Tim Grattan-Kane Warns Believe Me Cast Over Justice System Close to Exploding
Tim Grattan-Kane, the retired senior investigating officer behind the believe me cast story, says the criminal justice system is “close to exploding with a frightening bang” before ITV airs Believe Me. He is talking about the John Worboys case, the one his team helped solve after earlier police mistakes.
Worboys and the women’s accounts
In 2008, Grattan-Kane’s team arrested John Worboys after piecing together accounts from numerous women who said a London taxi driver had given them drugged champagne and assaulted them. That work matters here because Believe Me centers on the women whose testimony led to the conviction, and the drama has put the case back in public view.
The retired officer said young police officers were “waiting to get results from the Crown Prosecution Service, who are underfunded and taking so long to make decisions.” He also said there was a lack of support workers “because of financial cuts,” and that getting trials was hard because so many courts had closed.
Courts closed between 2010 and 2019
More than half the courts in England and Wales were closed between 2010 and 2019, according to the Law Society. Grattan-Kane’s complaint is not just about delay; it is about whether cases like Worboys can still be built quickly enough when prosecutors, support staff and courtrooms are all stretched.
He said officers had asked victims to come forward saying they would be “trusted, listened to, and believed,” and added that the police need to start from the point of believing women who say they have been assaulted. He also said that approach needs “continued, constant monitoring” and that police must “think the unthinkable” about people in positions of trust.
Drink spiking and trust
Grattan-Kane said there remained a “real problem” with men administering drugs to facilitate sexual assault, and that drink spiking had become “far more common.” He pointed to the Gisèle Pelicot case in France and to Vikas Nath, the Knightsbridge restaurateur facing trial on allegations that he raped and sexually assaulted a woman who had been drugged, which he denies.
He said higher rates could reflect more awareness, more men with a “bad approach to women,” or more women reporting that their drinks had been spiked. The Worboys case sits inside that broader warning: his team had to go back over previous blood tests and CCTV footage, then talk with a person training to become a black-cab driver to work out the routes the attacker might have taken.
Grattan-Kane also highlighted the murder of Sarah Everard by the off-duty Met police constable Wayne Couzens. ITV’s Believe Me is now using the Worboys case to show what happens when victims are not believed fast enough, and his blunt view is that the system needs monitoring before the next case slips through the same gaps.
