Home
The Sunday Times •

Is Britain a nation of porn addicts trapped in the algorithm?

Michael lost whole days of his life to online pornography. He would skip through video after video to see “if the people were doing what I wanted them to do”, never watching one for more than a few seconds, desperate to find the best one, to get the best hit. He couldn’t stop.

The more the 49-year-old watched, the more extreme the material became. “You get desensitised because you are seeing so many images so quickly,” he said. “You need something more edgy to get the same level of arousal. So
The Sunday Times •

Being a huge shark was bad enough. Now I’m a killer doll

Oh, it’s tough being me. Being a Megan, a Meghan, a Meg — maligned, defiled and slagged off. You may not have noticed, sheltered by your non-Megan name, but the world has a Megan problem. It’s exhausting.

At the moment I am a killer doll, in the horror film M3GAN. There are billboards — seemingly on every street corner and train platform — 6ft images of a wide-eyed and sallow girl doll lurking in a child’s bedroom. I can’t get off the Tube without giving myself a fright.

Before that I was an e
The Sunday Times •

Constance Marten: the aristocrat missing with her lover and baby

Constance Marten’s life started in the sweeping corridors, drawing rooms and 5,000-acre parkland of Crichel House, Dorset. The daughter of a landed family with links to the royals, she had a talent for acting, a flair for languages and, it appeared, a glittering future ahead of her.

But she turned her back on champagne parties and holidays at ski resorts, and is now being sought by the police along with Mark Gordon, a man 13 years her senior.

In recent years, they had moved between terraced ho
The Sunday Times •

From Luton to porn millionaire: how Andrew Tate became master of misogyny

Andrew Tate, self-proclaimed “trillionaire”, self-proclaimed “misogynist” and the most ubiquitous man on the internet, always said this would happen.

“First they attack your character and cancel you, then they put you in jail,” said Tate, 36, in an interview on YouTube in October. According to him, the “Matrix” — a group of elites that control the world — is threatened by his fearless free speech. And they are out to get him.

He continued: “I like to think that if anyone sees a media article w
The Sunday Times •

I took my own stalker to court because police weren’t interested

It was only when Dr Marie Gerval took her car to the garage that she knew for certain she was being stalked. Fixed under the bonnet of the car was a tracking device.

The incident was part of what she sees as a wider campaign of stalking behaviour by Kelvin James, 58, a man she had employed as a handyman and briefly dated. “The experience has shaken all aspects of my life,” she said.

Gerval, a leading gynaecologist, has not been able to work for months due to anxiety and was diagnosed with post
The Sunday Times •

Just Stop Oil bankrolled by fossil fuel heiress whose cash pays activists to protest

The Just Stop Oil activists who spent two nights last week suspended in hammocks above the Dartford Crossing in Kent were a long way from the main source of the group’s income: a coalition of wealthy individuals in the Hollywood Hills, including the heiress Aileen Getty.

Getty, 65, is the granddaughter of the oil tycoon J Paul Getty, once the richest man in the world. The family is thought to be worth £3.9 billion.

In 2020 she set up a non-profit organisation, the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF),
The Sunday Times •

Harvey Weinstein, a feminist film and abuse claims: Brad Pitt’s in a #MeToo tangle

Brad Pitt — Hollywood golden boy, keen philanthropist and People magazine’s “sexiest man in the world” — has positioned himself as one of this year’s most feminist producers.

He is at the helm of She Said, a Me Too film about the epic battle fought by New York Times journalists to publish the story of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct and abuse.

“People have tried to write this story before and he [Weinstein] kills it every time,” said the trailer before its release next month.

“This is ab
The Sunday Times •

Donald Burgess, 93, died after he was pepper-sprayed, hit with a baton and tasered in a care home — then it was covered up

Donald Burgess was a country lad. He lived near Battle, East Sussex, all his life and worked as a carpenter at a family-run builders’ merchant. He was a charmer, wangling a free lunch and a cup of tea wherever he worked, and a skilled tradesman, well-regarded by his peers and the apprentices he brought on. He built his own conservatory and read yesterday’s newspaper, the day after his wife, being too frugal to buy two copies.

After the death of his wife, a dementia diagnosis and a leg amputatio
The Sunday Times •

Pseudo-science and fascism: the dark side of sperm donation

Publicly, Clive Jones claims to be the “world’s most prolific sperm donor”, the father of 112 children, all under the age of nine, and 14 more “on the way”. He advertises his virility on Facebook groups, liaises with a “recipient”, arranges a meeting, drives to the destination in his van and hands over a pot of his sperm to a woman who will go on to have his child.

What he does not promote to the women or in media interviews is his membership of a group that has promoted “total Aryanism”. He is
The Sunday Times •

Logan Mwangi and Craig Mulligan: the two boys who never stood a chance

Craig Mulligan, 14, followed his stepfather, John Cole, everywhere. He followed him down the road from their flat in Bridgend, south Wales, over the River Ogmore, across the green and behind the row of houses where Angharad Williamson, Cole’s partner, lived with her five-year-old son, Logan Mwangi. “Every time I saw Cole I saw the boy behind him,” said a neighbour. “He was stuck to him.”

At 2.43am on July 31 last year, Craig followed Cole out of Williamson’s home and across the green. Over his