Between 2000 and 2008, John Worboys, the licensed driver of a London taxi, committed a series of sexual offences against women that created a media frenzy. “The black cab rapist”, as the tabloids dubbed him, was, however, only part of the story. Before the fight for justice had even begun, a number of those women had struggled for something else: recognition. Recognition that they had been assaulted, recognition that it was not their fault, and recognition that their attacker was still at large. This is the struggle at the heart of ITV’s new four-part drama, Believe Me.
Sarah (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is a young mother on her first night out in ages. After her friends put her in a black cab, sending her home, the driver strikes up a strange conversation: “If you don’t mind me saying, I think you look absolutely gorgeous tonight.” That man is John Worboys (Daniel Mays), a prolific rapist. Sarah is by no means Worboys’ first – or last – victim. By then, he had already established a distinctive modus operandi, in which he tells women he has had a casino windfall and encourages them to share champagne with him, which he has laced with sedatives. Over and over, he executes this plan. And over and over, the women who report Worboys – including cases where he can be positively identified – find themselves demeaned and disbelieved by a police force whose imagination, apparently, can’t extend to a licensed cabbie committing sex crimes.
Believe Me is written by Jeff Pope, who has worked on other true crime stories including See No Evil (about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley) and The Widower (about Malcolm Webster) as a writer, and others, such as Jimmy Savile drama The Reckoning and Peter Sutcliffe procedural This is Personal, as a producer. In short, he is the closest thing the UK has to Ryan Murphy, the auteur behind American Horror Story and American Crime Story. And Believe Me is another British Horror Story; the grimness of Worboys crimes matched by the systemic failure of the authorities to take women seriously. “[Victims] will be supported, they will be listened to and they will be believed,” a police statement announces, pompously. Any evidence to support that is thin.
Here’s the thing: television drama is very good at exposing the myriad ways that people in power let down those who rely on them. And Believe Me is effective at evoking the trauma of having your experience invalidated. “I’ve never seen a rape victim behave like that before,” an interrogating officer says dismissively. “She’s not crying.” Another of Worboys’ targets, Laila (Aasiya Shah), observes that the whole process is “like some kind of horrible joke”, and the Kafkaesque maze these women face at every turn – like an officer suggesting that maybe they just got blackout drunk – is important to depict. “I think the impact of what the police did to me was worse than the actual rape itself,” Sarah says.
Yet the drama is balanced with recreations of Worboys’s crimes. Mays is a fine actor, but his cheeky chappy persona is jarring. His interactions with women like Sarah and Laila have a strangely performative quality, Worboys’ lilting voice coming from the front of the vehicle while the camera studiously avoids showing his face. It is, I suspect, designed to evoke the disorientation that his victims felt – this overfamiliar cabbie they felt was more “strange” or “pathetic” than dangerous – but it ends up feeling grotty. In fact, these sequences are more reminiscent of the taxi murderer, played by Rob Jarvis, in the first series of Luther. Monstrous, unsettling, exploitative. There is an asymmetry too in that most of the women – other than Carrie Symonds (Miriam Petche), the future wife of prime minister Boris Johnson – are anonymised hybrids, whereas Worboys is flesh and blood, a deluded narcissist, but one the series cannot help but fixate on.
Does it help victims of these, or similar crimes, to see their experiences reenacted as entertainment? The cast handle their characters – particularly those not directly based on real people – with sensitivity, and Pope does redirect the series’ focus, in its second half, towards bigger concerns about the justice system. But Believe Me appears to feel an obligation to show the offending, so that it can fully demonstrate the establishment’s complacency. In doing so, it punctuates an important story with something jarringly tawdry.
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