The Guardian81%
Bizarre questions and an all-male ‘jury’: woman strangled by US pilot in Britain tells of airbase trial 37%
By Harry Davies0% Rob Evans0%
6/25/2026, 10:00:09 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Appeal to Emotion, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 23.7% saturation with 284 hits. Analysis detected 2,137 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,198 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.4% and a BS Rank of 37% (13,930 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 63.60% of the article peer group.
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.
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.
Steele, who has a doctorate in law, has worked at several universities in the UK.
Her research focuses on sexual safety and preventing violence against women and girls, providing her with an informed perspective on the case, though she said it had been deeply uncomfortable to be in the kind of situation she researches.
Wulfson assaulted Steele at their first face-to-face encounter.
During the court martial, US air force prosecutors also accused him of drugging her and penetrating her vagina without her consent, an accusation he was acquitted of.
This was charged by the military prosecutors as sexual assault and “aggravated sexual contact”.
He was, however, convicted of the strangulation charge.
Prosecutors alleged that in his bedroom Wulfson strangled Steele, despite her having told him not to touch her neck in a message sent before arriving in which she had set some “ground rules”.
They alleged he continued to sexually assault her after she passed out, a charge he was acquitted of.
But Steele said she found herself in an unfamiliar system where the process was different from the British courts.
There were no court-issued bail conditions imposed on Wulfson, nor was he remanded into custody.
Instead, his commanders issued a military order days after he was arrested that prohibited any contact with Steele, which he subsequently violated.
When Steele later learned of this order, she wanted it to be extended to cover her child and protect other members of the public.
This required her to go to Wulfson’s base and personally make the case to his commander.
“I had to somehow figure that out [and] ask for the thing I wanted and needed to feel safe.”
At the court martial, Steele had to spend extended periods on the witness stand.
While victims in sexual assault cases can give evidence from behind a screen in the English criminal courts, no equivalent protection exists in US courts martial.
Steele had to sit just metres from Wulfson.
To her side sat a panel of eight uniformed US air force officers who were acting as the jury in the case.
That they were all men was troubling, Steele said.
“To say they weren’t representative of society at large would be an understatement.”
For Steele, the process felt strikingly foreign and in the hands of people with little appreciation of life in the UK, despite the assault having happened in an English city.
“The American flag is there.
Everybody is in American uniforms.
Everybody, as you appreciate it, is American,” she said.
As an academic familiar with criminal procedure, Steele said she anticipated Wulfson’s lawyers would try to cast doubt on character and testimony.
But the defence in the court martial felt “abnormal and in-your-face” and more aggressive than she would have expected in the British courts.
“I had to withstand extended periods of intrusion into things that you never thought would be publicly shared, into things that you never thought would be questioned,” she said.
“It feels like you’re being ripped up.”
Wulfson did not give evidence in the court martial, relying instead on his lawyers’ attacks on Steele’s credibility.
While his conviction is appealed – a process that could take several years – Steele is unable to comment on Wulfson’s sentence.
He is now serving six months of confinement in a facility at RAF Lakenheath, after which he can fly home to the US.
His sentence does not include restrictions on contacting Steele after he is released.
Although the panel also decided to dismiss Wulfson from the air force, which is a severe punishment in the military, legal experts said a six-month prison sentence for a strangulation case such as this would be considered lenient had it been heard in the English criminal courts.
A spokesperson for US air force said: “The military justice process includes strict procedural safeguards by design to ensure proceedings are fair, transparent and thorough.
Maintaining the trust that underpins our partnership, while ensuring accountability and the fair administration of discipline, remains our priority.”
Steele believes there needs to be greater scrutiny of how British police forces handle cases involving visiting forces, in particular when their victim is a British citizen or unconnected to the US military.
She said the police need to formally record and then account for decisions to hand over cases to the US, and to seek the views of the survivors before doing so.
This is critical, she said, because it was in the US military’s interest “to have their cases heard in their own settings, according to their own laws, because then they can control everything”.
Its processes are “guided by the US military’s mission and what the US government wants, and that isn’t necessarily what’s best for British civilians”, she added.
Steele said “the system itself” had been bruising, but she hoped that by speaking out future victims of crimes by US military personnel stationed in the UK would have some insight from somebody who had “been through what’s inside that black box”.
“The only way I’ve been able to rationalise and kind of start to move forward is to do things like say, how could this have been better?
How can we fix it?
How can people in the future not go through what I’ve experienced?”
This article was amended on 26 June 2026 to remove an image captioned as being of RAF Lakenheath that was actually of RAF Mildenhall.
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