Why her reporting matters
Rachel Aviv’s 13 May 2024 New Yorker piece, “A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?”, was the first major international long-form investigation to set out the independent expert critique of the medical evidence in parallel to the prosecution account. The piece synthesised the medical, statistical and procedural concerns that had, until then, been circulating principally in specialist forums.
The article was geo-blocked to UK readers during the Child K retrial. That fact is, itself, part of the story: UK reporting restrictions (which have a legitimate function in protecting a live trial) ended up meaning British readers were the only major audience unable to access the single best-known international dissenting account of the evidence. Most British readers encountered the case through a one-sided diet of trial reportage that accepted the prosecution framing; the geo-block ensured the international counter-view did not reach the UK public for months.
Professional background
- Staff writer, The New Yorker.
- Author of the book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (2022) — finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
- Long-form investigative reporting track record in psychiatry, criminal justice, and evidence-based argument.
What the article establishes
Aviv’s piece is not a polemic. It works through the evidence carefully:
- It reports on the Royal Statistical Society’s post-Sally-Clark framework and applies it to the Letby shift-rota chart.
- It reports on Dr Shoo Lee’s public position that the skin signs described at trial do not match those in his 1989 paper. This was the reporting that gave Dr Lee’s position its first international visibility — the panel he later convened was partly a direct response to being widely cited on this point.
- It reports on the insulin-assay methodology and why clinical biochemists regard the Roche Cobas screening result as not a forensic test.
- It reports on the handwritten notes in their full context and on the pattern of self-blame that is standard in nurses facing blame for unexplained deaths.
The UK geo-block
The New Yorker blocked UK access to the article, on advice, during the live Child K retrial proceedings. UK reporting restrictions carry criminal contempt penalties for breach, and a publication that accepts a conditional-access approach avoids the contempt risk. The effect, however, was that during the retrial the only major international long-form critique of the evidence was unavailable in the jurisdiction whose public most needed access to it.
For a broader discussion of reporting restrictions in this case, see our analysis of reporting restrictions.