The Murder Of Grace Millane: ‘Heinous’ rough sex defence explored five years on from British backpacker’s killing in New Zealand

Published

2 years ago

October 22, 2023

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On 2 December 2018, British backpacker Grace Millane should have been celebrating her 22nd birthday during the trip of a lifetime in New Zealand.

Thousands of miles from her home in Essex, the messages and requests for video calls from friends and family kept pinging through to her phone. But they were never answered.

Her disappearance made headlines around the world. Grace had been murdered by Jesse Kempson, a 26-year-old man she met through Tinder. He strangled her in a hotel room in Auckland, calmly left in the morning to purchase a suitcase, and later buried her body in an area of bushland in the Waitakere Ranges.

When CCTV contradicted his story – that they enjoyed a short date before going their separate ways – he admitted she had died while with him, but claimed a case of consensual “rough sex” gone badly wrong.

Kempson’s defence meant Grace’s parents David and Gillian, grieving and in a strange country, listened in court to what felt like blame and shaming of their daughter; details of her sex life raked over, never able to tell her own story. Following the trial, it emerged Kempson had a record of violence against women and had raped another British tourist eight months before he murdered Grace.

Almost five years on, a new documentary, The Murder Of Grace Millane, takes a look back at the night of her death and Kempson’s subsequent trial, focusing on his use of the defence and the reaction from some on social media that Grace was in some way at fault for going back to a hotel room with a man she had met that day.

“Essentially the rough sex defence re-victimises that victim and their families – in a murder case, their families who are sitting in court,” Detective Inspector Scott Beard, the lead investigator on the case, tells Sky News. “The victim isn’t there to answer.”

The documentary has been made by filmmaker Helena Coan, featuring DI Beard and with the blessing of Grace’s family. She says Kempson’s defence, arguing that Grace had asked to be choked during sex, was one of the main reasons she wanted to tell the young woman’s story.

“I’ve been in that position and probably every woman in the history of the world has been in that position, on a new date with someone that you don’t really know,” she says. “We’re excited to be there.” The CCTV footage shows a “young girl having fun in a new country”, she adds. “She was just a normal young woman who absolutely didn’t deserve what was about to happen to her.”

Coan’s film lets the evidence speak for itself. There is contradictory CCTV, footage of Kempson rifling through Grace’s bag when she left the table during her date, his internet search history for porn in the hours after Grace’s death, as well as for “Waitakere ranges” – the location where he would later bury her body. He also took photos of her. And there was no call to emergency services, no attempt to get help.

Jurors saw through Kempson’s account and he was ultimately found guilty, sentenced to a minimum of 17 years in prison. But campaigners say the rough sex defence in some cases can lead to reduced sentencing.

“People don’t really understand the prevalence of the rough sex defence,” says Coan. “Men are getting away with the most heinous, manipulative, planned, pre-meditated crimes. And they are saying, basically, ‘she asked for it’.

“It’s scary to see how lawyers use this defence and how juries still buy into this idea, that a woman can consent to being strangled to death.”

As it was said in court, she points out, it takes five to 10 minutes to kill someone by strangulation. “That’s not pleasure. That’s murder.”

In England and Wales, following much campaigning, it was announced in 2020 that “rough sex” legally should not be considered a defence to violent crime, that a person “cannot consent to actual bodily harm or to other more serious injury or, by extension, to their own death”.

Before this, the We Can’t Consent To This campaign group, which was set up following another woman’s killing, said the use of the defence had increased tenfold since 2000. It features the stories of dozens of women and girls on its website.

Following Kempson’s conviction in 2019, Susan Edwards, a barrister and law professor who spent years campaigning for a change in legislation in the UK, told Sky News she believed the “alarming” increase in the use of the defence was down to “a narrative in society of pornography in the media and much more generally” which meant jurors “might be more persuaded to accept that women are more consenting to this type of dreadful behaviour”.

Coan says she wants to see changes in the conversation generally, “outside of the courtroom – about women and violence against women and domestic violence and victim blaming – that then makes these defences harder to use because juries don’t buy into them as much”.

Her film features comments made about Grace on social media as news of her disappearance and death made headlines. She says it was “horrifying” to see the negative remarks. “It’s always scared me how quickly people want to blame victims of violence for the violence that’s committed against them. I want people to hear [the evidence] and then go, there is no way she could have consented to this.”

Coan says she hopes more than anything that the film will help more men understand the “silent burden” of the fear of violence that women carry.

“That’s really where things start to change, is with good men calling out other men. I want men to watch this film and understand that this feeling that something like this could happen is with every single woman, all the time. All the way through their lives. I want men to watch this and realise the fear that we carry and how heavy that is, and how men can really help to solve that.”

Watch The Murder of Grace Millane on Sky Documentaries and NOW from 22 October

Entertainment

Robin Williams’s daughter begs people to stop sending her AI videos of her father

Published

2 hours ago

October 7, 2025

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Robin Williams's daughter begs people to stop sending her AI videos of her father

The daughter of late actor Robin Williams has begged people to stop sending her AI-generated “slop” of her father.

“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” actor and director Zelda Williams wrote on Instagram on Monday.

“To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening.”

She described the videos as “disgusting, over-processed hotdogs” made from the lives of human beings.

“You’re […] shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross,” she wrote.

It’s not the first time Williams has written about the impact of people sending her content about her father on social media.

In 2020, on the anniversary of her father’s death, Williams posted on Instagram saying:

“While I am constantly touched by all of your boundless continued love for him, some days it can feel a bit like being seen as a roadside memorial – a place, not a person – where people drive past and leave their sentiments to then go about their days comforted their love for him was witnessed.”

“But sometimes, that leaves me emotionally buried under a pile of others’ memories instead of my own.”

The death of Robin Williams in 2014, an actor and comedian known for his quick wit and wisdom, triggered a global outpouring of grief and tributes to the star still frequently surface on social media to this day.

In 2023, Zelda appealed for the end of AI-generated content, saying in a widely-reported post on Instagram:

“I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad. This isn’t theoretical, it is very very real.”⁠
⁠
“I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings.”

Entertainment

Author Dame Jilly Cooper has died

Published

1 day ago

October 6, 2025

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Author Dame Jilly Cooper has died, her publisher has said.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Dame Jilly Cooper, DBE who died on Sunday morning, after a fall, at the age of 88,” a statement said.

The Queen paid tribute to Dame Jilly, calling her a “legend” who was a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend”.

The best-selling author was renowned for her raunchy, so-called “bonkbuster” novels, which portrayed the scandals and sex lives of wealthy country social circles, including Rivals, Riders and Polo.

She was praised for her blend of risqué storylines and critique of Britain’s class system, personified by showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black.

Her children Felix and Emily said: “Mum was the shining light in all of our lives. Her love for all of her family and friends knew no bounds.

“Her unexpected death has come as a complete shock.

“We are so proud of everything she achieved in her life and can’t begin to imagine life without her infectious smile and laughter all around us.”

Dame Jilly was propelled to commercial success in the 1980s, and sold 11 million copies of her books during her more than fifty-year career.

Last year, Rivals was adapted into a successful TV series, which she worked on as an executive producer.

Tributes to author who created ‘a whole new genre’

Dame Jilly was a long-standing friend of the Queen.

In a statement released by Buckingham Palace, she said: “I was so saddened to learn of Dame Jilly’s death last night.

“Very few writers get to be a legend in their own lifetime but Jilly was one, creating a whole new genre of literature and making it her own through a career that spanned over five decades.

“In person she was a wonderfully witty and compassionate friend to me and so many – and it was a particular pleasure to see her just a few weeks ago at my Queen’s Reading Room Festival where she was, as ever, a star of the show.

“I join my husband the King in sending our thoughts and sympathies to all her family.

“And may her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”

The author’s many fans included former prime minister Rishi Sunak, who said the books offered “escapism”.

‘Dame Jilly defined culture’

Her agent Felicity Blunt said: “The privilege of my career has been working with a woman who has defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over fifty years ago.”

She added: “You wouldn’t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time, but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things – class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.”

The executive producers of the Disney+ adaptation, Rivals, said they are “broken-hearted” and “her legacy will endure”.

Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Alex Lamb added: “Jilly was and always will be one of the world’s greatest storytellers, and it has been the most incredible honour to have been able to work with her to adapt her incredible novels for television.”

As tributes rolled in on Monday, TV presenter Kirsty Allsopp wrote on X: “I know 88 is a good age, but this is very sad news.

“A British institution, funny, enthusiastic and self-deprecating, we don’t see enough of it these days.”

Her publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said: “Jilly may have worn her influence lightly, but she was a true trailblazer.

“As a journalist she went where others feared to tread, and as a novelist she did likewise.

“With a winning combination of glorious storytelling, wicked social commentary and deft, lacerating characterisation, she dissected the behaviour, bad mostly, of the English upper middle classes with the sharpest of scalpels.”

The ‘unholy terror’

Born in Essex in 1937, Jilly Cooper came from a Yorkshire family known for newspaper publishing and politics.

Her writing career began in 1956 as a junior reporter on the Middlesex Independent, covering everything from parties to football.

She had said she was known as the “unholy terror” at school, and was sacked from 22 jobs before finding her way into book publishing.

Dame Jilly started writing stories for women’s magazines in 1968, and found her break in 1969 when The Sunday Times published a story on being an ”undomesticated” homemaker. It gave rise to a column that lasted over 13 years.

In 2019 she won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award, and in 2024 was made a dame for her services to literature and charity.

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Entertainment

Robbie Williams forced to cancel world tour gig in ‘interests of public safety’

Published

2 days ago

October 5, 2025

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Robbie Williams forced to cancel world tour gig in 'interests of public safety'

Robbie Williams has said he is “deeply sorry” his concert in the Turkish city of Istanbul has had to be cancelled “in the interests of public safety”.

The former Take That singer said it was his “dream” to perform at Atakoy Marina on Tuesday but the decision by city authorities to cancel the show “was beyond our control”.

Williams’ Britpop world tour began in May and has taken him to cities including London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki and Athens.

The 51-year-old Angels singer said in a post on Instagram to his 3.7m followers: “The last thing I would ever want to do is to jeopardise the safety of my fans – their safety and security come first.

“We were very excited to be playing Istanbul for the first time, and purposely chose the city as the final show of the Britpop tour.

“To end this epic run of dates in front of my Turkish fans was my dream, given the close connections my family have with this wonderful country.

“To everyone in Istanbul who wanted to join the 1.2 million people who have shared this phenomenal tour this year with us, I am deeply sorry. We were so looking forward to this show, but the decision to cancel it was beyond our control.”

Williams is still expected to perform a small ticketed gig on Thursday at Camden’s Dingwalls venue in London.

He will run through his upcoming album Britpop, which is yet to be released, in full, with his first solo LP, Life Thru A Lens.

After leaving Take That in 1995, Williams released his chart-topping debut album in 1997, and has achieved seven UK number one singles and 15 UK number one albums.