invisible woman
VISIBLE MOMENTS
23 OCTOBER 2026
Last week, I asked who gets to describe a person — and when that description becomes a basis for institutional action.
This week, I began naming the people in that process.
The British chain, principally, with some NATO involvement. The full NATO and Spanish stories remain for a later season. There is only so much institutional machinery one woman can introduce in a single episode.
The names matter because institutions act through people. Someone receives information. Someone decides whether to check it. Someone authorises a restriction, passes an account onwards, handles a complaint or signs a response declining further examination.
My central publication this week brings those roles together.
Being named does not establish wrongdoing. It identifies participation, responsibility or a question that needs an answer.
The question is what each person knew, what they verified and what happened next.
This Week on the Blog
1. WHEN PERSONAL BECOMES CRIMINAL
How does a private relationship become an institutional security matter?
This article reconstructs the chain through which, I allege, a sexualised social narrative acquired military, administrative and policing consequences. It follows the communications, restrictions, complaints and ministerial responses—and identifies the people involved, including roles whose occupants remain unnamed.
The story reaches beyond the original decision. It asks what happened when later participants were given opportunities to examine its foundations.
What did they check?
What did they accept?
What did they pass on?
And what did they decline to investigate?
These are questions for potential witnesses and decision-makers. Whether the evidence establishes unlawful or criminal conduct remains to be determined.
Read the article →
2. THE ANATOMY OF A LABEL
An accent. A birthplace. A relationship. A woman who knows how to shoot.
None of those details changed when I became an international news story. The interpretation around them did.
This article examines how a person becomes a character—and how that character can begin to acquire the appearance of an institutional fact.
It also proposes a way to test the process: identify the words, their source, their evidential basis, how they travelled and what consequences followed.
A description may be a fact, an allegation, an inference, an opinion or a joke. Those distinctions become particularly important when the description reaches someone with the power to act.
Read the article →
3. TWO POLICE FORCES, ONE QUESTION: WHO CAN INDEPENDENTLY INVESTIGATE?
There is a joke: the most important thing in any criminal investigation is to make sure the trail does not lead back to you.
This week, that joke became an introduction to a serious institutional question.
On 22 October, I asked my MP, Andrew Rosindell, to seek a coordinated answer from Hertfordshire Constabulary and the Ministry of Defence Police about responsibility for criminal allegations originally reported in September 2025.
The difficulty is the overlap between the prospective investigators and the material requiring examination.
Hertfordshire holds relevant evidence, participated in connected events and is defending related civil proceedings. MDP would potentially investigate conduct, personnel and records within the defence environment it serves.
The article distinguishes jurisdiction, investigative responsibility and independence. It asks how the conflicts should be assessed—and what arrangements would allow the whole connected chain to be examined.
Read the article →
4. INVISIBLE WOMAN, CHAPTER TWO: LA PUTA ESPÍA RUSA
Before the documents, there were household expenses, children, Christmas plans and the ordinary work of building a relationship.
The second chapter returns to December 2024 and my lawful attendance at a NATO Christmas event.
I remember a crowded marquee, international food and a conversation about Catholic Christmas traditions. Almost two years later, I read an account attributed to military sources describing a rather different woman at that gathering.
This chapter examines the distance between those accounts—and the sexualised character that emerged around the woman I knew myself to be.
It also preserves a distinction that matters throughout this project: remembering how something felt does not establish what another person thought.
The writer remembers. The lawyer asks what can be proved.
Read the chapter →
5. I AM NOT SPAIN — SUNDAY THOUGHTS
A Spanish Christmas lunch, a carefully chosen outfit and an afternoon in which joining a conversation began to resemble herding sheep.
This reflection returns to an experience of social exclusion and considers it alongside the later “Red Sparrow” reporting.
Did suspicion produce hostility? Or did hostility help produce suspicion?
The essay moves between personal memory, published accounts and cultural interpretation. It asks how belonging is negotiated, how disapproval becomes a story about someone, and why understanding a cultural code does not necessarily mean finding a home within it.
It is also a personal conclusion to a long Spanish musical conversation.
Read the article →
Still Unanswered
This week’s publications approach the same problem from different directions.
A social description can travel. An institution can receive it, record it and act on it. A later reviewer may examine the resulting decision without fully reconstructing the information behind it.
At each stage, the description may gain authority while its original source becomes harder to identify.
That is the process I am trying to trace.
Who first said it?
Who checked it?
Who relied on it?
What happened when contradictory information appeared?
And when the person affected asks those questions, who takes responsibility for examining the whole chain?
The documents do not yet answer everything. They increasingly identify where the answers should be found.
Next Week
Chapter Three of Invisible Woman is coming, together with a Sunday reflection whose subject will be a surprise.
NATO’s handling of my complaints is likely to feature as response checkpoints approach. I also expect to return to Hertfordshire’s reliance on national-security grounds to withhold records, which I challenge as unlawful, as its Defence deadline approaches.
The Ministry of Defence is due to provide fresh litigation-expenditure information. Depending on what arrives, there may be another opportunity to examine the public cost of these proceedings.
Further press coverage is possible, but journalists make their own editorial decisions.
And somewhere between the documents, the deadlines and the next chapter, I will turn fifty.
I intend to do that beside the Mediterranean.
Every Friday, Visible Moments brings together what emerged during the week, what I published and what still requires an answer.
Today's song - JE COMPTE LES JOURS, as this is exactly my activity now before my birthday trip to a sunny Mediterranean, where I intend to celebrate my 50th birthday.
This week, I began naming the people in that process.
The British chain, principally, with some NATO involvement. The full NATO and Spanish stories remain for a later season. There is only so much institutional machinery one woman can introduce in a single episode.
The names matter because institutions act through people. Someone receives information. Someone decides whether to check it. Someone authorises a restriction, passes an account onwards, handles a complaint or signs a response declining further examination.
My central publication this week brings those roles together.
Being named does not establish wrongdoing. It identifies participation, responsibility or a question that needs an answer.
The question is what each person knew, what they verified and what happened next.
This Week on the Blog
1. WHEN PERSONAL BECOMES CRIMINAL
How does a private relationship become an institutional security matter?
This article reconstructs the chain through which, I allege, a sexualised social narrative acquired military, administrative and policing consequences. It follows the communications, restrictions, complaints and ministerial responses—and identifies the people involved, including roles whose occupants remain unnamed.
The story reaches beyond the original decision. It asks what happened when later participants were given opportunities to examine its foundations.
What did they check?
What did they accept?
What did they pass on?
And what did they decline to investigate?
These are questions for potential witnesses and decision-makers. Whether the evidence establishes unlawful or criminal conduct remains to be determined.
Read the article →
2. THE ANATOMY OF A LABEL
An accent. A birthplace. A relationship. A woman who knows how to shoot.
None of those details changed when I became an international news story. The interpretation around them did.
This article examines how a person becomes a character—and how that character can begin to acquire the appearance of an institutional fact.
It also proposes a way to test the process: identify the words, their source, their evidential basis, how they travelled and what consequences followed.
A description may be a fact, an allegation, an inference, an opinion or a joke. Those distinctions become particularly important when the description reaches someone with the power to act.
Read the article →
3. TWO POLICE FORCES, ONE QUESTION: WHO CAN INDEPENDENTLY INVESTIGATE?
There is a joke: the most important thing in any criminal investigation is to make sure the trail does not lead back to you.
This week, that joke became an introduction to a serious institutional question.
On 22 October, I asked my MP, Andrew Rosindell, to seek a coordinated answer from Hertfordshire Constabulary and the Ministry of Defence Police about responsibility for criminal allegations originally reported in September 2025.
The difficulty is the overlap between the prospective investigators and the material requiring examination.
Hertfordshire holds relevant evidence, participated in connected events and is defending related civil proceedings. MDP would potentially investigate conduct, personnel and records within the defence environment it serves.
The article distinguishes jurisdiction, investigative responsibility and independence. It asks how the conflicts should be assessed—and what arrangements would allow the whole connected chain to be examined.
Read the article →
4. INVISIBLE WOMAN, CHAPTER TWO: LA PUTA ESPÍA RUSA
Before the documents, there were household expenses, children, Christmas plans and the ordinary work of building a relationship.
The second chapter returns to December 2024 and my lawful attendance at a NATO Christmas event.
I remember a crowded marquee, international food and a conversation about Catholic Christmas traditions. Almost two years later, I read an account attributed to military sources describing a rather different woman at that gathering.
This chapter examines the distance between those accounts—and the sexualised character that emerged around the woman I knew myself to be.
It also preserves a distinction that matters throughout this project: remembering how something felt does not establish what another person thought.
The writer remembers. The lawyer asks what can be proved.
Read the chapter →
5. I AM NOT SPAIN — SUNDAY THOUGHTS
A Spanish Christmas lunch, a carefully chosen outfit and an afternoon in which joining a conversation began to resemble herding sheep.
This reflection returns to an experience of social exclusion and considers it alongside the later “Red Sparrow” reporting.
Did suspicion produce hostility? Or did hostility help produce suspicion?
The essay moves between personal memory, published accounts and cultural interpretation. It asks how belonging is negotiated, how disapproval becomes a story about someone, and why understanding a cultural code does not necessarily mean finding a home within it.
It is also a personal conclusion to a long Spanish musical conversation.
Read the article →
Still Unanswered
This week’s publications approach the same problem from different directions.
A social description can travel. An institution can receive it, record it and act on it. A later reviewer may examine the resulting decision without fully reconstructing the information behind it.
At each stage, the description may gain authority while its original source becomes harder to identify.
That is the process I am trying to trace.
Who first said it?
Who checked it?
Who relied on it?
What happened when contradictory information appeared?
And when the person affected asks those questions, who takes responsibility for examining the whole chain?
The documents do not yet answer everything. They increasingly identify where the answers should be found.
Next Week
Chapter Three of Invisible Woman is coming, together with a Sunday reflection whose subject will be a surprise.
NATO’s handling of my complaints is likely to feature as response checkpoints approach. I also expect to return to Hertfordshire’s reliance on national-security grounds to withhold records, which I challenge as unlawful, as its Defence deadline approaches.
The Ministry of Defence is due to provide fresh litigation-expenditure information. Depending on what arrives, there may be another opportunity to examine the public cost of these proceedings.
Further press coverage is possible, but journalists make their own editorial decisions.
And somewhere between the documents, the deadlines and the next chapter, I will turn fifty.
I intend to do that beside the Mediterranean.
Every Friday, Visible Moments brings together what emerged during the week, what I published and what still requires an answer.
Today's song - JE COMPTE LES JOURS, as this is exactly my activity now before my birthday trip to a sunny Mediterranean, where I intend to celebrate my 50th birthday.
