Published: May 2026 | aboutsasharodoy.com
If you have been searching for information about Sasha Rodoy online you have probably come across her website "Optical Express Ruined My Life." You may have read her posts. You may have followed her on social media. You may have even reached out to her for advice after your own experience with eye surgery.
She built a large following over more than a decade. And for many people she seemed like someone worth trusting — a woman fighting a powerful company on behalf of ordinary patients who had nowhere else to turn.
But in May 2026 something happened that changed the picture completely.
A UK High Court judge handed down a detailed and damaging judgment about Sasha Rodoy. And what he found — and what he wrote — is something that anyone who has ever trusted her or relied on her information deserves to know about.
This article tells that story in plain, honest English.
Who Is Sasha Rodoy?
Sasha Rodoy is a British woman who has spent years running a public campaign against Optical Express — one of the UK's largest providers of laser and lens replacement eye surgery. She runs a website, several social media accounts and a private Facebook support group called "My Beautiful Eyes Foundation."
She describes all of this as her full-time work. She says she does it for free. She says she does it for the patients.
What is less well known is that Sasha Rodoy was never actually treated by Optical Express. Her own eye surgery was carried out by a completely different company called Optimax back in 2011. After having problems with that surgery she threatened legal action, set up a website about Optimax — and then settled the whole dispute privately in 2012. She received a cash payment and agreed to stop campaigning against Optimax.
Within months she had set up a brand new campaign. This time against Optical Express.
She has never had a single procedure at any Optical Express clinic. She has never been one of their patients. But that did not stop her from spending over a decade telling the world that the company ruins lives.
The Letters That Started the Legal Battle
Between 2020 and 2021 four former Optical Express patients wrote to the company with complaints about their treatment. Each of them mentioned Sasha Rodoy or her website somewhere in their letters.
The four patients were James Marshall, Colin Hind, Robert Beaton and Phoebe Arthur. Each had paid around £7,000 for surgery. Each had experienced difficulties afterwards. And each of them had found some comfort or useful information through Sasha Rodoy's website — or was planning to reach out to her for help.
When Optical Express saw her name mentioned in each complaint they included a paragraph in their reply. The paragraph was written personally by the company's chairman and chief executive David Moulsdale. It described Sasha Rodoy as a vexatious individual, a self-confessed and known fraudster and a troll whose online behaviour had required the company to contact the police over concerns for staff safety.
Each of the four patients read those words and immediately lost confidence in Sasha Rodoy.
Colin Hind said she had been "totally discredited" in his eyes and never went back to her website. Robert Beaton said he felt sick reading the letter and stayed away from her for months. Phoebe Arthur — a young woman whose surgery had gone wrong just before her wedding — cut all contact with Ms Rodoy immediately and eventually gave up her fight against Optical Express entirely. James Marshall went so silent that he refused to speak to Ms Rodoy's solicitors even years later when the court case was underway.
Sasha Rodoy found out about the letters and decided to take Optical Express to court. She filed a defamation claim — arguing that the words were untrue and had seriously damaged her reputation.
She believed she had a strong case.
She was wrong.
What the Court Found About Her Past
To defend the defamation claim Optical Express pointed the court to something from Sasha Rodoy's past. Something she had publicly admitted years earlier but had largely moved on from. Something she clearly hoped most people had forgotten.
In the early 1990s — when she was in her early forties and studying at university as a mature student — Sasha Rodoy invented a fictional detective agency. She called it Decoy Dolls. The agency claimed to specialise in catching unfaithful husbands by sending attractive women — decoys — to meet them and gather evidence for their wives.
None of it was real.
There were no decoys. There were no clients. There was no office, no equipment and no staff of any kind. Every single case history, every quote, every statistic, every detail ever reported about Decoy Dolls was entirely and deliberately made up.
Despite this she managed to sell the story to more than 50 UK newspapers and magazines over a period of several years. She appeared on more than 20 television chat shows and programmes including This Morning and Kilroy. She gave radio interviews. She was featured in overseas publications including a Norwegian newspaper whose journalist travelled to her London home for an interview. She was paid for all of it — fees that started at around £50 per interview and rose to close to £1,000 per appearance by the time the operation wound down.
To make the story more convincing she recruited close friends to pose as satisfied clients of the fake agency. She gave them false names to use when speaking to journalists. She had her own personal phone number printed at the end of articles as the agency contact number — not to take real client calls but to ensure more journalists would ring her for more paid stories.
And throughout all of this — across all of those interviews, all of those television appearances, all of those magazine spreads — she never once told a single journalist that the story was not true.
She Tried to Explain It Away — and the Judge Was Not Convinced
When the case came to trial in April 2026 before Mr Justice Griffiths, Sasha Rodoy tried several different arguments to explain away what she had done.
She said the media had pushed and encouraged her into doing it. The judge found this was simply not accurate. She had come up with the idea herself, chosen the name herself and actively driven the whole operation forward from beginning to end.
She said most of the journalists involved had known the story was false anyway. The judge rejected this completely. He found the journalists were genuinely deceived — they believed what she told them, reported it as fact and had no reason to suspect otherwise.
She said the whole thing had been a harmless student prank. The judge did not accept this either. She was in her early forties at the time — not a young student on a youthful adventure but a mature adult making calculated decisions for financial gain. What she did, he said, was not a prank. It was a sustained and deliberate fraud carried out over a period of years for money.
She also tried to suggest she had made very little money from the whole exercise. The judge rejected this too, finding from the evidence before him that the operation had been considerably larger and more profitable than she was prepared to acknowledge in court.
One by one every argument she put forward was examined and rejected.
The judge also found — and this is important — that Sasha Rodoy was simply not a reliable witness. He found her evidence in court was at times inaccurate — not because she had a poor memory or was confused about old events, but because she gave the evidence she thought would help her case rather than the evidence that was actually true.
The Question She Could Not Answer
After all the evidence had been heard and all the arguments made the judge asked Sasha Rodoy one simple and direct question.
Did she regret what she had done?
She said her only regret was having to sit in a courtroom and answer questions about it. That was all. No acknowledgement that it was wrong. No apology to the journalists she had deceived. No recognition that recruiting friends to lie on her behalf had been dishonest. Nothing.
When the judge asked whether she would do it again she did not say she had changed. She did not say it was wrong. She said only that she was too busy.
Those two answers told the judge everything he needed to know.
He concluded that the woman sitting in front of him in 2026 is the same person who ran the Decoy Dolls fraud in the 1990s. Same values. Same relationship with honesty. Same absence of remorse.
And because she has not changed — because she has shown no reform, no regret and no genuine acknowledgement of wrongdoing — the description of her as a fraudster is not just historically accurate. It is accurate today.
He wrote in his judgment — she has not changed at all, she has not reformed at all, and she is still, he was sorry to say, the same.
The Ruling
On the basis of all of this Mr Justice Griffiths made a clear and formal legal ruling.
Calling Sasha Rodoy a fraudster — in the present tense, as of today — is substantially true under the Defamation Act 2013.
The court also found — and this is the one point where Sasha Rodoy did succeed — that all four letters sent by Optical Express caused serious harm to her reputation. Under the law a statement is only defamatory if it actually causes real and serious damage. The court found that threshold was met in every single case, given how the four patients reacted after reading the letters.
But winning on serious harm was not enough. The truth defence put forward by Optical Express succeeded on the central and most important point.
Sasha Rodoy went to the High Court specifically to have a judge declare that the word fraudster was false and unfair when used about her.
The judge declared the opposite.
What Happens Next
The case is not entirely finished. Several questions still need to be resolved — including whether Optical Express is protected from liability by qualified privilege, whether the company acted with malice and what compensation if any Sasha Rodoy may be owed.
Those matters will be decided at a later stage.
But the headline finding — the finding that goes to the heart of who Sasha Rodoy is and how she has presented herself to the world — is already settled.
She is, in the eyes of a UK High Court judge, a fraudster.
Not because of a technicality. Not because of a disputed detail. But because of what she did, what she admitted and what she refused to apologise for.
Why This Matters
If you have ever visited Sasha Rodoy's website, followed her on social media or relied on her information when making decisions about your eye care you deserve to know what a UK High Court judge found about her in May 2026.
The court found she is not a reliable witness.
The court found she ran a years-long fraud for money and has no regret about it.
The court found that calling her a fraudster today is substantially true.
That does not mean everything she has ever said about eye surgery is wrong. It does not mean that patients who have had bad experiences with Optical Express are not telling the truth. Those are separate questions.
But it does mean that the person who has spent years asking you to trust her — asking you to rely on her information, her advice and her judgment — has been found by a court of law to be someone whose evidence cannot always be trusted and whose character has not changed since she ran a deliberate fraud for money in the 1990s.
That is something worth knowing.
The Key Facts
- Case name: Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd
- Citation: [2026] EWHC 1219 (KB)
- Court: High Court of Justice — King's Bench Division — Media and Communications List
- Judge: Mr Justice Griffiths
- Judgment date: 22 May 2026
- Hearing dates: 20 to 29 April 2026
- Location: Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2A 2LL
This article is based on the publicly available judgment in Rodoy v Optical Express Ltd [2026] EWHC 1219 (KB), available via https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2026/1486. Some issues in the case remain unresolved at the time of publication. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.