Sarah Steele endured being cross-examined at length at a military base only metres away from her attacker. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Sarah Steele endured being cross-examined at length at a military base only metres away from her attacker. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian Base justice US military Bizarre questions and an all-male ‘jury’: woman strangled by US pilot in Britain tells of airbase trial Sarah Steele waives anonymity to call for greater scrutiny of how US military courts are allowed to ‘rip apart’ vulnerable witnesses in the UK
Why did a US fighter pilot avoid British trial after strangling a woman in England?
Explainer: how the US bypasses British courts
Prefer the Guardian on Google A woman strangled by an American fighter pilot at his home in an English city has come forward to criticise the handling of his prosecution via a US court martial, a process she described as “military first, justice second”.
Sarah Steele, a British academic, has come forward to speak about the “distressing and degrading” experience she had with the US military justice system after she was assaulted by the airman in Cambridge.
Although Jacob Wulfson assaulted Steele on UK soil in late 2023, after the pair met on a dating app, American military police quickly took over the case and the pilot was tried by US air force prosecutors.
View image in fullscreen Wulfson (centre) with colleagues at the Dubai airshow in UAE in 2019. Photograph: Tech. Sgt. Joseph Pick/United States Air Forces Central UK law enforcement have primary jurisdiction over crimes that occur outside of US bases while military personnel are off duty. However, Steele’s case has put a spotlight on how UK authorities cede authority to the US military.
In her interview with the Guardian, Steele also shed light on the process by which her case was claimed by American military prosecutors.
Wulfson’s court martial – details of which were revealed by the Guardian – was heard in April at the airman’s base, RAF Lakenheath in west Suffolk, the largest US military base in the UK.
The 32-year-old US captain was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but found not guilty of sexual assault. He received a sentence of six months in a corrections facility, handed to him by an all-male panel of air force officers who served as the equivalent of a jury.
Had his case been heard in the British criminal justice system, legal experts say, Wulfson would probably have been tried for rape. Any sentence would have been determined by a judge.
View image in fullscreen Photograph: Joshua Bright/The Guardian View image in fullscreen RAF Lakenheath. Photograph: David Goddard/Getty Images In an interview, Steele said the US military’s processes had been “confronting, and at times frustrating and distressing”. She said the court martial felt “archaic and bizarre”, adding: “It feels like you’ve been put in this absurd Netflix series kind of situation where you’re like, is this real?”
Steele, 42, said one reason for coming forward to the Guardian was that many people in the UK were unaware there were “little pockets of American jurisdiction” on British soil, where victims of crimes committed by US military personnel can find themselves caught in a foreign and outdated justice system.
She said decisions by UK police forces to cede responsibility of cases to the US military police and prosecutors needed to be “subject to scrutiny”, in particular when crimes com...