Article

Comment

Death & life

Justice

Sport

9 July 2025

4 min read

Diogo Jota, Thomas Partey, and the right to privacy

Distressing stories show that publicity hinders grief but enables justice

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A couple hold each other as they look at floral tributes on the ground

Liverpool manager Arne Slot and his wife at a shrine to Dioga Jota.

Liverpool FC.

Content warning: rape and sexual abuse allegations are discussed in this article.

It’s Thursday 3rd July 2025 and a friend has just sent a message. “Have you heard the news about Diogo Jota?”

I love Diogo Jota. Love him. So I assume the worst. The club have sold him. He’s got another of the horrific injuries that have plagued his career. But the news is worse than the worst.

“He and his brother died in a car accident in Spain,” the message continues. What? Surely not. But shortly afterwards the BBC News notification comes in. Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva have died in a car accident in Spain.

It is unimaginably tragic news. The incident occurred just two weeks after Jota married his childhood sweetheart. He leaves behind three young children. His brother, André Silva, also recently married his partner in June. It is heartbreaking beyond words and seeing the tributes pour in from colleagues – no: friends – of the players only cements how upsetting a loss this is.

It’s now Friday 4th July 2025. The day after Jota’s death. Another BBC News notification comes in. Now-ex-Arsenal player Thomas Partey is charged five counts of rape and one count of sexual assault.

Jota’s death was an utter shock. The news about Partey is anything but. It was the worst-kept secret in football. Everyone knew that he was under investigation for rape. In 2023, the BBC reported that two Premier League footballers continued to be selected by clubs, even “while knowing they [were] under police investigation for sexual or domestic violence.” In January 2025, the BBC subsequently reported that the Crown Prosecution Service had been given “a full evidence file about a Premier League footballer accused of rape.”

As The Athletic reports, Partey was first arrested in 2022. Between then and being charged in July 2025, he was arrested, questioned by police and then bailed again, seven times. Seven times. All while continuing to play for Arsenal.

Again: everyone knew that Partey was one of the players in question. Everyone knew. But no-one could say anything.

And the juxtaposition between the news about Jota and Partey has led me to reflect on the ways in which both stories have (or have not) been reported. I’m almost loathed to mention Jota and Partey in the same breath to be honest. But then that’s the tension underlying all this, isn’t it? Who is given privacy, and who isn’t?

One man is arrested in 2022 on suspicion of rape and sexual assault. He is afforded over three years of privacy and is permitted to continue in his high-profile, six-figure-a-week-paying job. Another is killed in a tragic accident, and, in the immediate aftermath, his family’s privacy is invaded at every turn.

Despite Jota’s family clearly and publicly asking for privacy, the media coverage of the tragedy was deeply invasive. The Daily Mail posted pictures of his recently wed wife outside of the morgue having just identified the bodies of her husband and brother-in-law. The BBC – in one of the most tone-deaf acts of journalism I can recall – covered Jota’s funeral. They wrote: “The family has asked for the funeral to be private, but you can follow live pictures from outside the church by clicking watch live at the top of this page.”

I promise that’s not a joke. Irony really is dead. But the real irony of all this is that this is a deep perversion of how things should be.

I may grieve with support from other people, but this is fundamentally a deeply personal and private act, not one to be undertaken under the public gaze. Justice, on the other hand, is enacted with the help of a jury of peers and is an act of public peacekeeping and safeguarding.

It is appropriate for one act to be undertaken privately while the other is conducted publicly. More than this, they are essential to those acts. Privacy enables grief, while publicity hinders it. I can only grieve effectively if given the time and space to do so. By contract publicity enables justice, while privacy hinders it. If justice is enacted in secret, public trust is eroded and the justice system is undermined.

Grief is private; justice is public. And yet Jota’s friends and family have been forced to grieve with the eyes of the world on them while Partey has been afforded years of luxurious privacy under the auspices of ‘justice.’

Real violence and harm are done to people when the appropriately private becomes inappropriately public, and vice versa. The news of Jota’s death and Partey’s charging with rape exposes the deeply flawed approach to privacy we have.

There is no goodness in either of these stories. There are no redeeming angles or silver linings here. They are both deeply upsetting and distressing. But if the stark contrast between the ways they have been reported causes us to reflect on how they ought (or ought not) to be reported publicly, then that will be something, at least.

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Column

Creed

Death & life

Suffering

23 October 2025

4 min read

Dressing up in the dark: what Halloween reveals about our uneasy age

Why Halloween feels darker this year

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Skeleton figurines clothed in Victoria outfits.

Wallace Henry on Unsplash.

Something bothers me about the approach of this years’ All Hallows’ Eve on 31 October and its accompanying night-time Halloween parties, like an irksome background unease at an encroaching darkness behind the childlike cosplay of the event itself.

God knows, there have been infinitely darker years, some of them within living memory. Two world wars, one of them containing the Holocaust and it doesn’t get darker than that. Genocides, such as Rwanda’s, and famines, from China to Russia to Ethiopia. Terrorist atrocities: Munich, Lockerbie, Madrid, 9/11.

Mass murders of children: Dunblane, Peshawar, Sandy Hook, Southport, to name a few in such a grim litany. Harder to imagine, because they’re further away culturally in either time or place, are the great plagues, conflagrations and disasters of history: The Black Death, Indian Ocean tsunami, Hiroshima.

So one wonders if it’s impertinent to feel uneasy about Halloween this year. I suspect it’s the discomfort of something bubbling under and as yet unseen, like unexploded magma or the unbearable tension of a faultline threatening to give way.

To name it is to call out a most fragile world peace – the pretence of a peace in the Middle East that cannot hold; a peace process that hasn’t even started between Russia and neighbouring Ukraine. Both presided over by an American president who at best isn’t up to securing either and, at worst, has zip interest in democratic process and is only in it for himself.

Then there’s apparently unstoppable mass migration, driven by climate change, to western economies already going to hell in policy-free handcarts. The creeping re-growth of nationalism and antisemitism, social media fuelled hatred of refugees, the collapse of trust in institutions of state in the UK’s unwritten constitution, such as the royal family, parliament, the police and the Church. Grooming gangs and trafficked sex-slaves; we’re not in the gloaming of dusk – it sometimes feels like night has fallen.

At what price, then, do we dress our children (and ourselves) as ghouls and witches and demons and make jack o’lanterns to celebrate the dark side at Halloween? It’s the question at the heart of a debate that customarily divides between those of us who say it’s just a bit of fun and we shouldn’t be spoil-sports, against others who warn censoriously about conjuring up the devil, who once abroad will play havoc with those who so foolishly summoned him.

That’s a fairly pointless argument, as the positions just get repeated and that doesn’t get us anywhere. More fruitful may be to examine what the dark side is, what it is we’re conjuring, if anything, and whether it plays any role in what we fear we may be facing, which ranges from the breakdown of the world order, to great wars and, not to put too fine a point on it, an apocalypse.

Stumbling about in the dark, we’re bound to trip over what’s called theodicy – the theological study of how a supposedly all-loving God can tolerate human evil. One of the more recent and most accessible contributions to this school comes from the US journalist and academic Brandon Ambrosino, who imagines the pursuit of theodicy not to be climbing stairs of knowledge, but the descent to a dark basement: “If the living room is where we ask how exactly God moved Trump’s head out of the way of the shooter’s bullet, the basement is where we ask if God caused the bullet to end up in a fire-fighter’s body.”

One of Amrosino’s conclusions is that “evil is not properly a thing… Evil is nothing, literally [his italics]. It is a void in the fabric of God’s creation.” This concept of evil – the dark, as any parent would comfort a child – as empty is appealing. In the dark of that basement, there is nothing there but hope.

This idea of evil as a void, or moral vacuum, is told in the story of a student (not young Albert Einstein, as widely claimed) who demurs when taught that the problem of evil proves the non-existence of God. “Does cold exist?” asks the student. Of course, replies the teacher. But cold is only the absence of energy, which creates heat. Likewise, does darkness exist? Yes, but it has no wavelength, so it is only the absence of light.

What brings the energy of light and heat, like why there is something rather than nothing, is too big a question for now. But it may go some way to addressing the darknesses listed in the first half of this column.

And perhaps it’s a thought to carry into this Halloween. Children dressed as undead phantasms, with Mum’s lipstick tracing blood trickles from their mouths, aren’t joining the dark, but filling what is empty with laughter. And, in doing so, they’re mocking it, which must offer some sort of hope for the future.

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