Tom Holland

And it whips up a sense that aristocratic predators are everywhere, stalking working class girls.

And there's a slight, I think, in terms of the obsession with it, there's perhaps a slight hint of kind of Jeffrey Epstein.

The kind of fascination of that case for people is the fact that his clients are all seen as being members of the elite, princes and presidents and so on.

And

It's massively amplified by reports in the Pall Mall Gazette in the years that follow of sex crimes that focus very, very precisely on the iniquity of aristocrats and baronets and people like that.

Right.

So again, I mean, people are much more interested in what Prince Andrew did than, say, groomers and predators from...

you know, in Britain who were not princes.

Right.

Instead is not interested basically in the grooming of working class girls by working class men.

And I think that had Stead come across the story of the upper-class rape taking Mary Jane Kelly to Paris, he would have been all over it.

And it may be that there was an aristocrat who had groomed and trafficked her.

I mean, we don't know.

Stead is reporting things that did actually happen.

But as you suggested, I think it's equally possible that Mary Jane, who's clearly very interested in newspaper reports and melodrama and stories of crime and so on, that she might have picked it up and kind of cast herself as the heroine of such a drama.

We are, and we've had a couple of descriptions that exactly match that image.

So there's the one with which we opened this episode, and then, of course, the most famous is the description that Hutchinson gave, the very detailed account of the man that he'd seen talking to Mary Jane Kelly.

Oh, yeah, the Astrakhan coat or whatever it is.

Yeah, a couple of hours before her murder.

And it's a report that is taken very seriously by students of Jack the Ripper.