Hong Kong’s rape case involving Isabel Rose ended with a six-year prison sentence after a court found the British woman had blackmailed a banker and perverted the course of justice. The ruling came after judges accepted that her rape claim was false, turning a private encounter into a criminal case with serious legal consequences.
Rose, who is 26 and from Hackney in east London, had said a British banker raped her after she travelled to Hong Kong to see him in January 2024. The man was arrested after she went to police, but he was later released without charge. Rose was then arrested herself and charged. Local media said she appeared in Hong Kong’s District Court on Wednesday for sentencing after being convicted in March, and that she denied the charges throughout.
According to reports from local press, Judge Adriana Tse handed Rose five years for blackmail and three years for perverting the course of justice, with one year to run consecutively. Prosecutors said she invented the allegation in an effort to extort £100,000, or $134,000, from the banker, whose name has not been released. Rose maintained during the trial that she had been raped.
Court documents said Rose had travelled to Hong Kong on 31 January 2024 after meeting the man in Thailand about a month earlier. The prosecution centered on WhatsApp messages exchanged between the two in the hours and days after the alleged assault on 1 February at his apartment. In those messages, the pair discussed what happened that night, and later shifted into arguments over money.
