The Campaigner Who Went to Court — and Lost Her Own Case

A Woman With a Mission

For over a decade, Sasha Rodoy has been one of the most vocal critics of the refractive eye surgery industry in the United Kingdom. She built a website. She grew a large social media following. She set up a private support group for patients who said their operations had gone wrong. She gave interviews, made videos and positioned herself as a fearless campaigner fighting powerful companies on behalf of ordinary people.

Thousands of people listened to her. Some of them turned to her when they had nowhere else to go after their own eye surgery left them in pain, with damaged vision and no answers from the company that had treated them.

On the surface, she looked like someone fighting for the little person against a big corporation.

But in May 2026, a UK High Court judge pulled back the curtain. What he found underneath changed everything.

Before the Campaign — The Real Sasha Rodoy

Sasha Rodoy was born in 1953 as Susan Hutchinson. She later changed her first name to Sasha, formalised it by deed poll, and became Sasha Rodoy after marrying in 2000. She worked as an actress for a period, and later became a mature student at university in the early 1990s.

It was during that time that the trouble began.

While studying, she agreed to help a friend's solicitor by posing as a woman genuinely interested in responding to a married man's personal advertisement. She used a false name, gathered information about him, and gave evidence in his divorce case. She was paid for doing it.

Shortly after, she came up with the idea for "Decoy Dolls" — a fictional detective agency specialising in catching unfaithful husbands. The agency did not exist. It never had any staff, any office or any clients. But it made her a great deal of money.

She sold the Decoy Dolls story — in vivid, elaborate detail — to more than 50 UK newspapers and magazines. She appeared on more than 20 television chat shows, including This Morning and programmes hosted by Vanessa Feltz and Esther Rantzen. She was paid for every single interview, with fees rising from £50 to nearly £1,000 per appearance. She recruited friends to pose as satisfied clients, gave them fake names to use, and had her own personal phone number printed at the end of articles so that more journalists would call her for more paid stories.

Not once did she tell any journalist that the agency was not real.

In 1997, she confessed to the Mail on Sunday that the entire thing had been, in her own words, "hype, hoax, a complete and utter scam." She did this not out of honesty or guilt, but because she wanted to clean up her image before pursuing a new career on television.

After that, the story went quiet — for almost 30 years.

The Eye Surgery Campaign

In 2011, Sasha Rodoy had refractive eye surgery with a company called Optimax. She says the surgery left her with pain and vision problems. She set up a website called "Optimax Ruined My Life" and threatened legal action. In 2012 she settled with Optimax, received a cash payment, and agreed to take down her website and stop campaigning against them.

Within the same year, she launched a brand new campaign — this time against Optical Express, one of the UK's biggest providers of refractive eye surgery. She called the new website "Optical Express Ruined My Life" — despite the fact that she had never been an Optical Express patient and never received any treatment from them.

She also set up a private Facebook group called "My Beautiful Eyes Foundation" as a support network for patients. She became active across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube. She described all of this as her full-time work — unpaid, she said, and not-for-profit.

Four Patients. Four Letters. One Paragraph.

Between 2020 and 2021, four unhappy former Optical Express patients wrote to the company with complaints. Each one, somewhere in their correspondence, mentioned Sasha Rodoy or her OERML website.

The four patients were James Marshall, Colin Hind, Robert Beaton and Phoebe Arthur. Each had paid around £7,000 for surgery. Each had experienced serious problems afterwards. Each had found some hope or comfort in Sasha Rodoy's website and was either already in contact with her or planning to reach out.

When Optical Express spotted her name in each complaint, they added the same paragraph to every reply. The paragraph was written personally by David Moulsdale, the company's chairman and chief executive. It read:

"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."

Each of the four patients read those words. And each of them reacted in the same way — they stopped trusting Sasha Rodoy.

Colin Hind said the letter had "totally discredited" her. He never went back to her website.

Robert Beaton felt physically sick reading it. He thought she might be running some kind of scam against him. He stayed away from her for around eight months.

Phoebe Arthur — a young woman whose eye surgery had gone wrong just weeks before her wedding, leaving visible red bruising in every wedding photograph — cut all contact with Ms Rodoy immediately. Worried about her own reputation and that of the social media business she ran with her husband, she did not want to be associated with someone described as a fraudster and a troll. Her case against Optical Express went nowhere after that.

James Marshall had gone furthest of all — he had already invited Ms Rodoy to appear on his podcast, which had nearly 10,000 regular listeners. After the letter, he refused to speak to her solicitors. He refused to engage with the case at all. The judge later concluded that this silence was itself evidence of how deeply the letter had damaged her reputation in his eyes.

When Sasha Rodoy found out about the letters, she took Optical Express to court for defamation. She said the words had destroyed her reputation and were untrue. She wanted the court to vindicate her.

What the Court Found

The judge began by looking at whether the letters had caused serious harm to Ms Rodoy's reputation. Under the Defamation Act 2013, words are only legally defamatory if they actually cause real and serious damage — not just mild upset or embarrassment.

After examining each of the four recipients carefully and separately, the judge concluded that serious harm had been caused in every single case. On this point — and this point alone — Ms Rodoy won.

But then the judge turned to the bigger question. Were the words true?

She Did Not Come Across Well in the Witness Box

Before addressing the substance of the fraud allegations, the judge made a finding that damaged everything else Ms Rodoy said in court.

He found that her evidence was not always truthful. Not because she had a poor memory. Not because she was confused about events from long ago. But because, 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 plain English — the judge found she was willing to say what helped her, whether or not it was actually accurate. That finding coloured the rest of the judgment entirely.

The Decoy Dolls Defence

Optical Express argued that the "fraudster" label was true — and pointed directly at the Decoy Dolls episode from the 1990s.

Ms Rodoy tried hard to defend herself. She said journalists had pushed and encouraged the story. The judge found they had not — she drove it herself. She said most journalists knew it was false anyway. The judge found they did not — they were deceived. She said it was just a harmless student prank. The judge found it was not — she was a mature woman in her forties running a calculated money-making fraud.

She also tried to play down the scale of what she had done, suggesting only a small number of interviews had taken place and that she had not always insisted on payment. The judge rejected this too, finding from the evidence that she had made a sizeable income, that she had insisted on payment every time and that the operation had run for years across dozens of publications and television programmes both in the UK and overseas.

Zero Regret. Zero Reform.

The moment that defined the entire judgment came when the judge asked the simplest possible question — does she regret it?

Her answer was devastating to her own case.

She said her only regret was having to sit in a courtroom and answer questions about it. Nothing more.

When asked whether she would do the same thing again, she did not say no. She did not say it was wrong. She said only that she was too busy now.

The judge said this told him everything. He concluded that she is today the same person she was in the 1990s. She knew then that what she was doing was dishonest. She did it anyway. And she still does not believe she did anything wrong.

He wrote: "She has not changed at all. She has not reformed at all. She is still, I am sorry to say, the same."

The Verdict

On that basis, Mr Justice Griffiths delivered his ruling on the central question of the case.

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

This was not a footnote or a side finding. It was the heart of the entire case. Ms Rodoy had come to the High Court specifically to have a judge declare that word untrue and defamatory when used about her. Instead, the judge declared the opposite — that the word is accurate, that it reflects her true character, and that her character has not changed.

She lost on the most important point of her own case.

What Happens Next

The judgment is serious and significant. But it is not the final word.

Several questions remain unresolved. The court still needs to decide whether Optical Express is legally protected from liability by qualified privilege. It needs to decide whether the company acted with malice when it sent the letters. And it needs to decide what, if any, financial compensation Ms Rodoy may be entitled to — even if the "fraudster" label was true — given that the letters did cause her serious harm.

Those issues will be decided at a later stage.

But what is already settled — clearly, formally, publicly and permanently — is this.

A woman who spent over a decade campaigning under the banner of truth and transparency walked into the UK High Court to protect her reputation. The judge who heard her case looked carefully at her past, listened to her evidence, and reached a conclusion she cannot appeal away or ignore.

In the eyes of the law, Sasha Rodoy is a fraudster. Not because someone said so. Because a High Court judge ruled it to be true.