If you have been following the 2026 High Court defamation case between Sasha Rodoy and Optical Express you will have heard the name "Decoy Dolls" mentioned repeatedly. It is at the centre of the judge's ruling. It is the reason the court found that calling Ms Rodoy a "fraudster" is substantially true. And it is — by any measure — one of the most remarkable press frauds in recent British history.
So what exactly was Decoy Dolls? How did it work? And why does something that happened in the 1990s still matter in a courtroom in 2026?
Here is the full story.
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What Was Decoy Dolls?
Decoy Dolls was a fictional detective agency invented by Sasha Rodoy in the early 1990s.
The agency claimed to specialise in a very specific service — catching unfaithful husbands. According to the story Ms Rodoy told the press, the agency employed a team of attractive women who would be sent by suspicious wives to meet their husbands in social situations. These "decoys" would engage the husband in conversation, encourage him to flirt or express romantic interest, and then report back to the wife with evidence of his behaviour.
It was a compelling idea. The kind of story that sells newspapers, fills air time on daytime television and gets people talking.
There was just one problem.
None of it existed.
There were no decoys. There were no employees of any kind. There was no office, no equipment, no filing system, no client records and no actual cases. Decoy Dolls was pure invention — a fictional business built entirely in Sasha Rodoy's imagination and sold to the media as if it were completely real.
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How Did She Pull It Off?
The operation worked because Ms Rodoy was convincing, creative and completely willing to deceive the journalists she was speaking to.
She gave each publication new details — new case histories, new statistics, new quotes — tailored to make the story feel fresh and exclusive. She never simply repeated the same interview. Each appearance added something new, which meant each publication had something different to report. This kept the story alive and kept the fees coming in.
She supported the deception by recruiting friends to pose as satisfied clients of the non-existent agency. These friends gave interviews alongside her — describing, in vivid detail, how Decoy Dolls had helped them catch their cheating partners. They used false names she suggested to them, to make sure their real identities could not be traced.
She also had her own personal phone number printed at the end of articles as the contact number for the agency. The judge found this was not done to take genuine client enquiries — when real women did occasionally call she talked them out of pursuing it — but to ensure that more journalists from other publications could reach her and pay for more stories.
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How Long Did It Last and How Much Did She Make?
The Decoy Dolls operation ran for several years through the mid-1990s.
During that time Ms Rodoy appeared in more than 50 UK newspapers and magazines including the Evening Standard, Women's Realm, Woman's Journal, TV Quick, the Sunday Telegraph and Eva magazine. She appeared on more than 20 television programmes including This Morning, Kilroy, and shows hosted by Vanessa Feltz and Esther Rantzen. She gave radio interviews. She was covered in overseas publications including a major feature in a Norwegian newspaper.
She was paid for every single appearance. Fees started at around £50 per interview in the early days and rose to close to £1,000 per appearance by the end of the operation. The Mail on Sunday — which later exposed the fraud — reported that she had derived a sizeable income from the whole enterprise over its lifetime and that she had always insisted on being paid.
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When Did It End?
In July 1997 Ms Rodoy approached the Mail on Sunday and admitted the whole thing was a fraud. She described it as "hype, hoax, a complete and utter scam."
But the judge found this confession was not driven by guilt or a genuine desire to come clean. She had been offered the possibility of a television career as an agony aunt and wanted to get ahead of any potential exposure before the opportunity materialised. Even in confessing she was playing an angle — and even in the confession interview she told new lies, denying things she had clearly said in earlier interviews.
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Why Did It Matter in Court in 2026?
This is the question at the heart of the 2026 ruling.
Ms Rodoy argued that whatever she had done in the 1990s was irrelevant to a defamation claim about letters sent in 2020 and 2021. She said the fraud was ancient history. She said she was a different person now. She said calling her a fraudster in the present tense — today — was not justified by something she had done 30 years earlier.
The judge disagreed. But not simply because the fraud had happened. He disagreed because of what Ms Rodoy said in the witness box when he asked about it.
She showed no regret. She expressed no remorse. She did not acknowledge that what she had done was wrong. When asked if she would do it again she said only that she was too busy.
The judge found that a person who shows no change, no remorse and no acknowledgement of wrongdoing has not reformed. The character revealed by the Decoy Dolls fraud — dishonest, calculating, indifferent to the harm caused to others — is, he found, the same character sitting in front of him in 2026.
He wrote — "She has not changed at all. She has not reformed at all. She is still, I am sorry to say, the same."
That is why Decoy Dolls mattered. Not just as history. But as evidence of who Sasha Rodoy is today.
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The Ruling
On the basis of the Decoy Dolls evidence and Ms Rodoy's own answers in court, Mr Justice Griffiths ruled that describing her as a "fraudster" in the present tense is substantially true.
She is not a fraudster only in the historical sense of having committed fraud in the past. She is a fraudster in the present sense — a person whose character, values and attitude to honesty remain those of someone who would and did commit fraud and who sees nothing wrong with it.
That ruling is now on the public record. It cannot be changed.
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Based on the publicly available judgment in Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd [2026] EWHC 1219 (KB) via caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Some issues in the case remain unresolved. This article is for informational purposes only.