Abercrombie & Fitch’s former chief executive is not fit to stand trial on sex trafficking charges as he is suffering from dementia, both prosecutors and his lawyers have said.

Mike Jeffries has Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia and the “residual effects of a traumatic brain injury”, his defence attorneys wrote in a letter filed at a federal court in Central Islip, New York.

The 80-year-old needs around-the-clock care, they added, citing evaluations by medical professionals.

Prosecutors and defence lawyers are calling for Jeffries to be placed in the custody of the federal bureau of prisons for up to four months. They say he should be admitted to hospital to have treatment that could allow his criminal case to proceed.

The business tycoon, who led fashion retailer A&F from 1992 to 2014, pleaded not guilty to federal sex trafficking and interstate prostitution charges in October, and was released on a $10m (£7.65m) bond.

A total of 15 men allege they were induced by “force, fraud and coercion” to engage in drug-fuelled sex parties.

Prosecutors have accused Jeffries, his partner Matthew Smith, and the couple’s alleged “recruiter” James Jacobson, of luring men to parties in New York City, the Hamptons and other locations, by dangling the prospect of modelling for A&F advertisements.

Smith and Jacobson have also pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.

‘Progressive and incurable’

In their latest letter on Jeffries’ health, his defence lawyers said at least four medical professionals had concluded his cognitive issues are “progressive and incurable”, and that he will not “regain his competency and cannot be restored to competency in the future”.

These issues “significantly impair” his ability to understand the charges against him, they wrote.

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“The progressive nature of his neurocognitive disorder ensures continued decline over time, further diminishing his already limited functional capacity,” said Dr Alexander Bardey, a forensic psychiatrist, and Dr Cheryl Paradis, a forensic psychologist, following evaluations made in December.

“It is, therefore, our professional opinion, within a reasonable degree of psychological and psychiatric certainty, that Mr Jeffries is not competent to proceed in the current case and cannot be restored to competency in the future.”

Jeffries left A&F in 2014 after leading the company for more than two decades, taking the retailer from a hunting and outdoor goods store founded in 1892 to a fixture of early 2000s fashion.

His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests by the Associated Press news agency for comment. The US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York declined to comment.

A British version of long-running US sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL) will be coming to Sky next year.

An American pop culture institution, SNL launched the careers of stars including Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell.

It’s also featured a host of celebrity and political guests, including tech billionaire Elon Musk and Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate.

SNL celebrated 50 years on air in February.

British comedians will be cast in the UK spin-off, which will be overseen by US producer Lorne Michaels alongside the US version.

Along with his production company Broadway Video, which has made The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and 30 Rock, the show will be led by UK production team Universal Television Alternative Studio.

The beginnings of SNL, which started in 1975, was recently made into the 2024 film Saturday Night, featuring Spider-Man star Willem Dafoe and Succession actor Nicholas Braun.

The success of SNL, which airs on NBC in the US, has led to past attempts at international versions of the programme, with a French version Le Saturday Night Live running for just one season in 2017.

Cecile Frot-Coutaz, chief executive of Sky Studios and chief content officer at Sky, said: “For over 50 years Saturday Night Live has held a unique position in TV and in our collective culture, reflecting and creating the global conversation, all under the masterful comedic guidance of Lorne Michaels.

“The show has discovered and nurtured countless comedy and musical talents over the years and we are thrilled to be partnering with Lorne and the SNL team to bring an all-British version of the show to UK audiences next year – all live from London on Saturday night.”

Saturday Night Live UK will be broadcast on Sky Max and streaming service NOW in 2026.

Details about the UK version’s cast, hosts, and premiere will be announced in the coming months.

The director of hit BBC period drama Wolf Hall says the government “needs to have enough guts to stand up to the bully in the White House” to protect the future of public service broadcasting.

Peter Kosminsky told Sky News’ Breakfast with Anna Jones that calls for a streaming levy to support British high-end TV production was urgently needed to stop the “decimation” of the UK industry.

His comments follow the release of a new report from the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee, calling for the government to improve support measures for the UK’s high-quality drama sector while safeguarding the creation of distinctly British content.

Specifically, the report calls for streamers – including Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+, all of which are based in the US – to commit to paying 5% of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences.

Kosminsky, who made the case for the levy and gave evidence to the committee in January, called global tariffs recently introduced by Donald Trump “the elephant in the room”.

He said he feared they would make the government reticent to introduce a streaming levy, but said it was a necessary step to “defend a hundred years of honourable tradition of public service broadcasting in this country and not see it go to the wall because [the government are] frightened of the consequences from the bully in the States”.

Kosminsky also noted that the streamers would be able to apply for money from the fund themselves, as long as they were in co-production with a UK public service broadcaster.

Earlier this year, a White House memorandum referenced levies on US streaming services, calling them “one-sided, anti-competitive policies” that “violate American sovereignty”.

In response to the call for streaming levies, a Netflix spokesperson said such a move would “penalise audiences” and “diminish competitiveness”.

They added: “The UK is Netflix’s biggest production hub outside of North America – and we want it to stay that way.”

The Association for Commercial Broadcasters and On-Demand Services (COBA) said such a levy “risks damaging UK growth and the global success story of the UK TV sector,” and “would risk dampening streamers’ existing investment in domestic content and would inevitably increase costs for businesses”.

COBA said it welcomed the committee’s support for targeted tax breaks for domestic drama.

Kosminsky also told Sky News the second series of Wolf Hall was nearly called off just six weeks before it was due to start shooting due to financial pressures, adding: “It was only because the producer, the director, writer and the leading actor all agreed to take huge cuts in their own remuneration that the show actually got made.”

He said that both he and the show’s executive producer, Sir Colin Callender, had “worked on the show unpaid for 11 years on the basis that we would get a payment when the show went into production”, calling it “a bitter blow” to see that disappear.

Working in public service broadcasting for his entire career, Kosminsky said it was “absolutely heartbreaking for me and others like me to see that the industry we have been nurtured by and we care about is being decimated”.

While he said he was a “huge fan of the streamers”, he said it was their “very deep pockets” that had “driven up the price of what we do”, to the point where the traditional broadcasters can no longer afford to make high-end television.

Just this week, Adolescence, created by British talent Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, became the fourth most popular English-language series in Netflix’s history with 114 million views.

But while some very British shows might get taken on by the streamers due to universal appeal, Kosminsky said dramas including ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office and Hillsborough, and BBC drama Three Girls about the grooming of young girls by gangs in the north of England were examples of game-changing productions that could be lost in the future.

He warned: “These are not dramas that the streamers would ever make, they’re about free speech in this country. That’s part of what we think of as a democratic society, where we can make these dramas and programmes that challenge on issues of public policy that would never be of any interest in America.”

The CMS report comes following an inquiry into British film and high-end television, which considered how domestic and inward investment production was being affected by the rise of streaming platforms.

Chairwoman of the CMS committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage, said “there will be countless distinctly British stories that never make it to our screens” unless the government intervenes to “rebalance the playing field” between streamers and public service broadcasters (PSBs).

A DCMS spokesperson said: “We acknowledge the challenges facing our brilliant film and TV industry and are working with it through our Industrial Strategy to consider what more needs to be done to unlock growth and develop the skills pipeline. We thank the committee for its report which we will respond to in due course.”