Two weeks ago, a distressed young woman told police she had been attacked by a group of men and raped near a Methodist church in Epsom, Surrey. The offence took place, she said, after leaving a nightclub and was reported in the early hours of a Saturday morning.
Police – responding to claims about an horrific crime in the heart of leafy suburbia – launched an appeal for witnesses, carried out forensic tests, checked surveillance cameras and conducted house-to-house inquiries. But now the case has been closed since they have concluded that there was no sexual offence. “A woman in her 20s during a night out in Epsom, sustained an accidental head injury prior to making a confused report,” said Sarah Grahame, an assistant chief constable for the Surrey force.
It seems the police responded in exemplary style. Officers rapidly solved a rather tragic case before releasing the results of investigations with consent of the “victim”, stressing how they take all reports of sexual offences seriously to reassure the alarmed public. Yet they found themselves trapped in a disturbing maelstrom of disinformation, xenophobia and violence that was stirred up in the febrile swamp of social media. It was fanned by scummy far-right agitators – but also inflamed by shameless fellow travellers in supposedly respectable political parties. And it shows the difficulties for today’s police, operating in a fast-changing digital landscape as the toxic tide of populism rises higher amid such widespread distrust in institutions.
These events in Epsom – a town famous for its prestigious horse race and close to my childhood home – offer a parable for our divided nation. Once again, we see the weakness of Westminster in restraining a technology that threatens democracy and public safety, let alone to control thugs and foreign actors that exploit their corrosive failure.
There is an ominous echo of the events that erupted after the disturbing 2024 murders of three girls at a dance class in Southport, when posts erroneously stating that the killer was Muslim or a newly arrived asylum seeker received millions of impressions and sparked riots. We must be thankful this latest volatile situation did not explode into worse civil disorder, despite the best efforts of the merchants of hate and migrant-bashers to whip people into a frenzy by fuelling fear and loathing.
Almost as soon as Surrey police issued their appeal for witnesses, rumours started to fly online that they were hiding key information about the perpetrators – especially among the blue-tick brigade on Elon Musk’s X, which feeds voraciously on outrage. There were claims migrants or refugees were involved, allegations about a shady establishment cover-up, sinister suggestions the rape victim’s parents had been silenced under threat of arrest. Self-declared journalists – often with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media – fumed about lying cops, complained about lack of transparency damaging public faith, and posed as noble protectors of women being left at mercy of foreign predators.
Three days after the initial police appeal, there was a protest in Epsom High Street promoted online by known far-right activists. This led to shops being shut down and was described as “intimidating” by local Methodist cleric Rev Catherine Hutton.
The police – struggling with the paucity of information from a confused woman – sought to calm fears by saying there was no evidence to support “the offence as reported,” nor of any involvement by asylum seekers or immigrants. Yet it was too late to dampen the flames of hate and hysteria set alight.
Protesters descended again on the town, shouted anti-migrant slogans, threw missiles at police and attacked a home for vulnerable young adults, leading to a few arrests.
Britain’s police have a terrible record on tackling sexual offences, of course, along with a new duty to disclose ethnicity of suspects in high-profile cases to deter the spread of falsehoods. But lies can still be spread fast on social media by agitators who jump on justified public concerns about crime, state ineptitude and women’s safety to scapegoat migrants – even when there is not a scrap of evidence to support their claims.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right jailbird who likes to be known as Tommy Robinson, was among those praising protesting “patriots” for demanding answers in wake of “deafening” silence from police. And he claimed Epsom locals had destroyed a suspected property “used for housing unvetted fighting-age invaders at the taxpayers expense”. One of his disciples was a key figure in the protests.
Just imagine the terror of those residents under mob attack. Yet note how the same issues and similar language was adopted by mainstream political figures. Robert Jenrick, the slippery Tory defector who found sanctuary in Reform UK after losing to Kemi Badenoch in his leadership bid, quickly called on Surrey police to share all possible information about “the horrific rape in Epsom”.
His colleague Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, talked about “military-age” men invading Britain when asked about the incident, saying “I can totally understand why people are so angry” and claiming the core of the issue was an alleged one million illegal migrants who “need to go” to protect the safety of Britons.
Bear in mind this party – pushing issues in tandem with toxic far-right figures who spurred on civil unrest – leads in polls ahead of the looming local elections. Several prominent Conservative Party figures also jumped on the rape allegations to demand more information from the police. Yet as the party’s own elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey, Lisa Townsend, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the investigation was exemplary and fast in the face of disinformation spread by people “who really should have known an awful lot better” including senior politicians using the case to push their own agendas. “And of course, that is what caused the riots,” she concluded.
So we saw public servants in Surrey carry out their duties properly in a complex and sensitive situation that suddenly engulfed them. Yet they were targeted by extremists and betrayed by politicians, all brandishing the banner of decency and flying flags of patriotism.
A sad little saga in Epsom gives us another snapshot of the darkness descending on our nation.
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