John Ashby is a man who did not hide his hatred of women.
In fact, the rapist, who was sentenced this week to life in prison with a minimum of 14 years for a racially motivated sex attack on a Sikh woman, vented his misogyny online for all to see.
Publicly available videos uploaded to YouTube show Ashby, 32, rapping about hitting women. “I’d fight any bitch, don’t give a fuck. You cheeky bitch want to get slapped up, what?” he says. “Think I don’t hit girls, oh please, you’re a bitch and you’re getting slapped down.”
Inevitably, perhaps, Ashby’s inventory of hate-filled uploads includes clips of him listening to manosphere-adjacent motivational messages, including from the controversial influencer Andrew Tate.
Ashby’s attack took place in October last year. This week, a trial heard how he had barged into the home of the victim – a woman in her 20s he mistakenly believed was Muslim – before raping her while subjecting her to racist and misogynistic abuse. He called her a “fucking Muslim bitch”, “dirty” and described himself as “the master”.
Rape as a weapon of racist hate is an exceptionally rare occurrence in British crime. Sikh Women’s Aid, a charity based in the Midlands which is supporting the victim, said the case was unprecedented. And yet, Ashby’s disdain for his victim based on the colour of her skin was not in doubt.
During a police interview, he answered “no comment” to all questions, apart from when he was shown a picture of the victim and said: “If she’s a Muslim, why isn’t she wearing a hijab?”
In the custody suite, referring to the area in Birmingham he comes from, he said: “You never see any Englishmen in Perry Barr any more.”
The Guardian has analysed videos from Ashby’s social media accounts, including on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. In several of them, his freestyle raps express misogynistic, violent and sexually violent lyrics. He regularly refers to women as “bitches” and “hos” with many of the videos showing him flexing his body, boxing and smoking.
“Put my dick in, get a bit of fun then move on to the next one. See me I got to get cash. I got to lift weight,” he says in a YouTube video uploaded in July 2023.
In another, uploaded on 29 January 2024, Ashby says: “You think you’re woman and I won’t slap you in your face.” In another he rants: “Never put myself down, I’m a confident alpha male.”
Ashby was listed as being of no fixed abode during court proceedings and the archive of online clips show him to be a lonely, dishevelled figure, often alone and ranting into his smartphone’s camera in a squalid flat filled with cigarette butts and discarded food packaging.
Judging by the relatively small number of views on the videos, it is not clear that there were enough people paying attention to Ashby to heed the warnings in the clips. But he did seem to be a devotee of Tate.
Videos on his YouTube account contained clips in which Tate can be heard saying: “The modern world, call me misogynistic, the modern world was built by men.” Tate is also heard addressing being in jail in Romania and saying it could “happen to anybody. Especially as they continue these … attacks on masculinity as a whole.”
In another YouTube video that Ashby appears to have listened to, Tate says: “I must suffer because I am a man, I am the head of my empire. I’m the head of the clan.”
Philip Bradley KC, prosecuting, said Ashby had targeted the young woman telling her he was there “to have fun”. He attempted to strangle her, punctuating his violent attack with racial and religious abuse, calling her a “fucking Muslim bitch” and “dirty”.
Ashby demanded that she climb into the bath and put the hot water on, the prosecution said, before asking which toothbrush was hers so he could clean his teeth. He then raped her.
Despite the horrors already meted out on the victim, the ordeal continued. Ashby told her to go into the bedroom, where he referred to his genitalia as “white” and “British”. He also demanded the woman repeat that he was a “master” and she was a “bitch”.
The ordeal ended when Ashby heard a noise outside and the victim told him it must be her housemate. Before running away, he stole her jewellery and mobile phone.
DNA and fingerprint evidence taken from the victim by police, and found on a toothbrush and a vape at her home, would later be matched to Ashby, who was arrested by police two days after the attack.
The trial was due to take place throughout this week at Birmingham crown court, but it was cut short after Ashby unexpectedly pleaded guilty to all four counts on the second day, after he was confronted by a member of the public in court.
Sukhvinder Kaur, the chair of Sikh Women’s Aid, said it had never dealt with a case of racially aggravated rape before. “It’s an element of rape that we have not encountered within our service before, this is unprecedented for us,” she said. “It was hate-filled rape. He thought she was a Muslim woman and he hated Muslim women that much that he felt absolutely entitled to do what he did to her.”
Kaur said the UK had taken a “very worrying turn” in terms of its treatment of marginalised communities. “Migrants are being scapegoated so much on a political level, on an online level and on a global level as well,” she said.
In the aftermath of the rape, the Guardian spoke to several women in Walsall who said they had changed their daily routines after a spate of religiously aggravated attacks on Sikhs at the end of last year. Kaur said there was “abject terror in the local community”.
Shaista Gohir, chair of the Muslim Women’s Network, said she was “deeply appalled” by the incident, adding: “This horrific case exemplifies the ways in which religious hatred is often racialised, with victims being targeted based on perceptions of their appearance, race, ethnicity or clothing.”
The organisation called on the government to take urgent action to improve protections for minority ethnic women, saying the “cumulative impact of daily hostility, harmful rhetoric, and disinformation” was causing “significant anxiety and fear”.
