raping her. Prosecutors say she protested, telling him she did not want to participate. Another complainant, who worked at a radio station, alleges that Brand grabbed her face, pushed her against a wall, kissed her aggressively and touched her breasts and buttocks without consent in 2004 or 2005.

The jury has also heard from a woman who alleges that Brand raped her at his London home in 2009. She says an encounter that began consensually changed when he forced her into anal sex despite her repeatedly asking him to stop. She later told him he had treated her “like an animal”. According to evidence presented in court, Brand replied: “I’m sorry.” Her friends, parents and former colleagues have described hearing about the alleged assault afterwards and recalled her distress. Brand’s barrister has challenged her account.

The final complainant alleges sexual misconduct while Brand was filming a project in 2009, claiming he placed his head against her groin after pressuring her to provide a massage.

Brand has previously told police that he never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity. His position is that the encounters were consensual and have since been “reimagined” by his accusers. His defence has questioned aspects of the women’s recollections and interpretations.

The proceedings follow allegations publicised in a 2023 television investigation. All allegations remain unproven, and Brand is presumed innocent unless convicted. The trial continues.

KENYA DOOMSDAY CULT LEADER FOUND GUILTY OF MURDERING 191 PEOPLE

Kenyan doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie, his wife Rhoda Maweu and 29 other defendants have been found guilty of murdering 191 people, including 190 children, in one of the country’s most horrific religious atrocities.

Justice Diana Mochache delivered the verdict at Mombasa Law Courts on Monday, concluding a lengthy trial examining the deaths linked to Mackenzie’s Good News International Church. All 31 defendants had denied the charges but were convicted on all 191 counts of murder. Sentencing is expected in November.

In a judgment spanning approximately 1,000 pages, Justice Mochache described how Mackenzie’s followers became psychologically dependent on him, surrendering their independence before relocating to Shakahola Forest in 2023.

“By the time they were relocating to Shakahola, many of them had lost their sense of self,” she said, explaining that followers had become so reliant on the self-proclaimed religious leader that they would consult him before making personal decisions.

The court heard that Mackenzie prohibited followers from vaccinating their children and instructed them to abandon formal employment. According to the judge, his followers obeyed without question, having become conditioned to accept his authority.

Prosecutors argued that Mackenzie orchestrated an extreme fasting regime, instructing followers to starve themselves and their children to death so they could reach heaven and meet Jesus before the predicted end of the world.

Investigators described a hierarchy in which children were expected to die first, followed by teenagers, women and men. Many of the children, some aged between six and 10, died from starvation. Prosecutors also cited evidence of asphyxia, neck compression and traumatic head injuries. The youngest victims were only a few months old.

Justice Mochache rejected the defence’s suggestion that the relocation to Shakahola was simply the result of Mackenzie’s powers of persuasion, finding that he personally participated in and supervised the move. She also ruled that children lacked the legal capacity to consent to fasting until death.

The convictions relate to 191 deaths, but the wider Shakahola tragedy claimed 429 lives, according to figures released by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights in 2024. Hundreds of bodies were discovered in shallow graves across the forest, while investigators also recovered 102 separate body parts. The condition of the remains meant that only 26 bodies could be identified.

Mackenzie, a former taxi driver, was arrested in April 2023 after a rights group alerted authorities and some followers were rescued. The subsequent investigation exposed mass graves and overwhelmed local mortuary facilities.

The case has devastated families across Kenya. Francis Wanje, 62, who lost eight relatives, including two grandchildren, described the psychological toll on his family.

“It has been really a heavy thing for us as a family,” he said.

Mackenzie faces additional proceedings involving terrorism-related offences, manslaughter and torture. In January, he was also charged with murdering another 52 people found dead in a nearby village, allegations he denies.

The scandal has intensified demands for tighter regulation of religious organisations, particularly after it emerged that Mackenzie had previously been arrested twice but released.

President William Ruto acknowledged in 2023 that government agencies should have prevented the deaths, accepting responsibility as head of state. The latest convictions represent a significant step towards accountability, although the wider questions surrounding the authorities’ failure to stop the tragedy remain.

THE WOMAN TENNESSEE COULDN’T KILL

Tennessee has spent the best part of thirty years trying to execute Christa Pike. On September 30th it finally got round to it, and made the most almighty hash of the job. Pike, now 50, was given two doses of pentobarbital. She did not die. Witnesses heard her breathing, groaning and, at one point, snoring, and she was eventually carted out of the prison in an ambulance and taken to hospital for emergency treatment. Which is not, one imagines, how the Department of Correction had drawn it up on the whiteboard.

She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee for at least 200 years. Her crime was the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow trainee at a Job Corps centre in Knoxville. Pike was 18. She and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were both convicted. Shipp, who was 17, got life with the possibility of parole. Pike got death. Only Pike.

Nobody pretends this was anything other than a savage killing. Slemmer was set upon after Pike and Shipp decided she had betrayed them in a row over their relationship. Pike has never denied her part in it. Her appeals have instead been about her age, her upbringing and the state of her mind at the time. In her clemency papers she called herself a mentally ill 18-year-old and accepted that she had taken somebody’s daughter, sister and friend.

Her lawyers made her childhood the heart of the last-ditch fight. She was, they said, sexually abused from a very young age, and no court had ever properly weighed what that did to her. An hour before the needle was due, the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to pause things and take a look. The US Supreme Court then waved the execution through anyway.

So in she went. According to her lawyers she received two doses of the drug. Witnesses described loud exhalations, gasping and snoring. She complained of pain and kicked her legs so hard that the sheets came off the gurney. The curtain was drawn, opened, drawn again, like some ghastly provincial pantomime, while officials tried to work out what on earth to do next. She ended up in hospital in a critical condition.

The Department of Correction insists everyone followed the protocol. And they probably did. The protocol says that if the prisoner is still alive after the first set of syringes, you use the second set. What it does not say, with any clarity at all, is what happens if the prisoner is still alive after the second set. That, it turns out, is precisely the page somebody forgot to write.

Pike is now awake and talking, according to her lawyers, though nobody can say how she will fare. She is handcuffed and shackled to her hospital bed, presumably in case a woman the state has just tried and failed to kill decides to make a dash for it. The damage to her arms is said to be severe. “At a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” her legal team said. Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising them, said she was off the ventilator and could communicate in a basic way, but did not seem to remember the execution. She knew her own name. She thought it was still September.

Nobody knows how much of the drug actually reached her bloodstream. Zivot thinks some of it may have leaked into the surrounding tissue rather than getting into her circulation in a dose that would kill her. Deborah Denno, a Fordham law professor who has spent years studying executions, said she was “absolutely astonished” Pike was conscious and talking. She told the BBC that Pike appears to be the first prisoner known to have survived an execution in which the lethal drug was actually put into her body.

The fallout has been considerable. Governor Bill Lee has halted all executions in Tennessee until the end of the year, and the Correction Commissioner, Frank Strada, is off. Pike’s lawyers want every scrap of evidence from that night preserved, medical records included, so they can find out exactly what went wrong. They are also, once again, asking the governor to commute her sentence to life without parole. Six days after the state tried and failed to kill her, she is still in a hospital bed and the lawyers are still at it.

GYPSY ROSE AND THE UNEXPLAINED DEATH

Ken Urker died on October 1. It was his 34th birthday. He was found on his bed in a house in Raceland, Louisiana, the latest and last chapter in a relationship with Gypsy Rose Blanchard that had gone from prison pen pals to engagement, to separation, to her marrying somebody else, to reconciliation and a baby. The Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office is investigating. It says it has found no evidence of foul play so far, but has not ruled it out either.

Deputies were called to the house at about 6.15pm. According to a police report obtained by People, they found drug paraphernalia, syringes among it, a spoon with a brown powdery substance on it, and a handgun in a holster. There was a blood-stained paper towel on his arm. There was no gunshot wound. The cause of death has not been released and the toxicology results are not back.

The welfare check happened because people were worried. He hadn’t turned up for work and wasn’t answering his phone. According to the police account, relatives had been anxious about his state of mind: depression, suicidal thoughts and heavy drinking. Gypsy has said she thinks he may have overdosed, while also saying she never once saw him take drugs and did not believe he had a problem with them. That is her view. It is not a medical finding.

His death has dragged the whole extraordinary Blanchard saga back into the light. For anyone who has been living in a cave, Gypsy’s mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, spent years passing her daughter off as desperately ill. Leukaemia, muscular dystrophy, you name it. She kept her in a wheelchair she didn’t need and put her through medical treatment she didn’t need either. When investigators finally pulled at the thread, what unravelled was a great deal nastier and more complicated than anyone had supposed.

In the end Gypsy turned to Nicholas Godejohn, a boyfriend she had found on a Christian dating website, of all places, and talked him into killing her mother. In June 2015 he went to the house in Missouri and stabbed Dee Dee to death while Gypsy hid in the bathroom. The two of them fled to Wisconsin, where they were arrested. Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2016 and got ten years. Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and got life. Gypsy was paroled in December 2023, after more than eight years inside.

Urker came along while she was in prison. He had seen the documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, wrote to her, and the thing grew through letters and phone calls. They got engaged in 2018 and split in 2019. Gypsy then married Ryan Scott Anderson, a special needs teacher from Louisiana whom she had also met through prison correspondence during the pandemic. That wedding took place inside the prison in July 2022.

For the record, nothing in the public timeline shows she cheated on Urker. The engagement was over before Anderson came on the scene. But Urker plainly never went away. After her release, and with the marriage to Anderson falling apart, she and Ken got back together in 2024. She told Us Weekly she had rung Ken two weeks before marrying Ryan, and admitted her feelings for him had caused trouble. She and Anderson separated in March 2024 and were divorced later that year.

Before long Gypsy and Ken were out in public holding hands and getting matching tattoos. They got engaged again, and their daughter, Aurora Raina Urker, was born in December 2024. Nobody claimed it was plain sailing. On the Lifetime series Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up they talked about trust and communication and the weight of their history, and they went to couples therapy, which Gypsy described as a way of working through the emotional barriers between them.

There has also been the usual sludge on social media, including a short clip of Gypsy apparently cutting something with a knife or a pair of scissors, which the internet’s armchair detectives have seized upon as proof that she is volatile. No police statement and no court document links that clip to any attack on Urker. Nobody reliable knows what she was cutting or why the clip was filmed. It is evidence of precisely nothing.

Things have turned nasty since he died. Ken’s sister, Autumn Urker, says the couple had split more than a month before his death, and disputes Gypsy’s claim that they were engaged and talking about another baby. “Gypsy had no right to lie and say that it was because of some text that she sent to him,” Autumn said, a reference to Gypsy’s explanation that she couldn’t get hold of Ken on his birthday. Autumn has also said a preliminary autopsy finding suggests he may have had an undiagnosed enlarged heart. That is not the final word. The official cause and manner of death are still pending.

Where that leaves us is this. Ken Urker is dead. The coroner hasn’t finished. Suspected drugs were found in the room, a gun was found with them, there was no gunshot wound, and the police have not ruled out foul play. Until the toxicology and the rest of the inquiry come back, nobody knows why he died, however many people on Reddit say otherwise.

And Reddit is where Gypsy has now turned her fire. She has published screenshots from what she calls an evidence log, most of it, she says, from a single forum, mocking his looks, his sexuality and his relationship with her. “These screenshots show only a small portion of an evidence log documenting the cyberbullying, ridicule, allegations, and targeted harassment Ken faced across social media over the years. There is substantially more that has yet to be documented,” she wrote.

Why make it public? “Because there are people who participated in the harassment who would rather sweep what happened online under the rug than acknowledge the very real harm their words and actions can cause. I’m not going to let that happen,” she told People. Her point is that it was the drip, drip, drip of the stuff that did the damage, not any one post, and that the platforms ought to answer for ignoring repeated complaints.

She has started a petition for what she calls “Kenan’s Law”, which would change how social media companies deal with repeated reports of harassment. She says she has a New Orleans lawyer helping her draft it, though she has not yet been in front of any legislative committee. “There needs to be accountability, not only from the platforms that allow relentless harassment to continue, but also from individuals who build entire accounts and platforms around repeatedly targeting, humiliating, and harassing a person and their family,” she said.

Then there is the funeral, or rather the funerals. Gypsy says she will “most likely” go to the service Ken’s family are organising, and is planning her own memorial in Louisiana in November, with fireworks, because Ken used to buy “the biggest and the baddest fireworks every year.” She has already been to a private family viewing with Aurora, where, she says, the little girl called her father “Daddy”.

So there are two rows running at once: what killed him, and what was done to him online before he died. Neither the heart theory nor the cyberbullying dossier answers the first question. Only the pathologists and the detectives can do that, and they haven’t yet.

JOSHUA KERRY: ANN WIDDECOMBE MURDERER NOW CHARGED WITH TERRORISM OFFENCE NAMING NIGEL FARAGE

Joshua Kerry, the man accused of murdering the former Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe, has now also been charged with preparing acts of terrorism, including alleged activity aimed at the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage. What began as a murder inquiry was some time ago handed over to counter-terrorism police, and this is the result.

Kerry, 28, from Rotherham, is accused of killing Widdecombe at her home in Haytor, Devon, in July. At an earlier hearing, prosecutors said she was eating her lunch when Kerry allegedly let himself into her bungalow and hit her 21 times on the head with a hammer. A doorbell camera recorded a red Vauxhall Corsa pulling up, and footage from cameras inside the house was used to piece together what happened.

She was found the next day, after failing to turn up for an interview with Channel 5. The production team couldn’t reach her, her personal assistant asked the family gardener to go round, and he found her face down on the kitchen floor with grave head injuries. Kerry was arrested in South Yorkshire two days later. Police say they are not looking for anybody else.

The political side of things emerged slowly. When Kerry was first charged with murder, the Crown Prosecution Service said inquiries into his motive were continuing, including whether there was a political or terrorist angle, and counter-terrorism officers were already involved. That line of inquiry has now produced a separate terrorism charge, covering activity said to have taken place between 2024 and July 2026.

Farage, who leads Reform and worked closely with Widdecombe, is named in the new charge. That does not mean every earlier report of threats against him has been pinned on Kerry. Police are still going through the wider material and looking at how, if at all, the alleged preparations connect to the murder. An earlier investigation into an attack involving Farage’s London home has had a fresh airing in light of all this, but nobody has publicly established any link between that incident and Kerry.

Inevitably, there are questions about how well we protect people in public life. Widdecombe was an MP from 1987 and later a minister, and in her later years threw in her lot with the Brexit Party and then Reform, while remaining one of the most recognisable and outspoken commentators in the land. Farage has been threatened before, at his home and at campaign events.

Counter-terrorism police have described the investigation as complex and intensive. In its early stages more than 800 lines of inquiry were being pursued, covering forensics, CCTV, travel and searches tracing Kerry’s movements between South Yorkshire and Devon.

Kerry remains in custody. The terrorism charge puts the case on a second legal track, in which prosecutors will have to prove what he allegedly prepared, why, and whether it meets the legal definition of terrorism. He is entitled to a fair trial, and none of the allegations has been proved in court.

LINDSAY CLANCY: JUDGE REFUSES TO END THE CASE AFTER HUNG JURY

Lindsay Clancy is heading back to court. A Massachusetts judge has refused to declare her not guilty after her first trial collapsed, which keeps alive the prospect of a second trial over the deaths of her three children. On October 1, Judge William Sullivan ruled that prosecutors had produced enough evidence on which a reasonable jury could convict.

Clancy is accused of killing Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan at the family home in Duxbury in January 2023. She then threw herself from a second-floor window and was left paralysed. Her defence accepts that she killed the children. The argument is that postpartum psychosis left her unable to understand that what she was doing was wrong.

The first trial ran for almost six weeks, with more than 80 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits. The jury deliberated for days and then reported that it could not agree. The judge sent them back with further instructions. They still could not agree, and on September 4 he declared a mistrial.

Her lawyers then renewed their application for a not guilty verdict on the murder charges, arguing that the prosecution had not proved she was criminally responsible and had leaned far too heavily on disputed expert evidence. Sullivan disagreed. Taken as a whole, he said, the evidence was enough for a jury to convict.

That evidence included forensic work on the exercise bands used to strangle the children, among it DNA linked to Clancy. The prosecution also called experts on her state of mind, and pointed to what she did before and after the killings as evidence that she understood what she was doing. The defence called its own experts, who said severe postpartum illness had swamped her judgment.

What makes the hung jury so striking is that nobody was arguing about whether the children died or who killed them. The only question was responsibility. Reports after the mistrial suggested that nearly all the jurors were for a verdict of insanity or lack of criminal responsibility, and that a single juror would not budge. That one juror is now at the centre of the legal fight over what happens next.

The defence is also lining up a second argument: that another trial would breach the constitutional bar on being tried twice for the same thing. They are questioning whether the mistrial was really necessary and whether the judge ought to have tried something else before sending the jury home. They want access to sealed juror material so they can look at the deliberations and the row involving the holdout.

Prosecutors have not yet said for certain that they will go again. There is a further hearing on November 2, when the remaining motions and the arguments over the mistrial are due to be heard. Even if there is a retrial, it will not be soon. The defence says it could not be ready before the middle of 2027.

Clancy remains in psychiatric care and remains charged with murder. The argument is no longer really about the evidence. It is about whether the state gets a second go at presenting it, and whether twelve more people will be asked the question the first twelve could not answer.

JOANNE SHEEN: FOUND, AT LAST, AFTER SEVEN YEARS

For nearly seven years Joanne Sheen was simply missing. Then, in August, a wildfire swept through a patch of woodland in west London, and human remains were found. On September 17 police confirmed, through DNA, that they were hers. She was a mother of three from Southampton, and she vanished in December 2019.

The discovery was made on August 12 near Padstow Walk in Feltham, where the Metropolitan Police recovered bones from fire-damaged scrubland. They went off for forensic examination, and a murder inquiry was opened while detectives tried to establish who she was.

Putting a name to her answered one question and raised several more. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, which had been looking for Sheen for years, took over the murder investigation. Shortly after the identification was announced, a 56-year-old man from Southampton was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.

Sheen was 44 when she disappeared. The last confirmed sighting was on December 5, 2019, when she travelled back from Fareham towards Southampton with a friend. Her family reported her missing after months with no word. Despite a long-running operation that eventually generated more than 4,000 lines of inquiry, the police never found her.

It was hardly a half-hearted search. Officers took more than 300 statements, searched more than ten addresses, and went through waterways and a good many boats. They combed woodland and water around Southampton. In 2020 five people were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, but no further action was taken against any of them over her disappearance.

Those arrests now look very different, because the case has been turned on its head. The original investigation had no body and had to work almost entirely from movements, relationships, sightings and whatever the phones and forensics could offer. Now detectives have the remains themselves and the place where they were found.

Police are appealing for information about Sheen’s movements around Southampton in late 2019 and about anything seen in Feltham and Hounslow. They also want to know how she came to be in London at all, given that the last confirmed sighting put her in Hampshire.

Her family now at least have a certainty they were denied for seven years. What they do not have is any idea who killed her, where she died, how she ended up in Feltham, or why years of searching never found her. Those are the questions detectives are now trying to answer.

LUCY LETBY: THE INQUIRY THAT LAID BARE A HOSPITAL ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

The big news in the Letby saga this month has not come from a courtroom. It came from the Thirlwall Inquiry, which has at last published its report into how a neonatal nurse was able to murder seven babies and try to murder seven more at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

The report, published on September 15, is about as brutal a judgment on NHS management as you are ever likely to read. Lady Justice Kathryn Thirlwall found dysfunctional governance, a chasm between the people running the hospital and the doctors working in it, and a failure to grasp even the basics of safeguarding. There had been, she concluded, a “complete failure to protect babies”, and some of the deaths and attacks might have been prevented had anyone acted on the warnings sooner.

The doctors had raised the alarm after a run of unexplained collapses and deaths on the neonatal unit. Nobody did very much about it. Senior nurses would not accept that the consultants might have a point, and senior managers dragged their feet over calling the police. Instead of a safeguarding investigation into whether a member of staff was deliberately harming babies, the hospital commissioned a series of internal reviews which, the inquiry found, studiously avoided that possibility.

Better still, some of the doctors who raised concerns found themselves under scrutiny through Letby’s own grievance procedure. Three consultants were told to apologise to her. There were even plans to put her back on the neonatal unit, before somebody saw sense. The inquiry was scathing about all of it, and about the failure to treat a matter of babies’ safety as a safeguarding issue.

And the parents were kept in the dark. For years, families were not told that there were concerns their babies might have been deliberately harmed. Their children’s medical records were sent off to outside experts and organisations without their knowledge or consent. Many only grasped what had really happened after Letby was arrested in 2018.

There are 17 recommendations. They include monitors on every neonatal cot and incubator so that parents can watch their babies remotely, and CCTV trained on the fridges or cabinets where insulin is kept until proper secure access is in place. The report also wants an NHS-wide protocol for dealing with suspected deliberate harm by a member of staff.

What the inquiry did not do was re-examine Letby’s convictions. That was never its job. It was there to look at how the hospital behaved before and after the alarm was raised, not to decide whether the jury got it right. That matters, because the Criminal Cases Review Commission is separately looking at material submitted on her behalf to decide whether there is a real possibility the convictions might be overturned.

That effort took a knock in September, when two experts who had been helping her defence walked away, saying some of the arguments they were being asked to back had fundamental scientific problems. Her lawyers insist the case can still be challenged, and the CCRC says it will read the inquiry report to see whether it has any bearing on its review.

People do tend to muddle these two things, so it bears saying plainly. The Thirlwall Inquiry found that the hospital failed badly and that chances to protect babies were missed. It did not find that Letby was wrongly convicted. That is a separate question for the CCRC, and no decision to overturn anything has been announced.

MEGHAN MARKLE ALERTED TO ALLEGATIONS AGAINST HER FATHER

The Duchess of Sussex has revealed that she was made aware of serious allegations concerning her estranged father, Thomas Markle, in 2018, following the circulation of a letter sent to the Metropolitan Police.

Meghan said the letter, which outlined the allegations, was subsequently shared with her and that she had been assured the matter was being investigated. Her statement comes amid reports that images allegedly depicting child sexual abuse were discovered at a property previously occupied by her father in the Philippines. Thomas Markle, 82, who is based in the United States, has denied possessing such material.

Responding to the reports, Meghan said she was deeply distressed by the developments and expressed sympathy for any children who may have been harmed. She described the allegations as deeply disturbing and said her hope was that the investigation would lead to justice, with the protection of children remaining the priority.

The duchess also addressed her decision to remain estranged from her father, explaining that the information she received in 2018 had influenced her approach to protecting her own family.

Meghan said she hoped the circumstances would help explain why she had maintained her distance from Thomas Markle and why she had not permitted him to have contact with her children. She said her decision had been made to protect them, adding that she had trusted the authorities to safeguard other families as well.

The claims were brought to wider attention by Meghan’s half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr, who told The Sun that he had allegedly discovered child sexual abuse images at their father’s former home in the Philippines and reported the matter to police. The allegations have not, on the information currently available, established that Thomas Markle Snr committed an offence.

Philippine authorities have confirmed that an investigation is under way. Nicholas Ty, an undersecretary at the country’s Department of Justice, told the BBC that the case was being examined by a specialist task force dealing with human trafficking and child sexual exploitation in Cebu.

Interior Minister Jonvic Remulla separately told the BBC that police had secured Thomas Markle Snr’s computer for a detailed digital forensic examination. Investigators were analysing the data to establish the nature and extent of any alleged criminal activity, with the minister indicating that the results were expected to take approximately a week.

The BBC said it had contacted Thomas Markle Snr and the Metropolitan Police for comment.

The allegations have also renewed scrutiny of the fractured relationship between Meghan and her father, which has been the subject of public attention since her marriage to Prince Harry. According to the duchess’s statement, she learned of the allegations after her wedding in 2018.

Sources close to the Sussexes reportedly said Meghan had refrained from discussing the matter publicly because of concerns that doing so could compromise a potential investigation. They also suggested that speaking out at the time might have exposed her to legal action.

The revelations may provide further context for the longstanding distance between Thomas Markle and his daughter, as well as the apparent absence of a relationship between him and Prince Harry or the couple’s children. However, the extent to which the allegations contributed to the family breakdown remains unclear.

Questions have also arisen over whether the matter had any bearing on the Sussexes’ return to the United Kingdom in late summer. There is currently no established evidence connecting that trip to the allegations, and any suggestion of a link remains speculative.

For now, the investigation in the Philippines remains central to the case. Thomas Markle Snr denies possessing the alleged images, and the claims must be distinguished from any findings that investigators may ultimately establish. Until the forensic examination and police inquiries are complete, the full circumstances remain uncertain.

NATALIA VILLALBA: THE BOGOTÁ SUITCASE MURDER, AND THE DETAIL THE AUTOPSY GOT RIGHT

In June, Natalia Villalba Angarita was found dead inside a suitcase in a short-let flat in Bogotá. The first reports said her body had been dismembered. The post-mortem says otherwise. Investigators now say she died from repeated blunt-force injuries to her head and body, and that she was not dismembered at all.

Villalba, 36, was a model and graphic designer from Cúcuta who was staying temporarily in a flat in El Chico, in the north of the city. Prosecutors say she was alone there when Foster Martinson walked in on June 18. Martinson, a British national, became the prime suspect after investigators traced his movements and identified him as the last person known to have entered the flat.

The forensic findings, as reported later in the Colombian press, make grim reading. Two skull fractures, a broken jaw, blunt-force injuries across the head, fractures to the chest and a great many bruises. The cause of death was given as severe blunt-force trauma to the skull. Reports of the evidence put before the court say she was struck dozens of times.

The suitcase matters because it hid the body and delayed its discovery. Investigators say Martinson put her body in it, moved it into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Prosecutors allege that he then tried to deal with the blood, changed out of the clothes he had arrived in and dumped them down a rubbish chute before leaving the building.

They also say he took her phone with him, apparently to stop investigators quickly linking her to the man who had walked into the flat, and that he made other attempts to interfere with the evidence.

Martinson left Colombia and was later tracked down in Ecuador. Interpol issued a Red Notice, and he was arrested at Quito’s international airport as he was about to fly on to Britain. He was sent back to Bogotá, where a judge ordered that he be held in prison pending trial. He denies the charges and has not been convicted of anything.

Colombian detectives have also been looking at his history in Britain. Reports there point to a previous conviction for harassment and to other allegations being examined as background. Prosecutors are also looking at whether he and Villalba had any personal or romantic connection.

The correction to the forensic account is no small thing. The early reports painted a picture of a body cut up and packed away. The post-mortem found nothing of the kind. She was beaten to death, and the suitcase was used to hide her.

The case against Martinson will rest on the prosecution’s account of those last hours in the flat, the forensic evidence tying him to it, the manner of his departure from Colombia, and whatever can be shown about his relationship with Villalba. It will be for a Colombian court to decide whether that adds up to proof.

TASIA FORTUNE: THREE MEN CHARGED AFTER A HANGING TURNED OUT TO BE STAGED

The death of Tasia Fortune began as a horror and has become a murder case. A woman was found hanging from a tree; three men are now charged. A judge in Jackson, Mississippi, has found probable cause against one of them, which sends the case on towards a grand jury, and the police are still looking for anyone else who may have been involved.

Fortune, 29, a mother of four, was found hanging behind an abandoned house in west Jackson on August 3. Given what it looked like, and given Mississippi’s history, people immediately feared a lynching. Fortune and the men later arrested are all Black. The police now say the hanging was staged after she was already dead.

Jarques Ratliff, 51, was arrested in September after the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. He has pleaded not guilty. A second man, Earnest Lloyd Jr, 25, was arrested later that month and also charged with murder. A third, Eric Clark, 45, handed himself in and was charged after investigators named him as somebody they believed was involved. A judge set his bond at $5 million.

Most of what is known publicly comes from Detective Samuel Dukes. At a preliminary hearing he told the court that Fortune is thought to have been killed somewhere else, and that the hanging was set up afterwards. He tied the case to a dispute over drugs and said detectives were looking at a fight involving Lloyd. Police believe she had been dead for two or three days by the time she was found.

So the tree was not necessarily where she died, and that is the nub of the prosecution case. Detectives are trying to establish where she was killed, who was there, who moved her body and who rigged up the scene afterwards. They have also mentioned a black cable cord in connection with the hanging.

All of which changes the nature of the thing entirely. In the first few days the talk was of a racially motivated killing, a modern lynching. Detectives now say the evidence points to a murder over drugs, followed by a staged hanging. They have not said the staging was meant to mimic a historic lynching, a point the Associated Press felt obliged to clarify after its earlier reports gave that impression.

Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, has stayed very much involved. She says her daughter had been struggling with homelessness and addiction but was trying to put her life back together and start a cleaning business. The family reject any suggestion that she took her own life.

Police have spoken to a great many people and have hinted that there may be more arrests. The probable cause finding is not a conviction. It does mean a judge has agreed there is enough evidence to move the case to the next stage.

What happens next depends on what detectives can prove beyond the scene itself: how she died, what each man is alleged to have done, and how the night ended with her body in that tree. Three men are charged and at least one more is being sought. This is now about reconstructing an alleged group killing and the attempt to disguise it.

JAY-Z’S ACCUSER RECANTS: “I NEVER MET HIM”

The woman who accused Jay-Z of raping her when she was 13 has formally withdrawn the allegation and told a federal court there was no truth in it. In a declaration filed in New York, the woman, previously known only as Jane Doe, said she had never met or spoken to Jay-Z and that he had never behaved inappropriately towards her.

Her lawsuit, filed in 2024, accused Jay-Z, real name Shawn Carter, and Sean “Diddy” Combs of raping her after the MTV Video Music Awards in 2000. She claimed she had been drugged and assaulted as a teenager. Both men denied it, and the civil case was later dropped.

Jay-Z then sued her and her lawyers for defamation and malicious prosecution, and it is in that case that she has now recanted. She had never met Carter, she said, and there was “no truth to any of my claims”. She added, for the avoidance of doubt, that nobody was paying her to say so.

According to her declaration, it all started when she answered a Facebook advert looking for possible victims of Combs. The law firm that got in touch, she says, ran with the allegation without properly checking it and without giving her a fair chance to read what was being filed in her name.

The original claim made headlines precisely because it put Jay-Z alongside Combs, whose own criminal case went on to a separate federal trial. The two cases are legally quite distinct, and her recantation concerns the 2024 civil suit against both men.

Her declaration also deals with how the original complaint came to be drafted and filed. She says she had told her lawyers about her mental health problems, and suggests she did not really understand how her allegations were being presented in court. The declaration was filed as part of the litigation Carter brought.

Jay-Z’s lawyers say they will drop her from the defamation case. That leaves the fight focused on the law firm: what it did when it filed the claim, and whether the allegations were pushed knowingly or recklessly.

It is an unusually blunt recantation. She did not say her memory had failed her. She said she had never met the man and that what she had said about him was false. That is now on the federal court record, and it changes the shape of a case that was once front-page news the world over.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN: THE ACCUSER WHO KEPT IN TOUCH, AND THE CHARGE THAT WAS DROPPED

Harvey Weinstein’s legal odyssey took another turn when New York prosecutors dropped the rape charge brought by Jessica Mann rather than put her through a fourth trial. Mann has testified again and again that Weinstein raped her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013. The evidence also showed that she stayed in touch with him for years afterwards, had consensual sex with him after the alleged rape, and asked him for help with her career.

She met him in 2013, when she was a 27-year-old hairdresser and would-be actress and he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. She has described the relationship as complicated, involving consensual encounters as well as the assault she says happened in New York.

At the 2026 retrial, the defence spent a long time on the messages and emails Mann sent Weinstein after the alleged rape. She told the jury that she carried on seeing him and that some of their sexual encounters were consensual. She also accepted that she had sent affectionate messages over the following years, including ones saying she missed him and felt he understood her.

One message in particular got a good airing. Mann wrote to a friend that she liked “the Harvey we know” and felt he protected her. She also told the jury that Weinstein had helped her get work at a hair salon when she was short of money. The defence used all of this to argue that the relationship was consensual and willingly continued.

They also produced a note Mann had written to herself two days after the alleged rape. It talked about her feelings for a man and the confusion surrounding the relationship. It did not mention rape. Asked why, Mann said she didn’t have to write an assault down in that note.

She also described a second alleged rape, in Beverly Hills, after she tried to put some distance between them. He was never charged with that. She said that once she started seeing someone she loved, she tried to end the sexual side of things with Weinstein, only to find him pressing her all over again.

Weinstein’s original 2020 conviction in New York was overturned on appeal. The retrial deadlocked on the Mann charge, and a third attempt failed too. In June, prosecutors told the court Mann could not face another trial, and the count was dismissed rather than make her give evidence once more.

None of which springs Weinstein from prison. He still stands convicted on a separate New York sexual assault charge involving Miriam Haley, for which he was sentenced to 15 years in September. He is also serving a sentence in California for rape, although that conviction has been through its own appeal and resentencing.

Weinstein has always denied any non-consensual sex and maintains that his relationships with his accusers were consensual. His lawyers have repeatedly pointed to messages, continued contact and sexual relationships after alleged assaults as support for that.

ANDREW TATE: WHAT IS ALLEGED, WHAT IS PROVEN, AND WHAT ISN’T

Andrew Tate, the cringeworthy self-styled king of masculinity, is spending his autumn in a federal detention centre in Miami, which is not quite the Bugatti-and-cigars lifestyle advertised to his followers. He and his brother Tristan were arrested in Miami on July 18th at Britain’s request, and on September 9^th Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis refused to let them out while they fight extradition. She was not satisfied they were not a flight risk, prosecutors having pointed out that the brothers appear to have plenty of money and have boasted about holding several passports.

Britain wants them back to face 59 charges. The first 21 were authorised in May 2025. In July this year the Crown Prosecution Service added 38 more, 32 against Andrew and six against Tristan. They include rape and sex trafficking, and documents unsealed in July contain allegations from four women that the brothers choked them, sometimes until they passed out, and raped them, between 2010 and 2017.

Then came the latest filing. On October 6, British prosecutors put further documents before the federal court in Florida as part of the extradition case, first reported by The Telegraph. These are the most serious allegations yet. Prosecutors say that when Tate was arrested in Britain in July 2015, on suspicion of rape and sexual assault, police seized a phone and laptop from his home in Hitchin containing 168 indecent images and videos of a girl who was 17 at the time. Sixty-six were in Category A, the most serious classification in British law.

According to the prosecution, the girl came to Britain from abroad in 2014 and was soon working in Tate’s webcam business, which made its money from women performing sexual content for paying customers online. Her passport, showing she was still 17, was found at his house. Prosecutors say messages show Tate knew she was underage: in January 2015 she told him her parents had found out she was working for him and believed he was prostituting her, and he is said to have worried that her father might go to the authorities. They allege that in June 2015 he shared videos of her with three other men in a WhatsApp group and boasted that she worked for him. Reports of the filing also describe messages in which he is alleged to have given her explicit and degrading sexual instructions. Separately, the documents allege he possessed extreme pornography, including material involving animals.

Tate’s American lawyer, Joseph McBride, has dismissed the lot as “prosecution slop” and says the case is “as weak as it gets”. He says the device in question was found at a “flop house”, that there is no proof Tate ever watched what was on it, that one of the clips was a war video shared in a group chat of MMA fighters, and that the British authorities no longer even have the device, only a report about what was on it.

Romania, meanwhile, has had another go. On September 4, Romanian prosecutors indicted Andrew Tate for trafficking minors, sex with a minor and money laundering, with Tristan charged as an accomplice. They say one victim was 15 when Tate seduced her in Britain in 2012, before moving her to Bucharest and using violence and intimidation to force her to produce indecent material for social media. They allege the brothers pocketed about $1.25 million, roughly 80 per cent of her earnings, and tried to launder it through four luxury cars. Their Romanian lawyer, Eugen Vidineac, says his clients “continue to reject the allegations against them”. Romanian law allows a trial in absentia, so they need not be in the country for it to proceed.

So what, if anything, has been proved? Here is the honest answer, and it will please nobody. No allegation of rape, trafficking or sexual abuse against Andrew Tate has been proved in any criminal court. Nor has any of them been proved false. Tate’s fans like to point to the 2015 British investigation, which was dropped without charge, and to Romania, where in late 2024 the Bucharest Court of Appeal sent the original trafficking case back to prosecutors after ruling some of the evidence inadmissible. Neither was a finding that the women were lying. Both were procedural, and both cases have since come roaring back. The claim, much shared online in 2025, that the Romanian case had been thrown out altogether was simply untrue.

What has been established by a court is rather more mundane. In December 2024 a British court ruled that Bedfordshire Police could seize more than £2 million from the brothers over unpaid tax, a ruling that went against them. And the footage that got him thrown off Big Brother in 2016, showing him hitting a woman with a belt, was real enough; he said at the time it was consensual. Beyond that, a separate civil claim brought against him in the High Court by four women is still to be heard.

The brothers deny everything, insist every relationship they have had with a woman was consensual, and say they are being persecuted for their views. On the latest allegations, as on all the others, the evidence has yet to be tested in court.

AVERY AND DASSEY LEFT OFF THE WISCONSIN CLEMENCY AGENDA

Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey have both applied to have their sentences commuted in Wisconsin. Neither of them is on the agenda for the next meeting of the state’s Commutation Advisory Board, which is a fairly strong hint that the board will not be looking at their applications any time soon.

The two men were convicted of the 2005 murder of the photographer Teresa Halbach at Avery’s property in Manitowoc County. The case became world famous in 2015 when Netflix released Making a Murderer, which picked holes in the investigation and the prosecution while also laying out the case against them.

Avery put in his application in September. Judge Guy Dutcher reviewed it and concluded that cutting his sentence would be “entirely inappropriate”. Dassey applied separately for commutation of a life sentence imposed for a crime committed as a juvenile, and that was reviewed by a different Manitowoc County judge. Unlike Avery’s, Dassey’s application went forward without a similar judicial thumbs-down.

Both were then sent to the state board. Its October 23 agenda mentions neither man. The board is not obliged to deal with every petition it receives, so this is not a formal rejection. It just means neither application is due to be discussed at the next public meeting.

Avery still says he was framed and that someone else killed Halbach. His latest appeal was rejected by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2025, after the state Court of Appeals found his motion inadequately argued and lacking the evidence needed to justify a hearing.

Dassey’s case went a different way. In 2016 a federal judge overturned his conviction, finding constitutional problems with how investigators got his confession. A majority of the federal appeals court later restored the conviction, and in 2018 the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The evidence in the Halbach murder included her blood in her car, Avery’s blood in the car, burned remains found at the salvage yard, a bullet fragment carrying Halbach’s DNA and the key to her car found in Avery’s bedroom. Dassey also gave investigators a detailed confession, which he later withdrew.

The documentary, for all its millions of viewers, did not overturn either conviction. Avery was sentenced in 2007 to life without parole. Dassey got a mandatory life sentence with the possibility of parole in 2048.

These clemency bids are just the latest round in a case that has already survived multiple appeals, federal litigation and years of public campaigning. For now, with neither man on the agenda, neither application looks likely to be heard at that meeting.

FROM AMERICAN IDOL TO MURDER: PASTOR FOUND GUILTY OF KILLING HIS WIFE

Caleb Flynn once stood in front of the American Idol judges and told them about his dreams of making it in music. On September 29 a jury in Ohio found him guilty of murdering his wife, Ashley, after prosecutors said he shot her and then tried to pass it off as a random break-in.

Flynn, 40, was convicted on nine counts, including aggravated murder, further murder counts, felonious assault and tampering with evidence. On October 5 he was sentenced to life without parole, the maximum available. He still maintains he is innocent.

It started on a February night when Flynn rang 911 and said an intruder had broken into the house and shot Ashley. She was 37, a teacher, a volleyball coach and the mother of two. At first, investigators had to treat it as a possible home invasion.

There was, prosecutors eventually argued, no intruder. Flynn shot his wife and dressed up the scene to make the police believe somebody else had done it. Digital records, they said, contradicted his account of where he had been and when he had moved around the house.

An affair formed a large part of the prosecution case. Flynn had been in contact with another woman, Alleigha Botner. Prosecutors showed messages in which he talked to her about Ashley, including one in which he wrote: “I choose you. I’m free. Actions will come tomorrow.” The prosecution presented that as evidence of both motive and planning.

Botner also gave evidence about conversations in which Flynn expressed anger towards his wife and talked about her. The state’s case was that these were not just the messages of a man having an affair, but part of a sequence showing he had decided Ashley had to die.

The gun was never found. But prosecutors put forward physical evidence from the house, including DNA and fingerprints, which they said tied Flynn to the shooting, and argued that the missing weapon did not outweigh everything else, including the holes in his account of that night.

Flynn had something of a public life. On American Idol in 2013 he told the judges that Ashley supported his musical ambitions. He went on to become a music pastor, which made the whole thing all the more shocking to people who knew him through church and through his music.

His lawyers argued that there was no eyewitness to the shooting and that the physical evidence was circumstantial. The jury disagreed and convicted him on every count before it.

At the sentencing hearing a family member read out a statement from one of his daughters, and the judge quoted from it as he passed sentence: “What did Ashley ever do to make you hate her so much?” Nobody in the courtroom, it seems, had an answer, least of all the man in the dock.

EPSTEIN’S EXECUTORS: FEDERAL PROSECUTORS TURN TO DARREN INDYKE AND RICHARD KAHN

Federal prosecutors in New York have opened an investigation into Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, the lawyer and the accountant who worked for Jeffrey Epstein for decades and now run his estate. It is the latest twist in the long, slow excavation of Epstein’s world, prompted by the release of more records and renewed interest on Capitol Hill in how his money machine actually worked.

Indyke was Epstein’s lawyer for years. Kahn was his accountant. Both carried on working for him after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, and both stayed close to him right up to his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019. Between them they now control a large part of his estate.

The investigation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and since confirmed elsewhere, is looking at the legal and financial work they did for Epstein. Investigators have asked for documents and spoken to potential witnesses. Which offences, if any, are being looked at has not been made public.

One line of inquiry is whether the legal or financial services they provided helped to hide transactions, move money or make payments connected with Epstein’s activities. To be clear, nobody is alleging that either man took part in Epstein’s sexual abuse. Both deny knowing about it or having anything to do with it.

It matters because both men have already admitted they stayed close to Epstein long after 2008. In congressional testimony released earlier this year, they said federal investigators had never questioned them about his crimes. Kahn said financial pressure around the 2008 crash played a part in his decision to keep working for him. Indyke described his own work as transactional and professional.

Since Epstein’s death they have remained at the centre of things. They ran a compensation scheme for victims that has paid out more than $120 million, according to reporting on the estate. They also stand to benefit from the estate themselves, with payments reported at around $50 million for Indyke and $25 million for Kahn.

Survivors have pursued them separately in the civil courts. One lawsuit against the estate claimed that people around Epstein provided money and logistical help that made his abuse possible. The estate has settled with survivors, which is yet another reason investigators and lawyers are now examining where the money went and who was in charge of it.

The timing is politically awkward. The Epstein files continue to generate congressional hearings and loud demands for more disclosure, and each new batch of documents raises fresh questions about the people who worked for him, the banks and advisers who did business with him, and how much the people inside his financial operation knew.

Neither Indyke nor Kahn has been charged with any crime in connection with this investigation, an investigation is not a finding of wrongdoing, and prosecutors have not said what evidence they are looking at. What it does mean is that two men who were once central to Epstein’s private affairs are now themselves under federal investigation for what they did there.

ANDREW MOUNTBATTEN-WINDSOR: JUDGE RULES POLICE RAIDS WERE UNLAWFUL

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, has won a round against Thames Valley Police. On October 8, Mr Justice Hilliard ruled in the High Court that the warrants used to search two of his homes in February were unlawful, and quashed them. Andrew was not in court. He did not need to be.

The warrants were issued by a judge at the Old Bailey on February 18, the day before his arrest, and allowed officers to search Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate, where he now lives, and Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, his former home. In the end the police did not even put up a fight. Once Andrew launched his judicial review, the force conceded, and both sides agreed the warrants should go. The problem, the judge said, was that the judge who issued them could not properly have been satisfied that the material being sought was not legally privileged, or “special procedure material”, a category covering confidential material held in public office. Thames Valley Police put it rather more sheepishly, saying “the initial court’s decision to issue warrants under the specific piece of legislation used was incorrect.” It was, in other words, the wrong law. Somebody, somewhere, picked up the wrong form.

Before anybody at Royal Lodge cracks open the champagne, however, the judge was careful to say that this does not make the whole investigation unlawful. “The fact that the search warrants were quashed does not bring an investigation to an end,” he said. Thames Valley Police say their inquiry into alleged misconduct in public office remains ongoing.

The real fight now is over what the police took away. In June the force applied to keep the material it seized, despite the warrants being defective. Andrew opposes that. A private hearing on the question is due in 2027, and until then nobody can say whether the evidence gathered in those searches can lawfully be kept or used. Andrew’s lawyers had already alleged that officers removed “private and confidential material unconnected to the criminal investigation”, according to The Telegraph, though that claim has not been tested by any court.

To recap how we got here: Andrew was arrested on his 66th birthday, February 19, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, over allegations that he shared sensitive information with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as Britain’s trade envoy. He was held for about twelve hours, questioned under caution and released under investigation. The searches ended on February 24. In May the force said it was working with the US Department of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service and witnesses as it examined alleged misconduct exposed by documents published under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He has not been charged.

THE EPSTEIN WHISTLEBLOWER, HIS DEATH, AND THE QUESTIONS FOR THE FCA

Simon Andriesz, a former Wall Street banker who helped bring to light evidence of Howard Lutnick’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, has died in Thailand at the age of 57. His family say he took his own life. His death has turned the spotlight not only on what he said about Lutnick and Epstein, but on how Britain’s financial regulator treated him over a number of years.

Andriesz spent more than three decades in the markets and was a managing director at BGC Group, where Lutnick was chief executive. He later told the BBC that he had come across a 2018 email chain in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed the prospects of a start-up both were involved in. That mattered, because Lutnick had previously described his relationship with Epstein rather differently.

In February, Lutnick admitted he had visited Epstein’s island in 2012, on a family holiday. He told the Senate Appropriations Committee: “I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation. My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies . . . We had lunch on the island. That is true. For an hour.” Lutnick has condemned Epstein’s crimes and denies any wrongdoing.

Andriesz had also taken his concerns about alleged misconduct at BGC to the regulators. According to the Financial Times and the Guardian, the FCA has now opened an internal review of how it dealt with him. The regulator has admitted that one of its officials wrongly told him he had lost his whistleblower protection because his identity had become known. The FCA has since apologised and says its whistleblowing team will get extra guidance and training. Which is something, one supposes.

That admission is now at the heart of the row over whether the regulator did enough. A cross-party group of MPs, along with whistleblowing campaigners, wants a proper independent inquiry rather than an internal one. The FCA has instead appointed one of its own non-executive directors, Lea Paterson, to look at what happened. Its chairman, Ashley Alder, defended the choice: “She fully understands that her role is independent. She will report to the board, and the board will publish the findings, so we will guarantee transparency over what she did.” Whether the campaigners will be reassured by an independent review conducted by a member of the board it is reviewing remains to be seen.

Andriesz had spoken openly about what blowing the whistle had cost him. At a Transparency Task Force event after the BBC investigation was broadcast, he talked about the damage to his career, his health and his family. He had also complained that the FCA had not dealt properly with what he told it. The American authorities had acted on parts of the wider BGC case, and he received a substantial whistleblower award in the US, but he continued to argue that the British response had fallen far short.

His family say he died on September 23 and that there is no suggestion of foul play. Andriesz committed suicide by hanging and there is no public evidence that his death had anything to do with what he revealed about Lutnick, Epstein or BGC.

His death joins a short and grim list of people in the Epstein story whose deaths have been ruled or reported as suicides. Epstein himself died in federal custody in 2019, a finding later reaffirmed by official reviews. Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modelling agent closely linked to Epstein, died in a Paris prison in 2022 while awaiting trial on charges involving minors. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, died in Western Australia in 2025, according to her family and police reports at the time. Andriesz is the latest confirmed case. Daniel Siad, another French model scout whose name crops up repeatedly in the Epstein files, does not belong on that list: the French authorities have not established suicide as the cause of his death.

TUPAC SHAKUR MURDER: FORMER GANG BOSS DUANE ‘KEFFE D’ DAVIS SENTENCED TO 40 YEARS IN PRISON

Former gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis has been sentenced to at least 40 years in prison for orchestrating the murder of rap superstar Tupac Shakur, bringing a major breakthrough in one of America’s most notorious cold cases.

Davis, 63, was convicted in September of murder with a deadly weapon over the drive-by shooting that killed Shakur in Las Vegas on 7 September 1996. He did not fire the fatal shots himself, but prosecutors argued that he organised the attack and supplied the gun used in the killing. Davis has vowed to appeal.

During Tuesday’s sentencing hearing, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo accused Davis of spending years publicly boasting about his involvement in a crime that had profound consequences for Shakur’s family and the music industry.

Shakur’s sister, Sekyiwa, told the court that her brother’s death had devastated their family.

“The loss of Tupac, for a long time, crippled my family,” she said, describing his ambitions to improve the world and help his local community.

She urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence, telling Davis he would have time in prison to contemplate the consequences of his actions. Shakur’s brother, Maurice, also called for the longest possible punishment.

Judge Carli Kierny delivered a pointed rebuke before sentencing Davis, telling him: “You don’t get to take a man from his family.”

She added: “The world never forgot about him and his death.”

When asked whether he wished to address the court, Davis replied: “I’m good. I’m gonna appeal this case for sure.”

The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Davis’s own statements. He repeatedly claimed to have been inside the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired. During a confidential police interview in 2008, conducted in connection with the murder of fellow rapper Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G., Davis described his involvement in Shakur’s killing.

He later expanded on those claims in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, and subsequent media interviews. Those public disclosures undermined a previous agreement that had protected him from prosecution, allowing his earlier police interview to be used against him at trial.

Davis’s defence argued that his accounts were fabricated exaggerations designed to sell books and attract attention. Prosecutors maintained that he had ordered the shooting and supplied the weapon allegedly used by his nephew, Orlando Anderson, who died in an unrelated shooting in 1998.

Shakur was just 25 when he was killed, already established as one of hip-hop’s most influential artists, with more than 75 million records sold worldwide.

For nearly three decades, his murder fuelled conspiracy theories and public fascination. Davis’s conviction marks the first in the case, although his planned appeal means the legal battle may not yet be over.

Now, let’s jump back into the case and continue our journey through this sordid scandal.

Rina Oh is an artist who lives in a leafy suburb of New Jersey. If you were to see her passing in the street, you’d be forgiven for not recognising her, dismissing her as just another attractive, well-dressed wealthy resident of an area filled with large sprawling mini mansions and successful business owners who have opted for a comfortably-positioned environment. Close enough to drive into downtown New York. Far away enough to avoid its chaotic crowds and suffocating skyscrapers, replaced by calm farms and remote undisturbed walks beneath the never-ending oaks of the Pine Barrens.

But she has, in fact, been the subject of a few recent television interviews, including Piers Morgan Uncensored. She’s even now writing a book. It will focus on her experience as a victim of Jeffrey Epstein.

For a long time, she’d stayed away from giving interviews at all, and for good reason. She’d been labelled as a “recruiter”, despite only having introduced overage women to the late disgraced billionaire who, at the time, she considered an art patron of sorts. Rina had first met him when she was in her early twenties. Lisa Phillips, a friend who met Epstein in her twenties and with whom Rina socialised in New York, had introduced the pair, telling Rina that she would take her to him, with promises of Epstein being a “rich guy” who could help her with her art career.

You can listen to the audio of my full shocking interviews with Rina on my Substack at jaybeecher.com.

“I had a very nice life before I met Jeffrey,” Rina Oh told me, her New Jersey accent gentle and calm as she sat perched on the edge of a small sofa draped with a white sheet. Around us, in her narrow art studio, an array of paintings adorned the whitewashed walls. Vibrantly colored paintings of trafficked girls from minority groups. Paintings of American presidents engaging in a range of vices, including the partaking of cocaine. The table in the center of the room was covered in small and medium-sized clay busts and statues. Intricate, stunning pieces, some of them of Rina herself, depicted in different stages of her life and progression. 

To the rear of the room, partitioned by tall shelves cluttered with works in the making, a small area festooned with tools and brushes contained a hidden fridge from which just moments earlier she’d fetched a fine, imported bottle of Prosecco. I sipped from my glass and listened to her, engrossed, as she delivered lengthy answers to my many questions.  

LISTEN TO THIS FULL EPISODE BELOW:

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So, let’s begin...

It was an early Sunday morning with gentle winds and the sun partially poking through the clouds, when a deliveryman scooped up a weighty stack of newspapers from a London newsagent’s and conveyed them, first by van, then by foot, to the statue-flanked black iron gates of Royal Mews behind Buckingham Palace. Handing the consignment over to a security guard, the stack then embarked on the daily humdrum journey through a chain of staff, making its way into the heart of the British monarchy; through security checks and scanners; to the mail room staff who arranged the newspapers in a particular order, and finally into the hands of Queen Elizabeth’s equerry, a senior personal aide, who arranged them neatly on a tray.

Briefly checking his suit was straight and corgi hair-free, he glanced down at the Mail on Sunday’s headline and, on seeing the photograph printed beside it, gulped. His perfectly polished shoes marched him down the corridor, leading him into the first-floor dining room, overlooking the Palace’s gardens, just on time, just as they did every morning, 8:30 a.m on the button. The Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, were already sitting at the table, the monarch tucking into her usual breakfast of Special K cereal from a Tupperware container and toast and marmalade.

Placing the tray down on a white clothed side table, the valet briskly departed, glad that he would be absent when the ink-based grenade detonated. Sifting through their favourites first, Philip and Elizabeth scanned the usual stories and sections. Then she saw the front page of The Mail on Sunday, passing over the story of a crack team of commandos who had just rescued 150 civilians from remote oilfields in war-torn Libya, and straight to the tabloid’s main story with a headline that read, ‘Exclusive: Andrew and 17-year-old girl at centre of under-age sex case that has scandalised America.’

It wasn’t the first damaging headline to hit her favourite son.

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You can either listen to the full explosive episode below or read the full transcript, with images.

Let’s start by listening to Jeffrey himself, and then I’ll reveal, for the first time, what Jeffrey was trying to tell us. The following audio clip comes from a deposition conducted with him in 2016.

Jeffrey repeated this answer over and over throughout the deposition, refusing, on the instructions of his lawyers, to answer questions, but evidently steadfast in his desire to ensure that this side of the story was recorded.

He knew that the transcript would be made public. He knew that the video recordings would, after being unsealed, appear in the media.

He wanted us to hear his words, specifically his allegations against lawyers he now found himself sitting opposite from.

But why?

To answer that question, let’s take a deep dive into the early, murky days where attorneys and journalists hunted down scandals to turn into cash cows.

NOTE: A special thanks to Mike Strange for helping to edit this episode.

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It was back in May 2022 when I first loaded a backpack with essentials - clothes, battery packs, a torch, a map, plenty of notepads and pens, and a ballistic vest kindly given to me by a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

I’d intended to only stay here for three weeks to cover Russia’s ongoing brutal invasio…

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Today, we’ll be continuing our journey together through the sordid Epstein scandal, and I’ll be covering the tragic death of one of Jeffrey’s sexual partners, the true story behind his first arrest and imprisonment, and I’ll be reading from Jeffrey’s long-lost statement so that we can hear his own version of events from beyond the grave.

You can either listen to the full explosive episode below or read the transcript, with images.

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In this episode, we’ll continue our journey through the Epstein scandal by diving into his first arrest, exploring the aftermath, the hidden truth behind his plea deal, and following Jeff’s life as he continued to surround himself with an entourage of young attractive women, massage girls and escorts.

…

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