Court Judgment: Sasha Rodoy Loses Fight Over "Fraudster" Label

Who Is Sasha Rodoy?

Sasha Rodoy is a British campaigner from the Jewish community. For years, she has positioned herself as a voice for people who say they were harmed by refractive eye surgery. She runs a website called "Optical Express Ruined My Life" (OERML), set up in 2012, along with active pages on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube. She also runs a private support group called "My Beautiful Eyes Foundation" for patients who say their surgery went wrong.

What makes her campaign unusual is this — she was never actually a patient of Optical Express. Her own eye surgery was carried out by a different company called Optimax, in 2011. She settled her dispute with Optimax in 2012, received a cash payment, and agreed to stop campaigning against them. She then immediately turned her attention to Optical Express instead.

She describes her campaigning as her full-time work. She says she does it for free, as a not-for-profit effort, on behalf of patients who have nowhere else to turn.

For years, people believed her. But in May 2026, a UK High Court judge put a very different picture of Sasha Rodoy on the public record.

The Letters That Started It All

Between 2020 and 2021, four former Optical Express patients contacted the company with complaints. Each one, at some point in their letters, mentioned Sasha Rodoy or her OERML website. The four patients were James Marshall, Colin Hind, Robert Beaton and Phoebe Arthur.

Each of them had paid around £7,000 for eye surgery. Each of them said things had gone wrong. Each of them was looking for help and support — and they had found it, or hoped to find it, through Sasha Rodoy.

When Optical Express saw her name mentioned in each complaint, they responded with the same paragraph in every reply. The paragraph had been written personally by David Moulsdale, the company's chairman and chief executive. It said this:

"The individual concerned is a vexatious individual, who is a self-confessed and known fraudster, currently using the name Sasha Rodoy, however she has previously been known as Sasha (Susan) Hutchinson. The individual was not treated by, and has never been a patient of, Optical Express. This person unfortunately does troll Optical Express and many of our team online. In the past, this trolling has been to such an extent that we have had to involve the police in the interest of employee safety."

When Ms Rodoy found out about the letters, she took Optical Express to court for defamation. She said the words had seriously damaged her reputation and that they were untrue. She wanted the court to agree with her.

On one point, the court did agree. But on the most important point of all, the judge ruled firmly against her.

Four Patients. Four Letters. Four Lives Affected.

Before deciding whether the words were true or false, the court first had to decide whether they had caused serious harm to Ms Rodoy's reputation. Under the Defamation Act 2013, a statement is only legally defamatory if it actually caused real and serious harm — not just embarrassment or upset.

The judge looked at each of the four recipients separately and in detail.

Colin Hind had paid £7,000 for lens surgery and suffered serious complications afterwards, including halos, blurred vision and difficulty reading. He had found the OERML website useful and was planning to seek more help from Ms Rodoy. After reading the Optical Express letter, he said it had "totally discredited" her. He never went back to her website and never contacted her again.

Robert Beaton had been reaching out to Ms Rodoy for advice after his own surgery left him in pain and with serious vision problems. When he read the letter calling her a fraudster and a troll, he felt physically sick. He said he thought she might be running "some sort of sting" against him. He stayed away from her for around eight months, and even after he eventually contacted her again, he admitted his confidence in her "was still a bit shaken."

Phoebe Arthur was a young woman who had chosen eye surgery ahead of her wedding, using money saved from a smaller ceremony due to Covid restrictions. The surgery went badly wrong — her eyes were left with visible red bruising that was still there on her wedding day, and she had to have every wedding photograph edited to remove it. She had spoken to Ms Rodoy on the phone and found her helpful and supportive. After reading the Optical Express letter, she cut all contact with Ms Rodoy immediately. She was worried that being associated with someone described as a fraudster and a troll could damage her own reputation and that of her husband's social media business. Her case against Optical Express went nowhere after that.

James Marshall had gone even further — he had invited Ms Rodoy to appear as a guest on his popular podcast, which had nearly 10,000 listeners. After the letter, he refused to speak to Ms Rodoy's solicitors at all, even years later when the case came to court. The judge concluded that his silence was itself powerful evidence of just how badly her reputation had been damaged in his eyes — so badly that he wanted nothing to do with her even through lawyers.

The court ruled that all four letters caused serious harm to Ms Rodoy's reputation. On this point, she won.

The Judge Did Not Trust Her

But the damage to her case did not stop there. During the trial itself, the judge found serious problems with the way Ms Rodoy gave her evidence.

He concluded that her testimony was at times factually wrong — and not simply because she had a poor memory or could not recall things from many years ago. The judge found something more troubling than that. He said she tended to give "the evidence she thought would be most helpful to her case, without particular regard to whether it was true."

In other words, the judge found that she said what suited her, not what was accurate. This finding ran through the entire judgment and undermined much of what she said in her own defence.

The Fake Agency That Started Everything

To defend itself against the defamation claim, Optical Express pointed to something Ms Rodoy had done decades earlier — something she had herself publicly admitted, but tried to dismiss as a harmless joke.

In the early 1990s, Sasha Rodoy invented a completely fictional detective agency. She called it "Decoy Dolls." The agency did not exist in any form. It had no staff, no office, no equipment, no clients and no cases. It was entirely made up.

But she did not simply make it up and move on. She turned it into a business — a business built entirely on selling lies to the press for money.

Over the course of several years, she gave interviews about "Decoy Dolls" to more than 50 UK newspapers and magazines, and appeared on more than 20 television chat shows and programmes, including This Morning, Kilroy and shows hosted by Vanessa Feltz and Esther Rantzen. Each time, she added new details, new case histories and new quotes to keep the story fresh and convincing. She was paid for every single interview. Fees started at around £50 and rose to nearly £1,000 per interview by the time she was done.

She did not do any of this alone. She recruited friends to pose as satisfied clients of the fake agency, giving fake names and fake stories to journalists. She coached at least one of them to use a completely made-up name. She even had her own personal phone number printed at the end of articles as the "Decoy Dolls contact number" — not so real clients could call, but so more journalists would ring her for more paid stories.

Not once — across dozens of interviews and television appearances — did she tell a single journalist that the agency was not real.

In 1997, she finally went to the Mail on Sunday and admitted the whole thing had been, in her own words, "hype, hoax, a complete and utter scam." She did this not out of guilt or honesty, but because she wanted to clean up her image ahead of a possible television career as an agony aunt.

Her Excuses Did Not Work

In court, Ms Rodoy tried several lines of defence for the Decoy Dolls fraud.

She said journalists had pushed and encouraged her into doing it. The judge rejected this completely. He found she came up with the idea herself, gave it a name herself, and actively kept it going by seeking out more interviews and more attention.

She said most of the journalists already knew the story was false. The judge rejected this too. He found the journalists were deceived. They had no reason to suspect the story was not true. She gave them no reason to doubt her.

She said the whole thing was just a prank, done while she was a student at university. The judge rejected this as well. She was in her early forties when she started Decoy Dolls — not a young student on a lark, but a mature adult making calculated decisions for financial gain.

She also tried in court to downplay the number of interviews she gave and the money she made from them. The judge rejected this too, finding from the evidence that she had made a sizeable income from the fraud over several years.

No Regret. No Reform. No Apology.

The part of the judgment that proved most damaging of all was what Ms Rodoy said — and did not say — when asked about her own feelings towards what she had done.

When the judge asked whether she regretted the Decoy Dolls fraud, she said this: her only regret was having to sit in court and answer questions about it. That was all.

When asked whether she would do it again, she did not say it was wrong. She did not say she had changed. She simply said she was too busy now to do something like that.

The judge said this told him exactly what he needed to know. He found that she is today the same person she was in the 1990s — with the same character, the same values and the same indifference to honesty. He said she knew at the time that what she was doing was wrong. She did it anyway. And she still does not think it matters.

In his own words, the judge wrote: "She has not changed at all. She has not reformed at all. She is still, I am sorry to say, the same."

The Court's Final Verdict on "Fraudster"

On the basis of all of this, Mr Justice Griffiths made a clear and formal legal ruling.

Calling Sasha Rodoy a "fraudster" — in the present tense, today, right now — is substantially true.

This was not a minor technical finding or a side point in the judgment. It was the central question of the whole case. Ms Rodoy had gone to the High Court specifically to have the court declare that the word "fraudster" was defamatory when applied to her — that it was untrue and had damaged her unfairly.

The judge said the opposite. He said the word is true. He said it fits her now just as it fitted her then.

The Fake Names Finding

The letters had also accused Ms Rodoy of dishonestly using different names. The judge found that her real names — Susan Hutchinson, Sasha Hutchinson and Sasha Rodoy — were all legitimate names used at different stages of her life and were not themselves used to commit any fraud.

However, the judge also found two separate occasions where she had used false identities dishonestly. The first was when she used a fake name to pose as a genuine respondent to a man's personal advertisement, in order to gather evidence for a friend's divorce case. The second was when she told one of her friends to use a completely made-up name when posing as a Decoy Dolls client for the press.

Where Things Stand Now

This judgment is significant and damaging for Sasha Rodoy. But it is not the end of the legal case.

The court has decided two major things. First, that the letters sent by Optical Express caused serious harm to Ms Rodoy's reputation — a finding in her favour. Second, that the "fraudster" label was substantially true — a finding firmly against her.

What the court has not yet decided includes whether Optical Express is protected from liability by qualified privilege, whether the company acted with malice in sending the letters, and what compensation if any Ms Rodoy may be entitled to. Those questions are still to be resolved.

But what is already on the public record — clearly, formally and in the words of a High Court judge — is this:

Sasha Rodoy spent years building a reputation as a campaigner for truth and justice on behalf of vulnerable patients. She went to the High Court to protect that reputation. And the judge who heard her case ruled that she is, in his legal judgment, a fraudster — not because of what others have said about her, but because of what she herself did, what she herself admitted, and what she herself still refuses to regret.