High Court of Justice, King’s Bench Division — Media and Communications List Before: Mr Justice Griffiths Judgment date: 22 May 2026

Introduction
On 22 May 2026, the High Court handed down judgment in Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd, dismissing a defamation claim brought by campaigner Sasha Rodoy against Optical Express, one of the UK’s largest laser eye surgery providers. The judgment is lengthy and fact-heavy, but it repays close reading: it touches on how far back a court can look when assessing whether a “fraudster” label is true today, how qualified privilege operates between a business and its customers, and how little audience a defamatory statement needs to cause serious harm.

This article sets out the full background, the court’s reasoning on each issue, and the practical lessons the case offers.

Background
The claimant and her campaign
Sasha Rodoy is a long-standing critic of refractive laser eye surgery. Since 2012 she has run a website called “Optical Express Ruined My Life” (OERML), supported by a network of social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Through these channels, she has invited and publicised complaints from patients dissatisfied with their treatment, and has run a private Facebook group, “My Beautiful Eyes Foundation,” as a forum for people to share their experiences.

A notable feature of her campaign — and one the court returned to repeatedly — is that Rodoy was never herself a patient of Optical Express. She underwent laser eye surgery in February 2011 with a different provider, Optimax, a commercial rival of Optical Express.

The relationship between Rodoy and Optical Express was already adversarial before this litigation. The company had previously brought proceedings against her before Nominet over her use of “Optical Express” in a domain name — proceedings Rodoy successfully defended.

complete report: https://www.scribd.com/document/1062071741/Sasha-Rodoy-v-Optical-Express-Limited-2026-EWHC-1219-KB

The defendant’s letters
Between July 2020 and November 2021, four people who had undergone treatment with Optical Express and were dissatisfied with the results made complaints to the company. In each of their complaints, they referred to Rodoy or to OERML. Optical Express responded to each of them with a letter that included a standard paragraph, drafted originally by company figure David Moulsdale, describing Rodoy in the following terms (paraphrased): as a vexatious individual and a self-confessed, known fraudster, who had operated under other names in addition to Sasha Rodoy, who engaged in online trolling of the company and its staff, and whose conduct had at times been serious enough to warrant police involvement over concerns for staff safety.

The four recipients were James Marshall, Colin Hind, Robert Beaton and Phoebe Arthur. Rodoy issued proceedings against Optical Express in relation to all four letters, notably before she even knew the recipients’ identities — those were established later, in the course of the litigation.

The Legal Framework
Defamation claims under English law, following the Defamation Act 2013, are generally decided by working through a fixed sequence of questions:

Meaning — what defamatory meaning, if any, do the words bear to an ordinary reasonable reader?
Serious harm — under section 1 of the Act, has the statement caused, or is it likely to cause, serious harm to the claimant’s reputation?
Truth — under section 2, can the defendant show the imputation is substantially true?
If truth fails, further defences may still apply, such as honest opinion or, as in this case, qualified privilege (a common law defence, not codified in the 2013 Act), which can be defeated only by proof of malice.
Rodoy v Optical Express worked through this exact sequence, with the meaning stage having already been dealt with at an earlier hearing.

Issue One: Meaning
The question of what the letters actually meant had been determined at a preliminary trial of preliminary issues in 2024, before HHJ Lewis. That ruling found the natural and ordinary meaning of the words was that Rodoy is a fraudster; that her record of dishonesty extends to the use of false names or aliases; that she engages in online trolling directed at Optical Express and its staff; and that this trolling had, on occasion, given reasonable grounds to suspect she posed a risk to staff safety.

This earlier ruling mattered a great deal by the time of trial, because it fixed the precise allegations that Optical Express then had to prove true — no more, no less.

Issue Two: Serious Harm
Mr Justice Griffiths found that the serious harm threshold under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 was satisfied.

Evidence from three of the four letter recipients was heard at trial (the fourth did not give live evidence, though the letter to them was still considered). The court found that each recipient’s confidence in Rodoy had genuinely been affected by what Optical Express told them. Several recipients reduced or ended their contact with Rodoy as a result. Some abandoned complaints they had been pursuing against Optical Express, apparently because the letters undermined their trust in the person encouraging them to complain.

The judge treated the size and standing of Optical Express as relevant here: because the allegations came from an apparently credible, established commercial organisation responding directly to patients, they were likely to be — and were found to have been — taken seriously and acted upon.

Importantly, the judgment underlines a point of wider significance: serious harm does not require a mass audience. Four recipients were enough, because those four recipients were precisely the people whose good opinion of Rodoy mattered to her ongoing campaign and credibility.

Issue Three: Truth
This was the decisive issue in the case, and the judgment addresses it in three parts, corresponding to the three limbs of the meaning found at the preliminary hearing.

Was Rodoy substantially a “fraudster”?
The court’s findings here go back to the 1990s. Griffiths J found that, during that period, Rodoy had sold fabricated stories to newspapers in exchange for significant payments. These stories were built around an entirely fictitious detective agency, “Decoy Dolls,” which did not exist as she represented it. The court held that this conduct amounted to fraud in the ordinary sense of the word.

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The more difficult question was whether it remained fair to describe her as a fraudster in the present tense, given the decades that had passed. This is often referred to as the “bad character” or “propensity” problem in defamation cases: old wrongdoing can support a present-tense allegation, but only if it remains a fair reflection of the person as they are now.

The judge’s reasoning turned substantially on Rodoy’s evidence at trial. She expressed no remorse about the events of the 1990s. Her only stated regret was having to answer questions about it in court decades later. When asked directly whether she would do the same thing again, she declined to rule it out. On the basis of this evidence, Griffiths J concluded that Rodoy remained, in character, essentially the same person who had committed the fraud, and that describing her as a fraudster in 2020–2021 was therefore substantially true, notwithstanding the historic nature of the underlying conduct.

Did her dishonesty extend to aliases?
The court’s findings on this limb were more mixed. It accepted that Rodoy had, in specific past episodes, used false names — including in connection with a sting operation targeting a public figure and a separate media hoax. However, it rejected the suggestion that her own genuine former names (she had previously been known as Sasha, or Susan, Hutchinson) were themselves dishonest aliases; a person having used more than one legal name over their life is not, without more, evidence of deceit.

Ultimately, the judge found that this partial success on the “aliases” limb did not meaningfully change the overall sting of the allegation once it was read together with the fraud finding, and so it did not undermine the truth defence as a whole.

Was the “trolling” and staff-safety allegation true?
The court reviewed extensive evidence of Rodoy’s online conduct directed at Optical Express and its employees. This included publication of a staff member’s home address alongside hostile commentary, an email containing imagery apparently intended to intimidate a member of staff, a disparaging remark made about a colleague’s young child, and provocative direct exchanges with junior call-centre employees carried out under a pseudonym.

Griffiths J drew a clear distinction between legitimate patient advocacy — which he did not criticise — and this separate pattern of conduct, which he characterised as gratuitous and personally motivated rather than serving any advocacy purpose. He found the “trolling” allegation substantially true.

On staff safety specifically, the court noted that police had become involved in relation to Rodoy’s conduct as far back as 2014. Taken together with the pattern of conduct found proved, the judge held that the allegation that her behaviour had, at times, given reasonable grounds for concern about staff safety was also substantially true.

Issue Four: Qualified Privilege and Malice
Even had the truth defence failed on any point, Optical Express had a fallback defence of qualified privilege. This common law defence protects statements made where the maker has a legitimate interest or duty in communicating them, and the recipient has a corresponding interest in receiving them — most classically, in situations involving employment references, complaints procedures, and similar reciprocal relationships.

The court held that this defence applied here. Optical Express and each of the four recipients were in an ongoing customer relationship concerning their dissatisfaction with treatment, and the recipients had themselves raised Rodoy in their complaints. Optical Express therefore had a legitimate interest in giving its account of who Rodoy was and why the company viewed her conduct and claims with scepticism, and the recipients had a reciprocal interest in receiving that information given they were relying on Rodoy’s representations.

Qualified privilege can be defeated by proof that the defendant was motivated by malice — that is, that the statement was not made with an honest belief in its truth, or was made for some improper, dominant purpose unconnected to the privileged occasion. Rodoy did not succeed in proving malice. The court accepted that David Moulsdale, who authored the standard paragraph, genuinely and honestly believed the allegations to be true, and was not motivated by personal spite or an ulterior purpose.

Outcome
The claim was dismissed in its entirety. Rodoy succeeded in establishing serious harm to her reputation, but Optical Express succeeded on substantial truth across all three limbs of the meaning (with a partial, non-material qualification on the aliases point), and separately succeeded on qualified privilege, with malice not proved.

The Costs Judgment
The case had a postscript. In Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd [2026] EWHC 1486 (KB), a subsequent costs ruling, Optical Express — having won at trial — applied for indemnity costs, a more generous costs basis than the standard order that ordinarily follows a successful defence.

Griffiths J declined to award indemnity costs. He accepted that Optical Express had not been under any obligation to settle the claim and that its ultimate success at trial was not, by itself, evidence of unreasonable conduct by Rodoy in bringing it. However, he found that Optical Express’s outright refusal even to engage with alternative dispute resolution was a negative factor properly weighed against it when the court assessed the parties’ conduct — consistent with the appellate guidance (seen, for example, in OMV Petrom SA v Glencore International AG) on the courts’ expectation that litigants at least engage with the possibility of settlement, even where they are not compelled to accept it. Optical Express therefore recovered its costs on the standard, rather than indemnity, basis.

Analysis and Practical Significance
Several points from the judgment are likely to be of continuing interest to practitioners and commentators:

Historic conduct can support present-tense allegations, but remorse is decisive. The court did not treat the passage of three decades as, by itself, a bar to calling Rodoy a fraudster today. What tipped the balance was the complete absence of any expression of regret in her evidence, and her refusal to disavow repeating the conduct. This suggests that in similar cases, a claimant’s own conduct in the witness box — not just the historic facts — can be determinative of whether an old label remains fair today.

Serious harm does not require a large readership. Only four people received the offending statements, yet the court had no difficulty finding serious harm. The quality of the connection between claimant and recipient mattered more than the quantity of readers — a point of some comfort to defendants in cases involving small, targeted disclosures, and equally to claimants who might otherwise worry that a limited readership dooms a claim.

Qualified privilege remains a live defence in commercial/customer relationships. The finding that Optical Express and its patients shared a reciprocal interest sufficient to found qualified privilege is a useful illustration of the defence operating outside its more classically discussed contexts (references, complaints to regulators, and so on).

Fine distinctions within a single defamatory meaning don’t necessarily unravel a truth defence. The partial failure on the “aliases” limb did not prevent the truth defence succeeding overall, because the court assessed the “sting” of the allegation as a whole rather than requiring each individual element to be proved to the letter.

Engagement with ADR still matters for costs, even for a winning party. The costs judgment reinforces that a party who wins outright can still be denied the more generous indemnity basis if it refused, without good reason, to even consider alternative dispute resolution.

Conclusion
Rodoy v Optical Express is unlikely to become a leading authority in the way that a Supreme Court defamation ruling might, but it is a rich, fact-intensive judgment that will be of real interest to media law practitioners, particularly for its treatment of historic conduct, small-audience serious harm, and qualified privilege in a commercial setting. For Sasha Rodoy, the practical result is that the “fraudster” label — one she has spent years contesting — has now been found, by a High Court judge, to be substantially true.