Tim Grattan-Kane says the black cab rapist drama arrives as the justice system is “close to exploding with a frightening bang.” The retired senior investigating officer, who helped arrest John Worboys in 2008, tied that warning to ITV’s new drama about the women who reported him.
Grattan-Kane said the case was built from the accounts of numerous women who said they had been given drugged champagne by a London taxi driver before being assaulted. He also said the same reporting-first approach is what gave Believe Me its title: officers told victims, “you will be trusted, you will be listened to, you will be believed.”
2008 and the Worboys inquiry
In 2008, Grattan-Kane and his team arrested Worboys after identifying links between crimes that earlier Metropolitan police officers had missed. They went back over previous blood tests and CCTV footage, and they even spoke with a person training to become a black-cab driver to predict which routes the attacker might have taken.
That method helped turn scattered complaints into a case that changed how police deal with rape investigations. Grattan-Kane said the process should start from believing women who say they have been assaulted, then continue with “continued, constant monitoring” so it is followed properly.
CPS delays and court closures
Grattan-Kane said young police officers were frustrated while waiting for decisions from the Crown Prosecution Service. He said the service is underfunded and too slow, and he blamed financial cuts for a lack of support workers.
He also said trials have become harder to secure because so many courts have closed. According to the Law Society, more than half the courts in England and Wales were closed between 2010 and 2019.
Drink spiking after Believe Me
Grattan-Kane said there remains a “real problem” with men administering drugs to facilitate sexual assault, and he said drink spiking has become “more common.” He pointed to the Gisèle Pelicot case in France and the trial of Vikas Nath, the Knightsbridge restaurateur who faces allegations that he raped and sexually assaulted a woman who had been drugged, which he denies.
He said police need to “think the unthinkable” about people in positions of trust, pointing to Sarah Everard’s murder by off-duty Met police constable Wayne Couzens. For readers watching Believe Me, the blunt takeaway is that the drama is not just revisiting a solved case; it is landing in a justice system Grattan-Kane says is already under strain.
