US airman convicted of rapes after UK police ceded case to military

In August 2019, two British women walked into a Suffolk police station with an account of a night that had gone catastrophically wrong. They had met James Loubeau and another US airman at a nightclub in Bury St Edmunds, a quiet market town in East Anglia. The men had offered them a ride home. Instead, they found themselves on RAF Mildenhall, an American military base, in Loubeau's bedroom. Wine and Disaronno liqueur appeared in plastic cups. Then nothing—until they woke at 6:30 in the morning, naked and disoriented, with no memory of what had happened to them.

They reported the assault to Suffolk police on August 3rd. Eleven days later, the police force handed the case over to the US military. This decision would set in motion a chain of events that kept Loubeau out of British courts and allowed him to evade accountability for years, even as evidence mounted that he had attacked at least six women across East Anglia in a four-month span. US prosecutors would later describe his conduct as a "frightening and dangerous" pattern of predation on sleeping and intoxicated victims.

Loubeau, then 38 and holding the rank of airman first class, had allegedly assaulted three military personnel stationed with him at the base and three British civilians. The jurisdictional handoff that Suffolk police executed rested on a 1951 agreement between the US and UK governments. Under its terms, the American military can claim authority over crimes involving their own service members as victims, and over offenses committed while personnel are on duty. The two British women did not fit either category—Loubeau was off-duty when he met them—yet the police transferred the investigation anyway. The military's subsequent inquiry appears to have encompassed all six alleged victims, including an American servicewoman who said Loubeau had broken into her locked bedroom on the base in June 2019 and assaulted her while she drifted in and out of consciousness.

A court martial was convened on the base in 2020. The proceedings left no public record. Military tribunals typically involve a jury of service personnel, and this one resulted in acquittal. Loubeau was not convicted. He was, however, discharged from the Air Force in 2020 after three years of service. The stated reason was a series of "minor infractions"—making sexual advances toward drunk women, using derogatory language, stealing jewelry from a store. He returned to the United States and settled in Miami with relatives.

Then, in 2025, an FBI investigation produced a breakthrough. Federal agents connected Loubeau to DNA evidence recovered from a 19-year-old American servicewoman he had assaulted in May 2019. She had been in her locked bedroom when he slipped his hand through an open window, unlatched the door from the inside, and climbed in. She woke at 2:30 in the morning to find him on top of her. Prosecutors in Miami secured a conviction for sexual assault under federal law, which permits prosecution of US military personnel and contractors for crimes committed abroad. They presented evidence of his pattern of attacks—the drugging, the breaking and entering, the targeting of unconscious or intoxicated women—and argued he posed an ongoing threat. The judge sentenced him to five years in prison and ordered two decades of supervised release.

One of the three British women Loubeau allegedly attacked reported her assault to Cambridgeshire police a year after it occurred, in April 2020. She identified him as her attacker. Cambridgeshire police determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute and noted that the victim had not supported prosecution. The force said it had not transferred the case to US military police, though it had "worked with" the Air Force during its investigation.

Suffolk police, when pressed by journalists, declined to explain why they had relinquished jurisdiction so quickly. In a statement, the force said it was "in the process of reviewing the decision-making surrounding the transfer of primacy" and examining "case transfer practices more generally." That review, according to reporting, was prompted by ongoing investigation into crimes committed by US personnel on British soil. In recent months, journalists had documented cases of other American airmen—a fighter pilot who strangled a British woman in Cambridge, an airman who sexually assaulted a woman in Brandon, another who exposed himself to a teenager and four young women in Littleport—all of whom had avoided British courts after local police ceded jurisdiction to American military authorities. The pattern raised a fundamental question about accountability and the reach of British law within its own borders.