CRUCIAL evidence used to prosecute Britain’s worst child serial killer Lucy Letby has been ripped apart by experts who claim “grossly misleading” methods were used to secure the nurse’s conviction.
Lucy Letby was handed 15 whole life sentences, meaning she will never be released from prisonCredit: AP
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A new ITV documentary explores the views of a team of international scientists who claim the prosecution case simply doesn’t stand up to scrutinyCredit: MEN Media
She was handed 15 whole life sentences, meaning she will never be released from prison.
Described as a cold-blooded, calculating killer, Letby was said to have used her trusted role on a neonatal intensive care unit to cause catastrophic harm to the most vulnerable newborn babies – without leaving a trace.
A new ITV documentary explores the views of a team of international scientists who claim the prosecution case simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, including crucial statistic evidence and claims over the methods used to kill newborn babies.
Doctors raised suspicions that Lucy Letby had been present at a number of these baby deaths, so she was moved off the unit and into a desk job.
A team from the Royal College of Paediatrics was invited in to investigate. It identified a shortage of nurses and a lack of consultant cover risking patient safety – but could find no definitive reason for the rise in mortality.
However, the unit’s senior doctors were unhappy with the outcome of the reviews and wrote to hospital bosses doubting that the deaths and collapses could be explained by natural causes.
In March 2017 the police were called, and in November 2020 Letby was charged with seven counts of murder and 15 counts of attempted murder, relating to 17 babies. She pleaded not guilty.
I was sure Lucy Letby was guilty… then I spent weeks poring over evidence and now I’m convinced no babies were murdered
The prosecution’s case centred on a few central pillars; a shift chart, which showed Letby was always there when something terrible happened, hand-written notes presented as confessions, blood tests suggesting babies had been poisoned, and medical evidence taken from the babies’ notes to support theories that Letby had attacked them.
The person who came up with most of those theories was a retired paediatrician, Dr Dewi Evans.
During the trial there was eight months of prosecution evidence and a series of prosecution witnesses.
But Letby’s legal team presented not a single expert medical witness in her defence.
She was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others.
AS the second anniversary of Lucy Letby’s incarceration approaches, I remain convinced of her innocence.
This investigation by ITV only serves to bolster my opinion.
As the title of the documentary alludes, English justice requires a jury to convict on evidence that is beyond reasonable doubt.
Programme makers have gathered a raft of experts and experienced medics who, in my opinion, ably demonstrate that the Letby prosecution falls well short of that threshold.
I believe it rightly highlights flaws in the statistical evidence put before a jury at her first trial.
A chart showed a cluster of 25 suspicious baby deaths and collapses matched against the shift rota of the 38 nurses who worked on the unit. Only Letby was at the scene for every death and collapse.
Yet, the jury wasn’t told about six other baby deaths in the period for which she faced no charges.
Leading medical statistician Professor Jane Hutton says of the chart in the programme: “This is a summary that is so crude it can only be described as grossly misleading.”
The documentary examines Dr Ravi Jayaram’s assertion that Letby didn’t raise the alarm over a dying baby.
It has since emerged that an email sent by Dr Jayaram to colleagues suggests Letby did actually alert him. It wasn’t shown to juries at either of her trials.
I found convincing an expert on the documentary debunking the prosecution’s assertion that Letby poisoned some of the babies with insulin.
While international expert Dr Shoo Lee – a vocal supporter of Letby’s innocence – insisted that all the babies said to have been killed or injured by the nurse actually died from “natural causes or just bad medical care.”
It mirrors my belief that incompetence not malice was behind the baby’s deaths.
ITV’s documentary will only add to the increasing groundswell of opinion that an innocent woman now languishes behind bars.
As the country started to reflect on the horror of Letby’s crimes, concerns were already being raised about the evidence that was used.
Mark McDonald, Letby’s new barrister, was instructed last September after two failed attempts to appeal her convictions.
He says: “People started contacting me, medically qualified people, scientifically qualified people, statisticians saying ‘we think something has gone wrong here’.”
In the weeks after Letby was convicted, professor of statistics Richard Gill was among a handful of professionals who were questioning the verdict.
He is known to be controversial and outspoken but his work has led to two nurses in Italy and the Netherlands who were convicted of similar crimes having their convictions overturned.
Professor Gill believed the shift chart which helped convict Letby was misleading.
Leading medical statistician Professor Jane Hutton agrees, saying: “It has influenced a lot of people into thinking she must’ve done it because she was always there and nobody else was.
“It has a very strong visual impact but it doesn’t tell you how the data has been selected. You know it is clear that this is aimed to present a conclusion.”
Their main concern was the left hand column of the chart. Each entry presents a death or life-threatening event.
But these were not all the deaths or life-threatening events in that period. The prosecution made a selection.
Dewi Evans’ early reports for the police identified other events which he said were attacks on babies. But these happened when Letby wasn’t on duty and those events don’t appear on the chart.
“This is a summary that is so crude it can only be described as grossly misleading,” says Jane Hutton.
According to the prosecution, Letby used various methods to try to kill. The most simple was by dislodging a baby’s breathing tube.
This is a summary that is so crude it can only be described as grossly misleading
Jane Hutton
Countess of Chester paediatrician Dr Ravi Jayaram told the court he had never known of the breathing tube of a baby born at 25 weeks to become accidentally dislodged.
But Dr Richard Taylor, a neonatologist with over 30 years experience, and some of his colleagues disagree.
He explains: “The prosecution allege that the tube was intentionally dislodged and the first thing I would say is accidental dislodgement is distinctly common.
“It can be dislodged by the operator and it can also be dislodged by the baby themselves just by moving their head or thrusting their tongue.”
Convictions ‘unsafe’
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As the country started to reflect on the horror of Letby’s crimes, concerns were already being raised about the evidence that was usedCredit: Alamy
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Lucy Letby has a number of high profile supporters including MP David Davis and Dr Shoo LeeCredit: Alamy
The jury couldn’t decide if Letby was guilty of attempting to murder one of the babies, Baby K, by dislodging its breathing tube. That single case went to a retrial and Dr Ravi Jayaram gave evidence.
He told the court he went into the room and saw the baby’s blood oxygen levels dropping dangerously low while Letby stood by and did nothing. He also said Letby had not called for help.
But an email has come to light from Jayaram detailing the event in which he said Letby herself had called him in because the baby was collapsing. The jury was never told about this email.
The documentary claims that Dr Jayaram isn’t the only medic who appears to have contradicted his own testimony. Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering baby C by forcing air into its stomach.
ITV’s documentary will only add to the increasing groundswell of opinion that an innocent woman now languishes behind bars
The Sun’s Oliver Harvey
Dr Dewi Evans based this theory on an X-ray taken on June 12, 2015 which showed air in the baby’s stomach. But Letby had been off work that day and she hadn’t met Baby C when the X-ray was taken.
When challenged on this at trial, Dr Evans couldn’t rule out that air had been injected into the veins, but the prosecution maintained that Letby must have injected air into the baby’s stomach.
Now Dr Evans has committed to another theory. He says Letby killed Baby C a day later by injecting air into the veins, causing something called an air embolism.
Mark McDonald claims the fact that Dr Evans has changed his mind, and was the lead expert for the prosecution, makes all the convictions unsafe.
Mental anguish
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Mark McDonald, Lucy Letby’s barrister, claims the fact that Dr Evans has changed his mind, and was the lead expert for the prosecution, makes all the convictions unsafe
Police investigated Letby for three-and-a-half years before she was charged. During searches of her home, some notes were found which appeared incriminating, with one noting: “I’m evil, I did this.”
In court Letby admitted writing the notes, but said she did so at a time of mental anguish and she was just scribbling down thoughts as a form of therapy.
The hospital had provided a therapist to support Letby during the investigations. Her name appears several times on the notes.
The jury was never told it was this therapist who suggested Letby express her feelings in this way as part of her treatment.
Nearly a year after the police began investigating Letby they made a breakthrough: blood tests which showed high levels of insulin and low c-peptide. The prosecution said this was proof that insulin had been given to the babies externally and was therefore an attempt to poison them.
The prosecution told the jury that two of the babies had been poisoned with insulin and they had test results that proved it.
But a leading forensic scientist says those results cannot be relied on as they will have been done quickly in a medical setting for diagnostic purposes and were not retested to forensic standards.
Over the last six months a team of scientists have been instructed by Letby’s legal team.
They have been given access to the babies’ medical notes and asked to look again at the insulin test results.
Chemical engineer Helen Shannon says: “We have spent hundreds of hours investigating every facet of the science and there is a completely obvious solution that does not involve poisoning.”
We have spent hundreds of hours investigating every facet of the science and there is a completely obvious solution that does not involve poisoning
Helen Shannon
“The insulin case has applied basic clinical guidance for healthy adults to tiny, compromised neonates,” adds Helen.
Many newborn babies are born with proteins in their blood called antibodies. The team says that insulin in the blood stream can stick to these antibodies, giving a higher reading, while c-peptide continues to be cleared, giving a low reading.
Helen says: “It doesn’t have any effect on the child at all, it just floats around. So as a result it gives a very high reading on the test that was done at the time.
“We can’t see any justification at all for the prosecution statement that it can only be poisoning.”
Earlier this year a panel of international medical experts, who reviewed Letby’s case, told a press conference that they did not find any evidence of murder.
Chairman Dr Shoo Lee provided what he said were highly detailed grounds baby-by-baby for concluding that none of the murders occurred.
He added: “We did not find any murders. In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.
“Lucy was charged with seven murders and seven attempted murders. In our opinion, the medical opinion, the medical evidence doesn’t support murder in any of these babies.”
‘Deeply distressing’
The expert panel report has been delivered to the Criminal Cases Review Commission and her case can only be returned to the Court of Appeal if there is new evidence.
To reexamine the cause of the babies’ deaths, the expert panel was given access to all the babies’ medical records to compile their report. For Professor Neena Modi those records tell a story of failure by the hospital and the doctors.
She says: “On reading through the detailed medical notes, what was harrowing was seeing a story unfold where possibly things could have been recognised earlier and interventions put in place and possibly for some of the babies the outcomes might not have been what they were. This was deeply distressing.”
The increase in deaths coincided with the unit having to take babies who were more unwell than they were equipped or staffed for, it is claimed.
Professor Modi says: “The babies we are referring to were all extremely vulnerable. Some of them were demonstrably and recognisably on a knife edge.
“Others could have been recognised to be on a knife edge but they were not monitored appropriately or treated appropriately.
“Problems went unrecognised until the point at which a baby deteriorated very abruptly. The babies might not have died had their difficulties been addressed earlier.”
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To reexamine the cause of the babies’ deaths, the expert panel was given access to all the babies’ medical records to compile their report. For Professor Neena Modi those records tell a story of failure by the hospital and the doctorsCredit: Alamy
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Earlier this year a panel of international medical experts, who reviewed Letby’s case, told a press conference that they did not find any evidence of murderCredit: PA
In a statement to ITV, the Crown Prosecution Service said: “Lucy Letby was convicted of 15 separate counts following two jury trials. In May 2024, the Court of Appeal dismissed Letby’s leave to appeal on all grounds rejecting her argument that expert prosecution evidence was flawed.”
They confirmed they are considering a file of evidence from the police relating to further deaths and non-fatal collapses of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital and Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
The Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: “Due to the Thirlwall Inquiry and ongoing police investigations it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”
Dr Dewi Evans told ITV that his evidence was subject to cross examination agreed by a jury after thorough review from a judge and subsequently agreed by the Court of Appeal.
He added: “None of the evidence presented by Shoo Lee’s expert panel has been subject to any such scrutiny and it contains factual errors. It is trial by speculation.”
Dr Ravi Jayaram declined to comment.
Lucy Letby: Beyond all Reasonable Doubt? Is on ITV1 on Sunday 3 August.
An ITV documentary, Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, features medical experts questioning the evidence that convicted nurse Lucy Letby of killing seven babies and attempting to kill seven others, as her legal team pursues a potential appeal
22:34, 02 Aug 2025Updated 22:35, 02 Aug 2025
Lucy Letby convictions under scrutiny as experts challenge trial evidence in new ITV doc(Image: Chester Standard / SWNS.com)
Several medical experts criticise the “deeply disturbing” and “flawed” evidence used to convict killer nurse Lucy Letby in a new documentary on TV tonight.
He adds: “In the trial, they started from the starting point, ‘She has done harm. Now we have to show how she has harmed each child….we’re just going to put together a theory.’ And she was convicted on that theory.”
Two appeals have failed. But in February a panel of medical experts, led by Dr Shoo Lee, found Letby did not murder any babies. Her defence team has now submitted an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Dr Neena Modi, ex-president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, says: “It’s been deeply disturbing that one can have such a… tremendously important trial that seems to have been conducted with so many flaws.”
Letby was found guilty of murdering seven newborn babies(Image: MEN MEDIA)
One alleged flaw is a shift chart, used to prove Letby was always present when the babies were harmed at the Countess of Chester Hospital from 2015 to 2016.
But statistician Professor Jane Hutton says some incidents, when Letby was not working, were left off, adding: “This is a summary that is so crude it can only be described as grossly misleading.”
It was also claimed Letby must have caused one baby’s death by removing a breathing tube. But several experts say the tubes can be dislodged for a “variety of reasons”.
Notes by Letby, including the phrase “I am evil I did this” were presented as confessional in court. But it is claimed she was encouraged by hospital staff to write down her feelings to help cope with stress.
Baby killer Lucy Letby has reportedly grown closer to another notorious child murderer in jail(Image: AP)
It is also alleged the prosecution’s lead expert, Dr Dewi Evans, has altered his view about how three babies died since the case.
But he denies this, saying his evidence has been agreed by a jury and the Court of Appeal. He also argues the case by Dr Shoo Lee’s panel has not been held to scrutiny in court and contains significant factual errors.
The CPS said: “Lucy Letby was convicted of 15 separate counts following two jury trials.
“In May 2024, the Court of Appeal dismissed Letby’s leave to appeal on all grounds, rejecting her argument that expert prosecution evidence was flawed.”
It added that it is considering police files on further baby deaths and collapses at the Countess of Chester and Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? is on ITV1, at 10.20pm, tonight.
Information, in the second Trump administration, is a currency of power and fear. Last week, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi announced sweeping subpoenas targeting physicians and medical providers who offer care for transgender youth. The aim is not to initiate prosecutions: Indeed, the legal theories upon which such prosecutions might rest are tenuous at best.
By filing these investigative demands, the government plainly hopes to chill medical providers from offering expert care. This strategy can work even if, at the end of the day, the government’s threats are hollow as a matter of law. The White House’s plainly unconstitutional attacks on law firms, for example, have substantially worked — even though the minority of firms to challenge the orders rapidly won relief.
Fortunately, the legal system is not powerless in the face of such overreaching: Federal district courts have the authority, and the obligation, to recognize that patient-physician dealings are akin to attorney-client and spousal discussions. Both of the latter benefit from judicially created privileges — or legal shields that individuals can invoke against the state’s probing. At a moment when not just gender medicine but also reproductive care more generally is in peril, federal courts can and should step in and shield intimately private medical data as well.
We suspect that many people believe that what they tell their doctors is already private. They’re right, but only sort of. There’s a federal law called HIPAA that limits what your doctor can do with the information. It says that your doctor can’t, for instance, sell your medical records to the newspaper. In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services also issued a HIPAA “privacy rule” that heightened protections for reproductive healthcare information. (Last month, a federal district court in Texas declared the rule unconstitutional — so its future is uncertain.)
Even with the privacy rule, however, HIPAA hides a gaping hole: It allows disclosures “required by law.” And the law explicitly permits disclosures pursuant to subpoenas of all kinds — judicial, grand jury or administrative — including those issued by Bondi. So if the Justice Department subpoenas your intimate and sensitive healthcare information, HIPAA won’t stop that.
In previous academic work, we’ve urged Congress and state legislatures to fill this gap. Blue states have acted to curtail cooperation with other states — but there’s a limit to what states can do when the federal government demands information.
Yet there remains one entity that can, and should, act immediately to shield reproductive healthcare information: the same federal district courts that have been at the forefront of pushing back on the Trump administration’s many illegal and constitutional actions. We think federal courts should extend existing “privileges,” as evidentiary shields are called, to encompass both records of gender-affirming and transgender medical care, and also records of reproductive care more generally.
A privilege not only bars protected information from being admitted into evidence at trial, but also blocks subpoenas, warrants and other court orders.
Federal district courts have a general power to create privileges, and they often do so when people already have a reasonable expectation that their conversations will not be disclosed. Most people have heard of the attorney-client privilege, which means that you can confide in your lawyer without worrying that what you say will end up being used in court. But privileges can apply to all sorts of other information as well: what you tell your spouse, what you tell your spiritual advisor and even highway safety data that your state reports to the feds in exchange for funding. Existing court-created privileges protect not only attorney-client but also executive-branch communications.
Federal courts should recognize a privilege for doctor-patient communications in gender and reproductive medicine. They could do so if one of the physicians subpoenaed recently goes to court. The protection they seek is simply an extension of widely recognized legal principles and expectations of privacy. Federal courts already have recognized a privilege for patient communications with psychotherapists, and many state courts also offer privilege protections for broader doctor-patient communications.
Importantly, it is the job of federal district courts to craft evidence-related rules. After all, these are the judges who are closest to litigants and the mechanics of evidence protection. District courts don’t need to wait around for the Supreme Court to act on this, because the Federal Rules of Evidence left privileges to common law development in the district courts. And under the well-established balancing test that lower federal courts should follow when they create new privileges, we think our proposed privilege is an easy case: It serves a public purpose and protects what should be recognized as a valued interest of “transcendent importance” — privacy for our most intimate medical care.
The case for recognizing the privilege in respect to the recent subpoenas is especially strong: The attorney general is seeking to chill physicians from providing advice that is protected by the 1st Amendment and care that is guaranteed by federal statutes. Such subpoenas are directly at odds with the rule of law.
Today, it is trans kids; tomorrow, it will be people seeking an abortion or contraception. We should not have to wait for the federal government to go this far before our privacy gets the shield that it deserves.
Aziz Huq and Rebecca Wexler are professors of law at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School, respectively.
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” the Justice Department acknowledged Monday as it said no more files related to the wealthy financier’s sex trafficking investigation would be made public despite promises from Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi that had raised the expectations of conservative influencers and conspiracy theorists.
The acknowledgment that the well-connected Epstein did not have a list of clients to whom underage girls were trafficked represents a public walk-back of a theory that the Trump administration had helped promote, with Bondi suggesting in a Fox News interview earlier this year that such a document was “sitting on my desk” in preparation for release.
Even as it released video from inside a New York jail meant to definitively prove that Epstein died by suicide, the department also said in a memo that it was refusing to release other evidence investigators had collected. Bondi for weeks had suggested that more material was going to be revealed — “It’s a new administration and everything is going to come out to the public,” she said at one point — after a first document dump she had hyped angered President Trump’s base by failing to deliver revelations.
That episode, in which conservative internet personalities were invited to the White House in February and provided with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain, has spurred far-right influencers to lambast and deride Bondi.
After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were pouring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI. In a March TV interview, she claimed the Biden administration “sat on these documents, no one did anything with them,” adding: “Sadly these people don’t believe in transparency, but I think more unfortunately, I think a lot of them don’t believe in honesty.”
But after a months-long review of evidence in the government’s possession, the Justice Department determined that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo says. The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
The two-page memo bore the logos of the Justice Department and the FBI but was not signed by any individual official.
“One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims,” the memo says. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.”
Conservatives who have sought proof of a government cover-up of Epstein’s activities and death expressed outrage Monday over the department’s position. Far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted: “We were all told more was coming. That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wrote that “next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed,’ calling it “over the top sickening.” Elon Musk shared a series of photos of a clown applying makeup appearing to mock Bondi for saying the client list doesn’t exist after suggesting months ago that it was on her desk.
Among the evidence that the Justice Department says it has in its possession are photographs and more than 10,000 videos and images that officials said depicted child sex abuse material or “other pornography.” Bondi had earlier suggested that part of the reason for the delay in releasing additional Epstein materials was because the FBI needed to review “tens of thousands” of recordings that she said showed Epstein “with children or child porn.”
The Associated Press published an article last week about the unanswered questions surrounding those videos.
Multiple people who participated in the criminal cases of Epstein and former British socialite girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell told AP that they had not seen and did not know of a trove of recordings along the lines of what Bondi had referenced. Indictments and detention memos also don’t allege the existence of video recordings and neither Epstein nor Maxwell were charged with possession of child sex abuse material even though that would have been easier for prosecutors to prove than the sex trafficking counts they faced.
The AP did find reference in a filing in a civil lawsuit to the discovery by the Epstein estate of videos and pictures that could constitute child sex abuse material, but lawyers involved in that case said a protective order prevents them from discovering the specifics of that evidence.
The Justice Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions from AP about the videos Bondi was referencing.
Monday’s memo does not explain when or where they were located, what they depict and whether they were newly found as investigators scoured their collection of evidence or were known for some time to have been in the government’s possession.
Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019, weeks after his arrest on sex trafficking charges, in a suicide that foreclosed the possibility of a trial.
The department’s disclosure that Epstein took his own life is hardly a revelation even though conspiracy theorists have continued to challenge that conclusion.
In 2019, for instance, then-Atty. Gen. William Barr told the AP in an interview that he had personally reviewed security video that revealed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died and Barr had concluded that Epstein’s suicide was the result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”
More recently, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have insisted in television and podcast interviews that the evidence was clear that Epstein had killed himself.
MI5 head Sir Ken McCallum said the Security Service would co-operate fully with the new investigation
The High Court has ordered a “robust and independent” new investigation into how MI5 gave false evidence to multiple courts, after rejecting two official inquiries provided by the Security Service as seriously “deficient”.
The two reviews took place after the BBC revealed MI5 had lied to three courts in a case concerning a neo-Nazi state agent who abused women.
A panel of three senior judges said it would be “premature” to decide whether to begin contempt of court proceedings against any individuals before the new investigation was complete.
They also “commended” the BBC for “bringing these matters to light”.
The two official inquiries, one of which was commissioned by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, absolved MI5 and its officers of deliberate wrongdoing.
But the judgement concludes that the “investigations carried out by MI5 to date suffer from serious procedural deficiencies” and that “we cannot rely on their conclusions”.
The three judges – England and Wales’ most senior judge, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Sue Carr, President of the King’s Bench Division Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Chamberlain, said: “It is to be hoped that events such as these will never be repeated.”
Their judgement says the new investigation should be carried out under the auspices of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner Sir Brian Leveson, who has oversight of MI5’s surveillance activities. His office, IPCO, was also provided with false evidence by MI5 in the case.
MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum repeated his “full and unreserved apology for the errors made in these proceedings”.
He said resolving this matter was “of the highest priority for MI5” and that they would co-operate fully with IPCO.
“MI5’s job is to keep the country safe. Maintaining the trust of the courts is essential to that mission,” he said.
A BBC spokesperson said: “We are pleased this decision has been reached and that the key role of our journalist Daniel De Simone in bringing this to light has been acknowledged by the judges.
“We believe our journalism on this story has always been in the highest public interest.”
Avalon/PA
The panel of judges hearing the case was Lady Chief Justice Baroness Sue Carr (centre), Mr Justice Chamberlain and President of the King’s Bench Division Dame Victoria Sharp
The case began in 2022 with an attempt to block the BBC from publishing a story about a neo-Nazi agent known as X. It has become a major test of how the courts view MI5 and the credibility of its evidence.
MI5 gave evidence to three courts, saying that it had never breached its core secrecy policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) that X was a state agent.
An MI5 officer had confirmed the agent’s status as he tried to persuade me to drop an investigation into X, a violent misogynist who used his Security Service role to coerce and terrify his former girlfriend, known publicly as “Beth”.
The two official inquiries criticised by the High Court were an internal MI5 inquiry and an “external” investigation by the government’s former chief lawyer, Sir Jonathan Jones KC. The latter was commissioned by the home sectary and Sir Ken.
But the judgement said that “there was in our view a fundamental incoherence in Sir Jonathan’s terms of reference”.
Beth has called for a public apology by MI5
The ruling said he was asked to establish the facts of what happened but not to “make findings about why specific individuals did or did not do certain things”.
However, the judges said Sir Jonathan nevertheless “did make findings” that there was no deliberate attempt by anyone to mislead the court – without ever speaking to an MI5 officer at the centre of the case and without considering key additional BBC evidence about what took place.
The judgement also found that MI5’s director general of strategy, who is the organisation’s third-in-command, gave misleading assurances to the court in a witness statement.
He said its original explanations were “a fair and accurate account” of secret material which, at that point, had not been disclosed.
The court forced the government and MI5 to hand over the material, and the judges concluded that MI5’s explanations were not “fair and accurate” and “omitted several critical matters” – including that IPCO had been misled and what was known by several MI5 officers at relevant times.
Their judgement said that it was “regrettable that MI5’s explanations to this court were given in a piecemeal and unsatisfactory way – and only following the repeated intervention of the court”.
“The impression has been created that the true circumstances in which false evidence came to be given have had to be extracted from, not volunteered by, MI5,” they said.
X physically and sexually abused Beth, attacking her with a machete
Today’s highly critical judgement also found:
In this one case MI5 has misled two separate branches of the High Court, as well as the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, and security cleared barristers representing the BBC known as special advocates
MI5’s core NCND secrecy policy about the status of agents was maintained in the legal proceedings long after “any justification for its maintenance had disappeared”
The BBC and I, as well as our lawyers and special advocates, should be “commended” for the “central role” we have played in bringing these matters to light
The judgement said that a “major” failing by the official reviews is that they did not contact me, despite the fact I was the other person involved in the key events.
The judges said that, having “considered carefully” further evidence I submitted in response to the reviews – such as records and notes that showed both reviews included false statements – it “paints a significantly different picture” to the one presented by MI5.
They added that they accepted the internal investigators and Sir Jonathan in the external review later considered my evidence “in good faith”.
But they said that because they had already reached a conclusion that there had been no deliberate attempt to mislead the court, they would “inevitably find it difficult” to revise those conclusions in the light of evidence which “fundamentally affects” the basis of their conclusions.
WASHINGTON — It was a surprising statement from Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi as the Trump administration promises to release more files from its sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein: The FBI, she said, was reviewing “tens of thousands of videos” of the wealthy financier “with children or child porn.”
The comment, made to reporters at the White House days after a similar remark to a stranger with a hidden camera, raised the stakes for President Trump’s administration to prove it has in its possession previously unseen compelling evidence. That task is all the more pressing after an earlier document dump that Bondi hyped angered elements of Trump’s base by failing to deliver new bombshells and as administration officials who had promised to unlock supposed secrets of the so-called government “deep state” struggle to fulfill that pledge.
Yet weeks after Bondi’s remarks, it remains unclear what she was referring to.
The Associated Press spoke with lawyers and law enforcement officials in criminal cases of Epstein and socialite former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell who said they hadn’t seen and didn’t know of a trove of recordings like what Bondi described. Indictments and detention memos do not reference the existence of videos of Epstein with children, and neither was charged with possession of child sex abuse material even though that offense would have been much easier to prove than the sex trafficking counts they faced.
One potential clue may lie in a little-noticed 2023 court filing — among hundreds of documents reviewed by the AP — in which Epstein’s estate was revealed to have located an unspecified number of videos and photos that it said might contain child sex abuse material. But even that remains shrouded in secrecy with lawyers involved in that civil case saying a protective order prevents them from discussing it.
The filing suggests a discovery of recordings after the criminal cases had concluded, but if that’s what Bondi was referencing, the Justice Department has not said.
The department declined repeated requests from the AP to speak with officials overseeing the Epstein review. Spokespeople did not answer a list of questions about Bondi’s comments, including when and where the recordings were procured, what they depict and whether they were newly discovered as authorities dug through their evidence collection or were known for some time to have been in the government’s possession.
“Outside sources who make assertions about materials included in the DOJ’s review cannot speak to what materials are included in the DOJ’s review,” spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said in a statement.
Bondi has faced pressure after first release fell short of expectations
Epstein’s crimes, high-profile connections and jailhouse suicide have made the case a magnet for conspiracy theorists and online sleuths seeking proof of a cover-up. Elon Musk entered the frenzy during his acrimonious fallout with Trump when he said without evidence in a since-deleted social media post that the reason the Epstein files have yet to be released is that the Republican president is featured in them.
During a Fox News Channel interview in February, Bondi suggested an alleged Epstein “client list” was sitting on her desk. The next day, the Justice Department distributed binders marked “declassified” to far-right influencers at the White House, but it quickly became clear much of the information had long been in the public domain. No “client list” was disclosed, and there’s no evidence such a document exists.
The flop left conservatives fuming and failed to extinguish conspiracy theories that for years have spiraled around Epstein’s case. Right wing-personality Laura Loomer called on Bondi to resign, branding her a “total liar.”
Afterward, Bondi said an FBI “source” informed her of the existence of thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents and ordered the bureau to provide the “full and complete Epstein files,” including any videos. Employees since then have logged hours reviewing records to prepare them for release. It’s unclear when that might happen.
In April, Bondi was approached in a restaurant by a woman with a hidden camera who asked about the status of the Epstein files release. Bondi replied that there were tens of thousands of videos “and it’s all with little kids,” so she said the FBI had to go through each one.
After conservative activist James O’Keefe, who obtained and later publicized the hidden-camera video, alerted the Justice Department to the encounter, Bondi told reporters at the White House: “There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”
The comments tapped into long-held suspicions that, despite the release over the years of thousands of records documenting Epstein’s activities, damaging details about him or other prominent figures remain concealed.
The situation was further muddied by recent comments from FBI Director Kash Patel to podcaster Joe Rogan that did not repeat Bondi’s account about tens of thousands of videos.
Though not asked explicitly about Bondi, Patel dismissed the possibility of incriminating videos of powerful Epstein friends, saying, “If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island and I’m in charge, don’t you think you’d see it?” Asked whether the narrative “might not be accurate that there’s video of these guys doing this,” he replied, “Exactly.”
Epstein took his own life before he could stand trial
Epstein’s suicide in August 2019, weeks after his arrest, prevented a trial in New York and cut short the discovery process in which evidence is shared among lawyers.
But even in a subsequent prosecution of Maxwell, in which such evidence would presumably have been relevant given the nature of the accusations against an alleged co-conspirator, salacious videos of Epstein with children never surfaced nor were part of the case, said one of her lawyers.
“We were never provided with any of those materials. I suspect if they existed, we would have seen them, and I’ve never seen them, so I have no idea what [Bondi is] talking about,” said Jeffrey Pagliuca, who represented Maxwell in a 2021 trial in which she was convicted of luring teenage girls to be molested by Epstein.
To be sure, photographs of nude or seminude girls have long been known to be part of the case. Investigators recovered possibly thousands of such pictures while searching Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, and a videorecorded walk-through by law enforcement of his Palm Beach, Fla., home revealed sexually suggestive photographs displayed inside, court records show.
Accounts from more than one accuser of feeling watched or seeing cameras or surveillance equipment in Epstein’s properties have contributed to public expectations of sexual recordings. A 2020 Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report on the handling of an earlier Epstein investigation hinted at that possibility, saying police who searched his Palm Beach home in 2005 found computer keyboards, monitors and disconnected surveillance cameras, but the equipment — including video recordings and other electronic items — was missing.
There’s no indication prosecutors obtained any missing equipment during the later federal investigation, and the indictment against him included no recording allegations.
An AP review of hundreds of documents in the Maxwell and Epstein criminal cases identified no reference to tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with underage girls.
“I don’t recall personally ever having that kind of discussion,” said one Epstein lawyer, Marc Fernich, who couldn’t rule out such evidence wasn’t located later. “It’s not something I ever heard about.”
In one nonspecific reference to video evidence, prosecutors said in a 2020 filing that they would produce to Maxwell’s lawyers thousands of images and videos from Epstein’s electronic devices in response to a warrant.
But Pagliuca said his recollection was those videos consisted largely of recordings in which Epstein was “musing” into a recording device — “Epstein talking to Epstein,” he said.
A revelation from the Epstein estate
Complicating efforts to assess the Epstein evidence is the volume of accusers, court cases and districts where legal wrangling has occurred, including after Epstein’s suicide and Maxwell’s conviction.
The cases include 2022 lawsuits in Manhattan’s federal court from an accuser identified as Jane Doe 1 and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a home, alleging that financial services giant JPMorgan Chase failed to heed red flags about him being a “high-risk” customer.
Lawyers issued a subpoena for any video recordings or photos that could bolster their case.
They told a judge months later the Epstein estate had alerted them that it had found content that “might contain child sex abuse imagery” while responding to the subpoena and requested a protocol for handling “videorecorded material and photographs.” The judge ordered representatives of Epstein’s estate to review the materials before producing them to lawyers and to alert the FBI to possible child sexual abuse imagery.
Court filings don’t detail the evidence or say how many videos or images were found, and it’s unclear whether the recordings Bondi referenced were the same ones.
The estate’s disclosure was later included by a plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jennifer Freeman, in a complaint to the FBI and the Justice Department asserting that investigators had failed over the years to adequately collect potential evidence of child sex abuse material.
Freeman cited Bondi’s comments in a new lawsuit on behalf of an Epstein accuser who alleges the financier assaulted her in 1996. In an interview, Freeman said she had not seen recordings and had no direct knowledge but wanted to understand what Bondi meant.
“I want to know what she’s addressing, what is she talking about — I’d like to know that,” she said.
Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP journalist Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
Southern California Edison’s admission that its equipment may have ignited the Hurst fire in the San Fernando Valley on Jan. 7 is being seized on by lawyers suing the utility company for another fire in the same area nearly six years earlier.
Both the Saddleridge fire in 2019 and the Hurst fire this year started beneath an Edison high-voltage transmission line in Sylmar. The lawyers say faulty equipment on the line ignited both blazes in the same way.
“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner as the fire that started the Saddleridge fire,” the lawyers wrote of the Hurst fire in a June 9 filing in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The lawyers said the January wildfire is “further evidence” that a transmission pylon known as Tower 2-5 “is improperly grounded.”
Edison told the state Public Utilities Commission in February that “absent additional evidence, SCE believes its equipment may be associated with the ignition of the Hurst Fire.” But the company denies claims that its equipment sparked the 2019 fire, which tore through Sylmar, Porter Ranch and Granada Hills — all suburbs of Los Angeles — burning 8,799 acres.
“We will continue to focus on facts and evidence — not on preposterous and sensational theories that only serve to harm the real victims,” said Edison spokesman David Eisenhauer. He declined further comment on the case.
The Saddleridge wildfire destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures, according to Cal Fire, and caused at least one death when resident Aiman El Sabbagh suffered a cardiac arrest.
Edison is being sued by insurance companies, including State Farm and USAA, to recoup the cost of damages paid to their policyholders. Homeowners and other victims are also seeking damages. A jury trial for the consolidated cases is set for Nov. 4.
In their June 9 filing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers also claimed Edison wasn’t transparent with officials looking into the cause of the 2019 fire. One fire official characterized the utility’s action as “deceptive,” the filing said.
Edison discovered a fault on its system at 8:57 p.m. — just three minutes before the blaze at the base of its transmission tower was reported to the Fire Department by Sylmar resident Robert Delgado, according to the court filing.
But Edison didn’t tell the Los Angeles city Fire Department about the fault it recorded, the filing said. Instead the fire department’s investigation team discovered the failure on Edison’s transmission lines through dash cam footage recorded by a motorist driving on the 210 Freeway nearby, the filing said.
When Timothy Halloran, a city Fire Department investigator, went to the location of the flash shown on the motorist’s camera, he found “evidence of a failure on SCE’s equipment,” the filing said.
Halloran said in a deposition that employees of the business located where the evidence was found told him that Edison employees “attempted to purchase” footage from the company’s security camera on the night of the fire, the filing said.
“The video footage shows a large flash emanating from the direction of SCE Transmission Tower 5-2,” the filing said.
Halloran testified in his deposition that he believed Edison was trying to be “deceptive” for attempting to purchase the security camera footage and not reporting the system fault to the Fire Department, the lawyers said.
Halloran didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Edison’s maintenance of its transmission lines is now being scrutinized as it faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the devastating Eaton fire, which also ignited on Jan. 7.
Videos showed that fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed thousands of homes, starting under a transmission tower in Eaton Canyon. The investigation into the cause of the fire is continuing.
Victims of the 2019 fire say they’ve become disheartened as Edison has repeatedly asked for delays in the court case.
“Many plaintiffs have not yet been able to rebuild their homes” because of the delays, wrote Mara Burnett, a lawyer representing the family of the man who died.
Burnett noted that Aiman El Sabbagh was 54 when he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during the incident. His children, Tala and Adnan El Sabbagh, “feel they were robbed of things they treasured and worked hard for with no apparent recompense in sight.”
Both the Saddleridge and Hurst fires included a similar chain of events where a failure of equipment on one tower resulted in two or more fires igniting under different towers elsewhere on the line, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs.
Edison designed and constructed the towers that run through Sylmar in 1970. They hold up two transmission lines: the Gould-Sylmar 220 kV circuit and the Eagle Rock-Sylmar 220 kV circuit.
In the case of the Saddleridge fire, investigators from the Los Angeles Fire Department and the California Public Utilities Commission found that at 8:57 pm on Oct. 10, 2019, a Y-shaped steel part holding up a transmission line failed, causing the line to fall on a steel arm.
The failure caused a massive electrical fault, lawyers for the plaintiffs say, that sparked fires at two transmission towers that were more than two miles away.
State and city fire investigators say the Saddleridge fire began under one of those towers. And they found unusual burning at the footing of the other tower, according to a report by an investigator at the utilities commission.
The utilities commission investigator said in the report that he found that Edison had violated five state regulations by not properly maintaining or designing its transmission equipment.
This year’s Hurst fire ignited not far away on Jan. 7 at 10:10 p.m. It also began under one of Edison’s transmission towers.
According to Edison’s Feb. 6 report to the utilities commission, the company found that its hardware failed, resulting in equipment falling to the ground at the base of a tower.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs say that they now have more evidence of the fire’s start. They say that investigators found that the hardware failure set off an event — similar to the 2019 fire — that resulted in five fires at five separate transmission tower bases on the same line.
One of those fires spread in high winds to become the Hurst fire. Officials ordered 44,000 people to evacuate. Air tankers and 300 firefighters contained the fire before it reached any homes.
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden, repeating his baseless claim that the contest was marred by widespread fraud.
“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD!” Trump said in a social media post in which he also sought to favorably contrast his immigration enforcement approach with that of the former president. “The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!”
Trump’s post, made as his Republican White House is consumed by a hugely substantial foreign policy decision on whether to get directly involved in the Israel-Iran war, is part of an amped-up effort by him to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency. Earlier this month, Trump directed his administration to investigate Biden’s actions as president, alleging aides masked his predecessor’s “cognitive decline.” Biden has dismissed the investigation as “a mere distraction.”
The post also revives a long-running grievance by Trump that the election was stolen even though courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm pronounced the election “the most secure in American history.”
It was unclear what Trump had in mind when he called for a special prosecutor, but in the event Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi heeds his call, she may face pressure to appoint someone who has already been confirmed by the Senate. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Friday.
The Justice Department in recent years has appointed a succession of special counsels — sometimes, though not always, plucked from outside the agency — to lead investigations into politically sensitive matters, including into conduct by Biden and by Trump.
Last year, Trump’s personal lawyers launched an aggressive, and successful, challenge to the appointment of Jack Smith, the special counsel assigned to investigate his efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A Trump-appointed judge agreed, ruling that then-Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland had exceeded his bounds by appointing a prosecutor without Senate approval and confirmation, and dismissed the case.
That legal team included Todd Blanche, who is now deputy attorney general, as well as Emil Bove, who is Blanche’s top deputy but was recently nominated to serve as a judge on a federal appeals court.
Tehran, Iran – Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Israel’s attacks on his country could not have materialised without the agreement and support of the United States.
“We have well-documented and solid evidence of the support provided by American forces in the region and their bases for the military attacks of the Zionist regime,” Iran’s top diplomat told reporters during a news conference in the capital, Tehran, on Sunday.
He said, more importantly, US President Donald Trump has publicly and explicitly confirmed he knew about the attacks, that they could not have happened without US weapons and equipment, and that more attacks are coming.
“Therefore, the US, in our opinion, is a partner in these attacks and must accept its responsibility.”
Araghchi said Tehran has received messages from Washington through various intermediaries that it was not involved with Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Isfahan’s Natanz, but it “does not believe this claim” due to evidence to the contrary.
“It is necessary for the US government to clearly state its position and explicitly condemn the attack on nuclear facilities,” he said. “This act is condemned under international law, and our expectation is that the US government, in order to prove its good faith regarding nuclear weapons, will condemn the attack on a peaceful nuclear facility and distance itself from this conflict.”
Pointing out that the Israeli attacks came as Iran and the US were slated to hold a sixth round of nuclear negotiations mediated by Oman on Sunday, Araghchi emphasised that Israel “will do anything” to stop the talks and diplomacy, as it has done in the past.
‘Major strategic mistake’
Iranian authorities said the Israeli attacks, which have targeted residential and military areas in Tehran as well as many cities across the country since Friday, have killed at least 80 people, including civilians.
Multiple top-ranking commanders of the Iranian armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were also assassinated, as were a number of nuclear scientists and university professors.
Iran has so far launched two nights of retaliatory attacks on Israel’s Tel Aviv and Haifa, using hundreds of missiles and drones, which have led to at least 10 deaths and dozens of injuries.
Araghchi told reporters that Iran’s attacks overnight into Sunday started targeting Israel’s energy infrastructure after the Israeli army hit refineries, power stations and oil reserves across Iran.
As sounds of explosions and air defences rang across Tehran in the early hours of Sunday, Israel hit a fuel reserve in western Tehran’s Shahran neighbourhood that caused a massive fire. Authorities said the fire was contained after several hours and that most of the fuel in the reserve was taken out before the air raids.
On Saturday, the Israeli military hit Asaluyeh on Iran’s southern shores in the province of Bushehr, hitting Phase 14 of South Pars, the largest gasfield in the world.
Araghchi said the attack was a “major strategic mistake” that was likely carried out deliberately with the intention of dragging other nations into the war.
“The Persian Gulf region is extremely sensitive and complex, and any military development there could involve the entire region, and even the whole world,” he said, using the name of the Gulf, which is also commonly known as the Arabian Gulf.
Iran and Israel have said their attacks will continue for now, and the Israeli military on Sunday issued a threat to Iranians to stay away from what it called “military weapons production factories and their support institutions”, or risk being killed.
But Araghchi said Tehran is willing to stop if Israel halts its attacks, and urged the international community to intervene and condemn Israel.
‘National battle’
Iranian newspapers on Sunday dedicated their front pages to the war, with more hardline outlets manoeuvring on Iran’s attacks while others focusing on a sense of national unity.
Keyhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, published the headline: “We will finish the war and Israel together”, and wrote about “unprecedented damages in occupied territories” caused by the Iranian missiles.
“National battle”, read a headline from the reformist Ham-Mihan, with Etemad newspaper writing about “Israel’s gamble on a minefield” and Sazandegi highlighting “Slap for Tel Aviv” in its headline story.
For the first time in nearly four decades, Iranian state television on Saturday broadcast a victory march. It was last heard in the 1980s during Iran’s eight-year invasion by neighbouring Iraq, which was backed and armed by major powers.
Mehdi Chamran, chairman of the City Council of Tehran, said the capital will soon be forced to use the same shelters used during that war, as well as metro stations and some car parks, as no new dedicated shelters have been built.
Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said on Sunday that all flights are cancelled until further notice and tried to assure people that measures are under way to ensure the state can provide basic necessities, including fuel, in case of a prolonged conflict.
Vehicles jam a highway as a fire blazes nearby in the oil depots of Shahran, northwest of Tehran, on June 15, 2025 [Atta Kenare/AFP]
The Tehran Chamber of Guilds announced that all business associations, grand bazaars and malls were open in the capital, but government workers were told to work remotely until at least Wednesday, in an indication that Tehran is expected to be hit again.
The Tehran Stock Exchange was also closed on Sunday, with its director saying the decision to keep it closed or open it for Monday will be taken on the day, considering Sunday night’s developments.
Iran’s currency, the rial, has taken another nosedive since the start of the latest conflict, having depreciated from about 840,000 against the US dollar before the Israeli attacks to about 955,000 on Sunday.
