When a US fighter pilot stationed at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk was accused of strangling a British woman in Cambridge in late 2023, the case never reached a British court. Instead, it was handled by American military police and heard inside a US air base, before an all-male panel of eight air force officers. The pilot, Captain Jacob Wulfson, was convicted of strangulation but acquitted of sexual assault charges and received a sentence of six months at a correctional facility on the base. The victim, academic Sarah Steele, told LBC she was treated 'incredibly aggressively' by the defence team and felt 'like she was on trial.'
The case has brought renewed scrutiny to a little-known legal mechanism that has governed the conduct of American troops on British soil for more than seven decades: the 1951 NATO Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
