Believe Me review: Jeff Pope delivers another powerful and unflinching drama

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A star rating of 4 out of 5.

It’s early morning. A young woman is riding home in a London taxi after being out for the evening. The driver, who seems nice, tells her he just won money at the casino and suggests they celebrate together. He offers her a drink, and she accepts it, wanting to be polite.

She was drugged without her knowledge and lost consciousness. The next morning, she began to remember the horrifying details of a sexual assault by the driver.

The ITV drama Believe Me tells the harrowing story of John Worboys, a serial sex attacker played with chilling realism by Daniel Mays. Known as “the black cab rapist,” Worboys targeted vulnerable women over several years, using a consistent and disturbing pattern. Unfortunately, his crimes remained undiscovered for a long time.

Jeff Pope’s compelling portrayal of the case reveals how the system deeply let down the women affected by Worboys’s crimes. They felt their concerns weren’t taken seriously and that the police didn’t fully investigate their reports.

The first episode tells the story of Sarah Adams (not her real name, to protect the actual victim). Actress Aimée-Ffion Edwards (known from ‘Slow Horses’) plays Sarah, who reported being drugged and assaulted in 2003. However, police didn’t believe her at the time because they felt there wasn’t enough proof.

It was immediately apparent that the police could have offered more assistance. During questioning, officers displayed troubling and sexist behavior, suggesting her past drug use, heavy drinking, and sexual history were relevant to the situation.

Worboys is disturbingly good at hiding what he’s done. He stays one step ahead of the police and carefully controls the story. When Sarah wakes up in the hospital, she’s told her cab driver was actually the one who helped her – a claim that makes it harder to believe she was attacked. Furthermore, tests don’t show any drugs in her system. Worboys seems to have planned for every possibility.

Sarah, like other victims of Worboys, faced repeated, stressful interviews that didn’t consider the emotional toll of revisiting her trauma. She also had to undergo invasive physical exams to collect evidence and felt humiliated as she was transferred between officers, especially as the investigation lost momentum. Ultimately, the case was closed, leaving Sarah deeply shaken and forced to rebuild her life.

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Jeff Pope excels at creating powerful dramas that capture public outrage when institutions fail dramatically. He’s known for tackling difficult true stories, including the Jimmy Savile scandal in The Reckoning, the murder of Rhys Jones in Little Boy Blue, the mystery surrounding Lord Lucan in the 2013 drama Lucan, and the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting in last year’s Disney+ series Suspect.

In “Believe Me,” Pope directly asks how a dangerous offender like Worboys was able to continue his attacks for so long. Both the victims and viewers – and Pope himself – are searching for answers, but these answers are proving hard to find. This highlights serious flaws within the Metropolitan Police that significantly damage public trust in their ability to keep people safe.

You can watch the final episode of Believe Me on Monday, May 11th at 9pm on ITV1. All four episodes are currently available to stream on ITVX.

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2026-05-11 00:34