Why I was wrong about Sophie of Dundee

A Bulgarian man has been found guilty of making sexual remarks to a 12-year-old girl in Dundee, Scotland, before grabbing and pushing her to the ground. His accomplice – namely, his sister – had previously admitted to assaulting the girl’s 13-year-old friend by pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground and hitting her.

The court’s verdict is vindication for the girl dubbed ‘Sophie of Dundee’ when footage of part of the incident went viral last autumn. Infamously, it shows ‘Sophie’ (she is too young to have her real name revealed) briefly brandishing an axe and a knife. One of the girls can also be heard referring to their assailants as ‘kid bashers’. Don’t fucking touch my little sister’, the older girl says. ‘She’s fucking 12!’

We now know for certain that these girls had every reason to be terrified and to want to defend themselves. As Ilia Belov walked past the two girls, he said, ‘Hello sexy, I’ll show you a good time’. They dismissed him as a creep. He then sought out his sister, Nadjedzha Belova, and they returned as a pair to confront the girls. While Belov claimed that the children had racially abused him, the judge rejected that he had any grounds for ‘self-defence’.

Since the verdict, my email inbox, X mentions and WhatsApp have been full of people reminding me about a piece I wrote on spiked last year, in which I’ll happily admit I got several things wrong, based on the information that was available at the time.

My mistake was being insufficiently sceptical towards what the police were saying. Usually, in high-profile, contentious cases like this (especially those involving a migrant or ethnic-minority perpetrator), the police tend to withhold information and say as little as possible. Instead, Police Scotland not only arrested one of the girls on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon – they also stated clearly and unequivocally that she was the aggressor and the Bulgarian pair were the victims. We now know that to be totally false.

Police in Dundee declared in no uncertain terms that, having reviewed the CCTV, they had found ‘no evidence’ that the Bulgarians had committed any offences or posed a risk to the girls. Thanks to the court case, we now know that the CCTV evidence actually showed the girls being physically assaulted. One girl’s mother spoke of her distress at having to watch her daughter being ‘dragged about’ on film during the trial.

The police even got the most basic facts wrong, including falsely describing the assailants as husband and wife, when they were in fact brother and sister. A police spokesman has since acknowledged that this ‘initial information… did not fully reflect the situation’, which feels like the understatement of the century. We now know this ‘information’ bore no resemblance to reality at all.

Nevertheless, Police Scotland seemed so confident of their version of events – or perhaps, so determined to push a predetermined narrative – that they had the nerve to warn social-media users to stop spreading ‘misinformation’ that contradicted their statements. SNP first minister John Swinney backed the cops up, warning that online interest in the case threatened to undermine ‘community cohesion’. Statements like this ought to have alerted me sooner that something was amiss. After all, what is now abundantly clear is that the police, the media and the political class were, by far, the worst purveyors of ‘misinformation’ about this case.

However, I do not accept the charge of my fiercest critics that I maligned the two girls in any way. I did not call them – or imply that they were – liars, racists or feral brutes, as some seem to imagine I did. (Perhaps they are thinking of some of the other commentary at the time.)

The target of my spiked piece – as the headline makes clear – was not the girls, but the online right and the BS it so often peddles. ‘Sophie’ and her friend have undoubtedly been vindicated by the courts, but many of the claims about her case made by online shit-stirrers have not. The Bulgarian man was not an Islamist, an illegal immigrant or part of a grooming gang, as was widely suggested at the time.

What’s more, there is nothing about the facts of the case that can justify turning a scared young girl into a social-media meme. What could well have been the worst day of her life has now been immortalised online. Neck-bearded bedwetters in their bedrooms used AI to reimagine her as some sort of female Braveheart for the 21st century, fighting off the hordes of migrant paedos who are supposedly invading Scotland. The exploitation of this incident, recasting a terrified teen as a frontline soldier in an imaginary race war – whether for clicks, for cash or for political gain – was and is shameful.

While I should undoubtedly have been more sceptical towards the ‘official’ narrative around ‘Sophie of Dundee’, I make no apologies for being sceptical of what viral X videos appear to show. The rogues’ gallery of bullshitters who leapt on the case, proclaiming to know the truth from 44 seconds of out-of-context footage, gave me every reason to doubt their version of events. Not least as, in a climate as febrile as 2020s Britain, a misconstrued, misunderstood piece of cameraphone footage can and has led to innocent people being tarnished.

Only a week before Tommy Robinson shared the Sophie of Dundee clip, a post of his on X had baselessly implied that two black men were child abusers – their only ‘crime’ was to have been filmed playing in the park with one of their granddaughters, who has lighter skin. More recently, Robinson tweeted a video which he claimed showed the victim of the Belfast knife attack in his hospital bed (it showed someone else entirely). In both cases, the posts were simply deleted without apology or explanation. Most notoriously, he devoted a feature-length documentary to defaming a teenage Syrian refugee as a violent, knife-wielding monster. When sued for libel, Robinson was unable to defend any of his film’s most lurid claims.

Around the same time as the Dundee incident, Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe had alerted the coastguard to a small vessel off the coast of Norfolk that he believed to be containing illegal migrants, only to later discover they were charity rowers. And in the months since, Epsom in Surrey erupted in protest over a rape by an alleged migrant that it now appears did not take place (although the authorities could, of course, be wrong again). False allegations, including innocent mistakes, have consequences and must be guarded against.

Bullshit is being sprayed from all directions. From the establishment that crows about online ‘misinformation’ while spreading its own. From self-styled ‘truth-seekers’ and ‘free-thinkers’ who repost any old rubbish that confirms their priors. Nobody should be trusted by default.

If there is a lesson from the Sophie of Dundee incident, it is surely to keep questioning everything.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.