Jersey Senator Stuart Syvret Speaks for the First Time from Exile in the USA

You will never look at tiny islands, global finance, the UK Queen or the Royal Family the same way again.

Hello everyone —

I am sitting in a cabin in the Adirondacks, writing to you over the Labor Day holiday. It is a drizzly and gray day, but I was able to hit the lake with an old friend in our kayaks early this morning, while the water was still like glass, and paddle out to our favorite sandy island for some much-needed catch-up time.

We did not succeed in staying dry on our junket, but the water was much warmer than the air, so we dipped our hands in the lake and lingered in the misty rain.

All the while, however, I was thinking about this: For the past few weeks, my producer, Reggie, and I have been working hard to condense a four-hour interview with the former senior senator from the island of Jersey, Stuart Syvret, a prominent children’s-rights activist and one of the first to blow the whistle on decades of crimes against children in Jersey.

Stuart spoke to us recently for the first time from an undisclosed location in the U.S., having left Jersey, fearing for his life. In this wide-ranging podcast, the first of two we plan to release, he tells his remarkable story.

Stuart left Jersey, a top tax shelter controlled by the Queen, after repeatedly exposing the systemic abuse of hundreds of children on the island and then receiving death threats for years. (His house was also raided by Jersey’s police, his papers and computers taken, and he was infamously slapped with a superinjunction, a secret gag order that was subsequently exposed by UK parliament, and imprisoned three times — each in connection with his efforts to expose multiple allegations of horrific crimes across the island.)

When someone like a former senator or politically exposed person’s life is threatened in most western democracies, the police would typically be expected to try to protect them, address the threat immediately and dispatch a security detail. The media would be expected to cover it. After all, Stuart served as a high-ranking senator, as well as the island’s health minister. He blew the whistle on 70-plus years of systemic child abuse. Now he was receiving death threats. Anywhere else, that’s a big news story.

Not so in Jersey. Instead, Stuart, once one of the most popular politicians on the island, found himself isolated, receiving written “personal safety warnings,” brought to him (literally to his door) by the Jersey police, letting him know that death threats were being made against him, that these threats were well-documented and explicitly naming the person threatening him (please see below).

Jersey’s police were not in question as to whether these threats were real. They knew they were, because the police had received the threats from the threatener himself, by email, which the police quoted to Stuart in their warnings to him: “If Stuart Syvret’s body is washed up somewhere, you know where to find me,” one said (also below). The police claimed to be undertaking a criminal investigation. But as years went by, nothing happened and the person making the threats continued to walk free.

Stuart received no updates on his case and has not received any to this day. The police have refused to say publicly what, if any action, they took to protect the former senator. They have declined to reveal the results of their criminal investigation.

Troublingly, the person threatening Stuart has already been investigated for alleged serious crimes in the past (read: also involving possibly killing people).

It is hardly surprising that after receiving notices from the police like the one below, without any evidence of further action to apprehend the person making death threats, Stuart was forced to take the painful decision to leave the island, to protect his life.

Since this podcast was first recorded, I have learned Stuart is very much missing his island home. He loves Jersey and he wishes he could be there. But he also wants to know he can live there safely, not as a permanently under-threat political prisoner.

In our last podcast (Episode 2: “The Jersey Way”), you heard live audio of how islanders are ganged-up on and silenced when they speak up about child endangerment, or just ask questions. In this episode, Stuart’s account will demonstrate how one of the most chilling things about Jersey is that when politicians, child-rights activists, even high-level cops speak out, they are systemically crushed, socially, politically, legally, financially and personally — and driven from the island.

As the Jersey police spokesperson I talked to asserted, the threats against Stuart were “personal.” In Jersey, politicians can take a stand professionally but, in the end, they may be silenced as a personal matter. Once again, this is what makes Jersey stand out.