Cosmo Campaign

Free Chantal McCorkle: Cosmo demands she has a retrial

Cosmopolitan Magazine
Chantal Update
October, 2000

A year ago Cosmopolitan first published the incredible, shocking story of Chantal McCorkle.  She's the 30-year-old woman from Slough sentenced by a US court to an horrific 24 years in a maximum security Florida jail for a minor fraud.  Her husband ran a company selling videos and books about how to make money on the property market.  They posed in front of their private plane, but didn't mention it was rented.  In Britain this wouldn't even have been a crime.  In America it cost Chantal her liberty and almost her sanity.

When we met Chantal four months into her incarceration, she was handcuffed, shackled and on the brink of emotional collapse.  Though her story was one of the most disturbing we have ever published, nothing could have prepared us for your phenomenal response.  More than 1000 Cosmo readers wrote to us, and to Chantal, demanding she be set free.  You sent her messages of love and support.  You convinced her to keep on fighting, to not think about giving up and to keep faith that justice would be done.  The letters you wrote have her a reason to live.  But the readers of Cosmo didn't stop there.  You demanded action.  No matter how many times you were told by UK officials that this case was not your concern, you refused to accept defeat. You wrote in your hundreds, and then you wrote again--to Tony Blair, to the Foreign Office, to your MPs and to Fair Trials Abroad (FTA), the human rights charity based in London.

Today, we are thrilled to be able to tell you the pressure you brought may soon help free Chantal.  An investigation by FTA has revealed that Chantal McCorkle's trial was unfair.  "Information has reached us that the jury was subject to improper influences," confirms FTA Director Stephen Jakobi.  Private investigators claim a court bailiff illegally implied to the jury he had damning information about Chantal and her husband William that they didn't know.  Another member of the jury is said to have had a relative who subscribed to the couple's supposed fraudulent scheme and to have kept quiet about this connection.  "In the light of these new matters, Fair Trials Abroad is demanding a retrial.  We want the American judicial system to re-examine Chantal's case as a matter of urgency," says Jakobi.  Cosmo says Chantal McCorkle must be released--soon.  Her lawyers have lodged an appeal and she is waiting to hear when the judge will rule on this new evidence.  We trust the judicial system of the United States will ensure justice is served--at long last.

(Cosmopolitan column, including other articles not pertaining to Chantal and not reproduced here, by Deborah Joseph, Erin Kelly, Sophie Walker, Tom Stone.)