About

Rebecca began publishing in April 2010.

It was Britain’s first stand-alone investigative website.

In September, October and November 2016 three of the individuals it has investigated were gaoled:

— Gordon Anglesea, the former North Wales Police superintendent, was sentenced to 12 years for the historic abuse of children in 2016. He died shortly afterwards.

The Fall Of Gordon Anglesea tells the story — and the context can be found on the Gordon Anglesea page.

How Anglesea fits into the wider North Wales child abuse scandal is explained on the Child Abuse page.

— Mazher Mahmood, the former News of the World, Sunday Times and Sun journalist, was given 15 months by a judge at the Old Bailey.

He was gaoled for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice after he was caught lying on oath in 2014 during the Tulisa Contostavlos drugs trial.

Rebecca had already exposed him as a liar in the Leveson Inquiry: his claim to have convicted more than 250 individuals was a fabrication.

Two years before his fall from grace, Rebecca warned Scotland Yard and Rupert Murdoch’s “governance” watchdog that he was a “serial perjurer”.

Both ignored the warning.

See The Fall of Mazher Mahmood for more details.

— John Arthur Jones, the corrupt former director of housing at Anglesey County Council, was gaoled for 18 months after he was convicted of endangering RAF training flights.

He shone bright lights into the cockpits because he believed the flights were harming his plans to develop a nearby site.

Jones was a member of a corrupt gang — which included former council leader Gareth Winston Roberts — that ruled the island for a quarter of a century.

Jones is a supremely arrogant character — he once likened himself to Jesus.

The Fall Of John Arthur Jones tells the inside story …

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Rebecca takes its name from the Rebecca Riots, a series of agrarian disturbances in west Wales in the nineteenth century.

Poor farmers dressed up in women’s clothing and destroyed the gates of the turnpike trusts which were driving them into poverty.

This is the origin of the “mad axeman” logo at the top of this page — it’s based on a contemporary drawing from the Illustrated London News.

In the 1970s and early 1980s Rebecca took the form of “a radical magazine for Wales” and gained a reputation as an investigative, campaigning title.

The magazine — and its uncompromising Corruption Supplement — documented the decay of Labour politics in south Wales and helped to bring about a long series of corruption trials which resulted in many politicians and businessmen going to prison.

Rebecca was also in the forefront of UK investigations into the relationship between the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan and the Welsh multi-millionaire banker, Sir Julian Hodge.

Many Rebecca articles were reflected in coverage in newspapers like the Sunday Times and in television programmes including Man Alive, This Week and Nationwide.

The new Rebecca website originally contained television-style current affairs documentaries but these quickly ran into legal problems.

The details can be found on the Documentaries page.

See the Investigations page for more on the work of Rebecca.

Rebecca covers the whole of the UK but includes a built-in bias to issues concerning Wales.

Since 2013, when the Rebecca website moved to WordPress, there have been 182,000 page views [February 2018].

Its UK media reporting — which focuses on Piers Morgan, Mazher Mahmood and the cover-up surrounding the murder of the Welsh-born private detective Daniel Morgan — was moved to the associated Press Gang website in 2014.

This site has attracted over 73,000 visitors.

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The editor of Rebecca is the northern Irish-born journalist Paddy French.

He was a current affairs producer on the ITV Wales current affairs strand Wales This Week for nearly ten years.

He left ITV Wales in 2008 and now, aged 68, lives in France.

Rebecca is independent, does not accept advertising or sponsorship and depends on supporters to cover some of its costs.

It runs at a loss.

You can support the work by making a contribution: