Sophie Toscan du Plantier: Another New Trial?

Next Monday, 14th July will see more courtroom action relating to the 1996 killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in West Cork, Ireland.

On Thursday evening, 10th July, a number of journalists who have written about the killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier received a large number of files pertaining to a private criminal prosecution for defamation in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. There will be a hearing this Monday, 14th July, 2025.

There are over a hundred, and possibly over 200, pages of information that I have received. Different journalists have received slightly different documents so we have been comparing notes and filling each other’s gaps since Thursday.

This will not be a forensic analysis of those documents due to the pressure of time. Not yet anyway.

The case is being brought by Robert Sheehan, a man who worked in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), in Dublin in the late 1990s. In 2001 the office of the DPP wrote a detailed report that was highly critical of the police investigation into Sophie’s murder.

That report became public in 2011 and since then the author has been widely named to be Robert Sheehan. However, as anyone who knows anything about public life will know, nobody is allowed to write reports and send them out willy nilly. The DPP himself agreed to publication and the report was reviewed by others and amended on the basis of feedback.

I have spent around four years working on this case, and in the last year or 18 months the work has become sporadic. Jim Sheridan’s new movie is running through festivals around the world this summer ahead of a general release this autumn. But otherwise little has happened, and a police re-investigation is taking an inordinate amount of time.

My main question in relation to this defamation lawsuit, which it must be stressed is a criminal (not a civil) prosecution is this: why now?

There are certain circumstances. The publication last autumn of Senan Molony’s book won widespread media coverage due to the profile of the author. Much of the evidence in the book had been discredited long before.

I have read all the documents available publicly and most of the privately available ones in four years. The one document that stood out to me as being neutral and authoritative was in fact the 2001 DPP report, which rightly threw out all the half-baked circumstantial evidence against Ian Bailey. It made a prosecution in Ireland impossible without further investigative work, which never materially happened.

There has never been a shred of evidence against Ian Bailey. Most of the evidence in fact puts him at home, several miles away, at the two times when it is believed Sophie might have died. Late at night, in the hours after she called her husband, Ian was at home. And he remained there until the morning after, including in the hours around seven or eight in the morning, when many believe Sophie was killed due to the contents of her stomach resembling breakfast foods.

The only scenario which can place Ian Bailey at the crime scene is a highly unlikely midnight ramble across dangerous ground in the dark, and back again. During all of this roaming and murdering he received no mud or blood on any of his clothes and, farcically, also found time to wander miles out of his way down to Kealfadda Bridge, where he was spotted by one of the most unreliable and compromised witnesses ever to grace a courtroom.

I will report more as I receive it. It feels to me as though Robert Sheehan is doing more than protecting his own reputation. 2001 was a very long time ago indeed, and many people have criticised that report in the decades since. It feels to me as though he is still seeking justice for Sophie as well as for himself.

The DPP report is freely available from several sources online including this one.

Sophie and son