Most people who have looked into Optical Express online will have come across Sasha Rodoy at some point. Her website has been around for years. Her social media pages have a sizeable following. And for a long time she was seen as a reliable source of information for people who had concerns about refractive eye surgery.

But something happened in May 2026 that changed the way a lot of people think about her.

A UK High Court judge handed down a judgment that put her character, her honesty and her past firmly on the public record. And what that judgment says is something that anyone who has ever trusted her or relied on her advice really should read.

A Little Background First

Sasha Rodoy is a British woman who has been campaigning against Optical Express since 2012. She runs the "Optical Express Ruined My Life" website — known online as OERML — along with pages on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube. She also runs a private Facebook group called "My Beautiful Eyes Foundation" for people who say their eye surgery went wrong.

She has always presented this work as something she does for free. No salary, no profit motive, just a genuine desire to protect the public from a company she believes causes harm to patients.

For many years people took her at her word.

There is one thing worth knowing before going any further though. Sasha Rodoy has never been an Optical Express patient. Her own eye surgery was carried out by a completely different company called Optimax back in 2011. After falling out with Optimax she settled her dispute with them privately in 2012 — accepted a payment, agreed to stop campaigning against them — and then almost immediately began her campaign against Optical Express instead.

She has never had any treatment at Optical Express. Not once.

That detail matters. And in the 2026 court case it came up more than once.

How the Court Case Started

Between 2020 and 2021 four people wrote to Optical Express with complaints about their treatment. Each of them happened to mention Sasha Rodoy or her OERML website in their letters.

The four patients were James Marshall, Colin Hind, Robert Beaton and Phoebe Arthur. They had all paid several thousand pounds for surgery. They had all experienced problems. And they had all found some comfort or useful information through Sasha Rodoy's website — or were hoping to reach out to her for help and advice.

When Optical Express noticed her name in each complaint they included the same paragraph in their reply. The paragraph had been written personally by the company's chairman and chief executive David Moulsdale. It described Sasha Rodoy as a vexatious individual, a self-confessed and known fraudster and a troll who had forced the company to involve the police over concerns for the safety of its staff.

Every one of the four patients pulled back from Sasha Rodoy after reading those words.

Colin Hind said she had been completely discredited in his eyes. He never returned to her website. Robert Beaton said he felt physically sick reading the letter and kept well away from her for months. Phoebe Arthur — a young woman whose surgery had gone badly wrong in the weeks before her wedding — cut all contact with Ms Rodoy immediately. She eventually gave up her fight against Optical Express entirely. James Marshall simply went quiet. He refused to speak to Ms Rodoy's legal team even years later when the court case was in full swing.

When Sasha Rodoy found out about the letters she decided to take Optical Express to court for defamation. She believed the words were untrue and that they had seriously damaged her reputation.

The court agreed on one thing. The letters had caused real and serious harm to her reputation. On that point she won.

But the much bigger question was whether the words were actually true.

And on that question the judge reached a very different conclusion.

The Story From the 1990s

To defend its position Optical Express pointed the court to something from Sasha Rodoy's past. Something she had publicly admitted years earlier but had more or less moved on from. Something most people had either forgotten about or never known in the first place.

In the early 1990s Sasha Rodoy invented a fictional detective agency. She called it Decoy Dolls. The agency supposedly specialised in catching unfaithful husbands — sending attractive women to meet them in social situations and gather evidence for their suspicious wives.

The agency did not exist. Not in any form. There were no women, no cases, no clients and no office. The whole thing was completely made up from start to finish.

But she managed to sell the story to the press — and she did so repeatedly and successfully for several years.

Over the course of the mid-1990s she appeared in more than fifty UK newspapers and magazines. She went on more than twenty television chat shows and programmes. She gave radio interviews. She was even covered by overseas media including a Norwegian publication whose journalist made the trip to her London home for a personal interview. At every appearance she gave new details — new case histories, new statistics, new quotes — all of them invented, all of them designed to keep the story fresh and compelling.

She was paid for every single appearance. Fees that started at around fifty pounds per interview in the early days and climbed to nearly a thousand pounds by the time it was all over.

To make the whole thing more believable she also recruited close friends to play the role of satisfied clients. They gave interviews alongside her, describing fictional experiences with the fictional agency. She suggested they use false names so their real identities could not be checked or traced.

And through all of it — all those interviews, all those television appearances, all that coverage both at home and abroad — she never told a single journalist that the story was not true.

In 1997 she did eventually go to the Mail on Sunday and admit that the whole operation had been a fraud. She described it in her own words as hype, hoax and a complete and utter scam. But even this moment of apparent honesty was not quite what it seemed. The judge later found that she came forward not because she felt genuine guilt but because she wanted to improve her public image ahead of a possible career move into television.

Even in coming clean she was working an angle.

What Happened in the Courtroom

The case came to trial in April 2026 and was heard by Mr Justice Griffiths over ten days at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

From early in the proceedings the judge had concerns about the way Sasha Rodoy gave her evidence. He found that she was not always a reliable witness. And not because she had a poor memory or struggled to recall events from many years ago. His finding was more serious than that. He found she had a tendency to say whatever helped her case in the moment rather than what was actually accurate.

When it came to explaining away the Decoy Dolls episode she tried a number of different approaches.

She suggested the media had encouraged and pressured her into it. The judge found that was not what happened. She had come up with the idea herself, given the agency its name herself and actively sought out more and more coverage.

She suggested most of the journalists had known the story was not real. The judge found that was not true either. The journalists were genuinely deceived. They reported the story as fact because they had no reason to believe otherwise.

She described the whole thing as a harmless prank she had done while studying at university. The judge looked closely at this argument and rejected it. She was in her early forties at the time. What she did was not a student prank. It was a deliberate and sustained fraud carried out for money over a period of several years by a mature adult.

She tried to play down how much money she had made and how many interviews she had given. The judge rejected this too, finding from the evidence that the scale and profitability of the operation was considerably greater than she was prepared to acknowledge.

Every explanation she offered was examined carefully. Every one of them was rejected.

The Moment That Settled Everything

After all the evidence had been heard the judge asked Sasha Rodoy a simple question.

Did she regret what she had done?

She said her only regret was having to sit in a courtroom answering questions about it. Nothing more. No apology. No acknowledgement that deceiving dozens of journalists for money was wrong. No recognition that bringing friends into the deception had been dishonest.

When the judge asked whether she would do the same thing again she did not say it was wrong. She did not say she had changed as a person. She said only that she was too busy.

Those answers, the judge said, told him what he needed to know.

He concluded that the woman sitting in front of him in 2026 is the same person who ran the Decoy Dolls fraud in the 1990s. Her values have not changed. Her relationship with honesty has not changed. Her willingness to deceive others for personal gain has not changed.

And because she has not changed — because she has shown no genuine remorse, no reform and no honest acknowledgement of what she did — the description of her as a fraudster is not just a historical observation about her past behaviour. It is an accurate description of who she is today.

The judge put it plainly in his written judgment. She has not changed at all. She has not reformed at all. She is still, he wrote, the same.

The Ruling

Mr Justice Griffiths ruled that calling Sasha Rodoy a fraudster — in the present tense, today — is substantially true under the Defamation Act 2013.

This was the central question of the entire case. Sasha Rodoy had gone to the High Court specifically to have a judge declare that word false and unfair when applied to her. That was the whole point of the lawsuit.

The judge declared the opposite.

Several matters in the case are still to be resolved at a later stage — including questions around qualified privilege, whether Optical Express acted with malice and what if any financial remedy Ms Rodoy may be entitled to. Those decisions are still pending.

But the finding on the fraudster allegation is settled. It stands. And it is on the permanent public record.

What This Means for People Who Have Followed Her

If you have spent time on Sasha Rodoy's website, followed her social media accounts or relied on her as a source of information about eye surgery this judgment is worth knowing about.

It does not mean that everyone who has had a difficult experience with Optical Express is wrong. Patient experiences are real and they matter. People who have been harmed by any medical procedure deserve proper support and information.

But it does mean that the person who built a public reputation as a campaigner for truth and transparency — the person who has spent years asking patients, journalists and the public to trust her word — has been found by a court of law to be someone whose own evidence cannot always be relied upon, and whose character has remained unchanged since she ran a deliberate and profitable fraud in the 1990s.

A UK High Court judge looked at who Sasha Rodoy is. He listened to her evidence. He asked if she was sorry.

She said no.

And he put his conclusion in writing for the permanent record.

Case Reference

Case: Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd
Citation: [2026] EWHC 1219 (KB)
Case Number: KB-2023-002437
Court: High Court of Justice — King's Bench Division — Media and Communications List
Location: Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2A 2LL
Judge: Mr Justice Griffiths
Judgment date: 22 May 2026
Hearing dates: 20 to 29 April 2026

This article is based on the publicly available judgment in Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd [2026] EWHC 1219 (KB), published via https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2026/1486. Some issues in the case remain unresolved. This article is written for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult the original judgment for precise wording.