Believe Me centers Sarah and Laila in John Worboys drama — Carrie Symonds

carrie symonds appears in a review of Believe Me, a four-part drama about the women John Worboys drugged and sexually attacked. The series keeps Worboys in the background and puts the survivors first.

Sarah and Laila in Believe Me

The first two episodes available for review follow Sarah and Laila. Sarah is picked up by Worboys after a night out with her gay best friends, nine months after having her first baby, and later wakes in hospital with no memory of how she got there. Laila gets into the cab alone after her friends leave her at a club.

Jeff Pope created and wrote the drama, and Daniel Mays plays Worboys. Pope said, “I’m not really interested in trying to get inside the mind of psychopaths.”

John Worboys and the survivors

The drama follows the stories of a few of the 14 women who reported suspicions that they had been drugged and assaulted by Worboys. Those 14 women were part of more than 100 women who eventually came forward when Worboys went to trial and after he was convicted.

The review places Believe Me in the context of long-running concerns about how rape victims are treated by police and the courts, and says conviction rates for rape are horrifyingly low. The drama uses that backdrop without shifting the focus away from the women at its center.

Jeff Pope's approach

The review says the drama gives the spotlight to the survivors and rightly pushes the perpetrator into the background. That choice leaves the episode structure tied to the women’s accounts, rather than to Worboys himself, and keeps the case anchored in what the women said happened to them.

For readers coming to the series after the review, the practical takeaway is simple: Believe Me is not built as a character study of Worboys. It is built around Sarah, Laila and the wider group of women whose reports and later testimony drove the case forward.