TL;DR
John Ashby, a 32-year-old rapist, was sentenced to life in prison for a racially motivated attack on a Sikh woman. His online raps displayed extreme misogyny, boasting about violence against women.
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 fromAshby’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.”