The Baby Trafficker

The life and truly terrible crimes of Dr John Davies

John Davies in 2016

Listen here to part one of my eight part audio series on Dr John Davies, produced by Ocean City Media for TimesRadio with support from the Audio Fund.

Next episode coming soon!

At London’s Southwark Crown Court, in May 2016, dangerous criminal Dr John Davies was finally sent to prison, having evaded justice for decades. Sentencing him to 12 years in prison, the judge described his crimes as ‘despicable’. His son Benjamin Davies was imprisoned alongside him.

However, Davies was imprisoned not for his numerous crimes against women and children, but for masterminding a sophisticated charity operation that had netted him more than £5 million, defrauded from the British taxpayer.

As a lifelong feminist campaigner against sexual violence, I have been investigating Davies for almost 20 years for his crimes of sexual violence and abuse (which can be traced as far back as the early 1980s). But despite investigations by Europol, and by police in the UK, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and the US into allegations of baby trafficking and organised prostitution, somehow nothing ever stuck to Davies.

My investigation of him is a saga-length exposé that has had a considerable effect on my life. In addition to almost landing me in court on libel charges, it has prompted me to travel to several countries in pursuit of evidence and introduced me to the best and the worst of humanity. Davies is the most dangerous man I have encountered in almost four decades of campaigning against crimes towards women and girls, yet prior to his 2016 conviction he was considered an esteemed academic, a philanthropist running charities for impoverished women and girls, an anti-trafficking activist, and a goodhearted Christian.

I first met him in 1999 at a conference about sex trafficking of women and girls, where I was approached by two police officers who were aware that I was a British anti-trafficking campaigner. They asked if I knew “the big man in the corner … Teflon John … wearing a grubby-looking suit?” The officers told me that Davies – a man who travelled the world addressing academic conferences on the subject of trafficking – was suspected of running a ‘baby fattening’ business from his farm in Balástya, Hungary, close to the Romanian border. The Metropolitan Police in London had evidence that Davies had combed the Balkan region looking for pregnant women who had been raped by soldiers. Posing as a Christian missionary, he offered these women, first, a place to see out their pregnancies, and then, to find a respectable, loving couple from the US or UK to adopt their baby.