The Man Forcing Open Britain's Buried Grooming Gang Files
And exposing flaws in the judicial system in doing so...
Some may not have heard of Adam Wren.
But he and his team have done more for grooming/r*pe gang survivors in a few months than entire government departments have in years.
Adam runs Open Justice UK, a small but relentless outfit pushing for transparency in the courts. In just a few months, his campaign has triggered the release of dozens of long-buried grooming gang trial transcripts.
His mission began in January, as public anger resurfaced and the Labour government made fresh promises of local inquiries. It was then that Adam noticed something odd: many key court transcripts still weren’t public.
So he started digging.
What he found in many cases wasn’t a web of national security concerns or legal gag orders—but unpaid fees.
If you want either all or part of a court transcript in Britain, you must pay for it. The records are accessible—but they come with a price.
Adam highlighted one case in a recent GB News interview: a r*pe survivor who was quoted £7,000 to obtain a trial transcript. That’s not a typo. Seven thousand pounds—for someone to access evidence of the abuse that happened to them.
So Adam launched a crowdfunder. It exploded. Within weeks, Open Justice UK had raised over £100,000.
Then came the real work.
Adam and his team mapped 450 defendants across 90 separate grooming trials. They cross-referenced names, charges, and outcomes, identifying which transcripts had been sealed, redacted, or buried.
They’ve submitted 33 transcript requests so far. Fourteen were approved—partially. Five were rejected outright. None have been released in full.
But those five rejections were revealing.
One, in particular, caught national attention last week. Justice Jonathan Rose refused to release the full transcript from a 2016 trial at Bradford Crown Court, where twelve men were convicted for the abuse of a 13-year-old girl in Keighley.
For context, Bradford has long been a hotspot for some of the country’s most insidious grooming/r*pe gang cases.
Underage girls were abused while living in children’s care homes—a place you’d expect to find not just protection, but over-protection, if anything. In another case, a 13-year-old girl was exploited by as many as 100 men.
Rose claimed that releasing the transcript would be “contrary to the public interest.”
He added that doing so would be inappropriate “in the context of the public debate now taking place in general concerning cases such as this which are said to be part of a currency of offending in this city and elsewhere.”
It constituted one hell of a word salad. But basically, public debate is apparently a problem. Transparency, thus, is not allowed.
Adam called the decision “ridiculous.” He said the court censored key information. Others suggested Rose did so to control public conversation.
In a recent article, Adam and Melisa Tourt, a policy communications specialist on the Open Justice UK team, revealed more about the issues they’ve encountered with other requests.
Earlier this year, they submitted two identical transcript requests—one to Sheffield Crown Court, and one to the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey)—each relating to grooming gang convictions.
Sheffield approved the request without hesitation. The transcript is now being processed.
But the Old Bailey refused.
Their reason? The case “involved child sexual exploitation” and would be subject to reporting restrictions to “protect the anonymity of victim(s)”—despite those same conditions being present in the Sheffield case.
Another obvious refutation: if anonymity is the issue, redact the victim’s name. After all, when these trials were being conducted, any member of the public could sit in court and hear most proceedings in full.
Adam’s team had already assured the court that all reporting restrictions and anonymity protections would be honoured. But it didn’t matter.
The rule the judge cited, Criminal Procedure Rule 5.5, gives courts discretion to block releases where reporting limitations apply. But there’s a provision that sidesteps this if a recipient of a transcript will not break reporting limitations.
In other words, it seems they didn’t trust Adam with the transcripts.
This apparent mistrust carries far wider consequences than it first appears.
As Melisa and Adam put it, such discretion creates a postcode lottery for justice: “Whether crucial information can be obtained shouldn’t hinge on arbitrary geographical boundaries or which judge happens to be presiding.”
That arbitrariness matters. Grooming gang prosecutions are disproportionately concentrated in just a handful of Crown Courts—including the Old Bailey, Sheffield, Manchester Minshull Street, Newcastle, and Leeds.
So if one of these courts decides to block access, entire regions of information become inaccessible.
They gave an example: if a single judge at Manchester Minshull Street takes a hostile view to transparency, virtually all records related to the Rotherham cases —some of the most significant in the country—could be withheld indefinitely.
What emerges is a system riddled with contradictions. Some courts are blocking access based on vague concerns over “public debate.” Others are openly contradicting each other on basic procedural rules—with some judges appearing to unfairly decide which journalists or campaigners can be trusted.
Some have said this reveals more than just inconsistency—it points to a possible motive: shielding from political fallout.
And the force of such fallout was felt again very recently.
Last week, Conservative MP Katie Lam stood in Parliament and confronted Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips over Labour’s diluted promises of local grooming gang inquiries.
She recounted the details of several survivor’s stories to encourage Phillips to do more, including one survivor who said her abuser told her: “We’re here to f*ck all the white girls and f*ck the government.”
She told the story of Anna, a 14-year-old in residential care in Bradford who made repeated reports of r*pe to social workers.
A year later, she was married off to her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding ceremony. Her social worker was a guest. The authorities then arranged for her to be fostered by the abuser’s parents.
Lam also spoke of another survivor from Oxford.
A 13-year-old girl, who was prepared for gang anal r*pe by using a pump to expand her anal passage. She was then subjected to gang r*pe by five or six men. At one point, she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.
The year before, when she was 12, a court heard how the girl threatened the same r*pist with his lock knife. He responded by picking up a metal baseball bat, striking her on the head with it, and then inserting it into her vagina.
Lam’s speech went viral—super viral—garnering millions of views. The details she shared? Some of these came from the transcripts Adam and his team obtained.
These transcripts don’t just expose a single party but failure after failure across the system—from social services to local councils to police to Crown prosecutors. They throw the entire justice system back under the spotlight—especially amid growing criticism over two-tier justice and some of the grooming members’ lenient sentences.
That, perhaps, is why some judges don’t want them released.
The truth is too raw, the anger too real, the consequences too unpredictable.
Melisa and Adam quite aptly wrote toward the end of their article: “the common thread has always been authorities that are allowed to mark their own homework trusting their biased judgments over transparency and accountability.”
It appears some judges are doing the same here with these transcripts. Fortunately, Adam, Melisa, and Open Justice UK crew seem determined to not let them get away with it.
You can follow Adam Wren on X - here, Melisa Tourt on X - here, and access and support Open Justice UK - here.
Do you really believe our best days lie ahead if nothing changes?
Will you keep watching from the sidelines as politicians and broadcasters push for more surveillance, censorship, and control?
If you want to push back—if not today, maybe someday—supporting independent journalism can make a real impact.
In the past year, The Stark Naked Brief reached over 90 million people on X. Sometimes, all it takes is one post—one uncomfortable truth—to wake someone up.
Jess Philips is a deplorable miscreant and the only safeguarding she does is for the communities that enabled and perpetrated these truly evil crimes against our children. Keep the pressure up. These crimes must be stopped and the perpetrators eradicated like the cancerous growth they are.
Thank goodness for people like this guy, Maggie Oliver and more recently, the stirling work of Charlie Peter’s and his team at GB News.