I slept with a hammer next to my bed after blowing the whistle on child abuse in Jersey

When Stuart Syvret arrived at an undisclosed location in the United States, he had nothing more than the shoes on his feet, the clothes on his back and a knapsack containing just a few of his belongings.

The last time he'd been to the US was more than 20 years earlier, on a whirlwind holiday to New York. Now, he was entering the country to meet friends who would help him apply for protective asylum.

Behind him were two decades as a politician, senior senator and health minister on the British island of Jersey. During that time, Syvret went from topping the island's polls as its most popular politician to becoming one of its most vociferous political dissidents, blowing the whistle on child abuse and other serious crimes.

It also put a target on his back.

As Jersey's health and social services minister, Syvret learnt, to his horror, that some of the island's most vulnerable people, from children in Jersey's government-run care homes to patients at the local hospital, faced serious and unaddressed dangers. His attempts to hold the government to account led to his dismissal in a vote of no confidence in 2007. He eventually left his position as the island's longest-serving senior senator in 2009. As Syvret puts it, "I was sacked for doing my job."

His life and career have since been defined by his very public battle to expose what he contends are longstanding issues of endemic corruption in Jersey, a $2 trillion tax haven notoriously sensitive about maintaining its image as a global financial centre. "I was the only meaningful opposition the island has ever seen, and I took a stand against crimes," Syvret tells me, in an exclusive interview at his home in the US. He has asked that his location be kept confidential for security reasons.

"I slept with a hammer next to the bed all the time," he says, recalling his final days on the island. "I was in fear of my life. But rather than arresting the person who was threatening me, Jersey's authorities kept bringing me the threats."

Also known as "Osman warnings", the personal safety notices alert the recipient to the possible threat of murder or death. For the former senator, the threat notices from Jersey's police began in 2018, when they rang him up to ask him to come to the police station. "I thought they were going to arrest me, but instead they took me to an interview room and handed me a slip of paper," he says.

On it was a summary of an interaction between Jersey Police and Andrew Marolia, a former nurse previously suspected of killing patients at the island's largest hospital whose police files had been leaked online by Syvret in an effort to alert the public to the danger he believed Marolia posed to the public.

According to the Osman warning handed to Syvret, Marolia had told officers that people now referred to him as the "guy that murdered all those women" and added: "If Stuart Syvret's body is washed up somewhere, you know where to find me." The warning, viewed by The Telegraph, also indicated that Jersey Police had initiated a criminal investigation into the Marolia threat. Yet the police never provided Syvret with any information about the results of that probe. When asked about the investigation by The Telegraph, a Jersey police spokesman said: "There was no formal investigation, as the offence of threats to kill did not exist in Jersey by law at that time." She did not explain what became of the investigation disclosed in the warning, but added, "Both parties were spoken to."

Jersey laws tend to lag behind the rest of the UK – sometimes to an extraordinary degree. Only this year, the island enacted its first law against threatening to kill, rape or cause serious physical injury to another, or causing one to believe such a threat might be carried out. The offence carries a fine and term of imprisonment of up to 10 years.

Marolia is well-known to the Jersey police – he had not only served on the police force in the 1990s, but also has a criminal history. In 1999, he was convicted of multiple firearms offences and for stealing drugs and syringes from the island's main hospital, Jersey General, which fired him.

Jersey police did not arrest Marolia for making the more recent death threats against the former senator, but instead instructed Syvret "to mitigate the threat" by changing his daily routines, maintaining a low profile and avoiding Marolia's associates and place of work.

It has not been lost on Syvret how strange it is to be told by the police that he should avoid the person who threatened him. "Jersey's authorities won't protect me, but they will protect known criminals on the island," he explains. "The entire law enforcement and criminal justice system has been stood on its head."

What haunts him most, he says, is that the 13 patients who were suspected of potentially meeting untimely deaths at the Jersey hospital were never publicly named, or even identified to their families, something he believes to be a grave and unforgivable injustice. "Jersey authorities failed to apprehend this man and then failed to have him struck off the national nursing register," he says. "Marolia also worked on the UK mainland, so others could have been endangered." The 1999 investigation into Marolia by Jersey police states that UK police had been alerted to criminal allegations against Marolia while working at a hospital in the UK, but there do not appear to have been charges brought.

Syvret wrote a long letter to the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) in 2010, also viewed by The Telegraph, to warn them about Marolia after repeated efforts to get the case resurrected, but was largely ignored, he says.

The NMC eventually struck Marolia from the UK register, but a spokesperson says it was unable to disclose when he was removed, or why.

In his attempts to alert the public to the potential dangers, Syvret leaked a trove of police and court documents online, including Jersey's 1999 criminal investigation into Marolia. The move prompted Jersey's police to reopen the Marolia case and review the files a decade later. A Metropolitan Police Report reviewing the 1999 investigation recommended Jersey police "carry out an up-to-date risk assessment around the activities of Andrew Marolia with a view to prevention of offences against vulnerable members of the Jersey community."

Jersey police maintained the Marolia matter had been appropriately dealt with. He was never prosecuted. Marolia and his last legal representative of record did not respond to requests for comment.

As of 2020, it appeared he was still living, working – and getting into trouble, periodically – on the island.

It's worth noting that under the Jersey legal system, the professional police are not allowed to bring charges or prosecutions. This can only be done by a senior member of the island's Honorary Police or by Jersey's Law Officers' Department. The professional police on the island may only investigate allegations and present evidence to decision-makers, such as Jersey's unelected attorney general, appointed by the Crown.

After leaking documents in 2009, Syvret's home was raided by Jersey's police and his laptops and confidential correspondences with constituents seized – including the testimonies of survivors of child abuse.

In the protracted legal tussle that followed, Syvret was imprisoned twice for three months, once in 2011 and again in 2013, for refusing to remove leaked s and documents about suspected predators from the internet.

In the end, Jersey's government backed a lawsuit brought against Syvret by four people he had accused of committing crimes, including Marolia and an alleged serial child abuser. Syvret was convicted in a Jersey court in 2012 of two data-protection offences for naming the alleged perpetrators and their reported offences. His public-interest defence was thrown out by the Jersey courts and years of appeals, including a bid for judicial review in London's High Court, failed.

Seeking to silence him once and for all, Jersey's government also slapped Syvret with a superinjunction in 2012 – an action undertaken via a secret court proceeding, which took place without his knowledge, and forbade him from speaking about the four individuals he had named. "Two enforcement guerrillas came pounding on my door and handed me a notice telling me to take the documents I had leaked down, or I would be imprisoned," Syvret says. "I just ignored it, so they came by and carted me off to prison again."

Notably, Syvret was not sued for defamation, because, according to him, the allegations were true. "In all of my time blowing the whistle on child-abusers and perpetrators, they knew perfectly well that if they sued me for defamation, I would call their victims as witnesses and they would be exposed," Syvret says. "My disclosure of these crimes was completely correct, justified and lawful."

Syvret's efforts to expose decades of child abuse on the island in 2007 were more successful, prompting a major police investigation that identified more than 150 alleged perpetrators and drawing international attention. "It probably would have never come out the way it did if it wasn't for Stuart, and the Jersey elite hated him for it," Lenny Harper, the former Jersey senior investigating officer who led the probe, says.

In 2017, a UK judge leading a years-long inquiry into Jersey's history of child abuse vindicated Syvret, concluding Jersey's government had turned a blind eye to the suffering of hundreds of vulnerable children, stating that the wellbeing of youth on the island is "low on the list" of its priorities and that "children may still be at risk in Jersey".

Judge Frances Mary Oldham also recognised the former senator's campaign to bring the matter to light, noting in her report: "Stuart Syvret highlighted relevant issues about child abuse that needed to be addressed to ensure the protection and safety of children in Jersey."

Astoundingly, Marolia's threats against Syvret continued into late 2019. When a Jersey police officer visited Syvret's home to hand-deliver another threat warning, he refused to let Syvret have a copy of it – holding it up in front of his face, and then taking it away again. This one stated that the former senator had been named in a threat over email, but did not disclose the email nor specify what the threat was, and that he should ring the police in case of emergency.

"There was no way out for him," Harper says. "The police gave him no protection at all."

Harper notes that during his time on the island he also dealt with threats – even one to burn down his house. "Stuart would have been hunted like a dog," he says. "It would have been ever-present; 24 hours a day, he would have been under threat. But it was a hatred born of fear. They hated him because he was trying to help vulnerable people, and they saw it as a threat."

Syvret began arranging his escape from the island during the pandemic, connecting with people to help him fund his flights, find housing and other support. In June 2022, he boarded a one-way flight.

Now residing with friends around 5,000 miles away from his ancestral home, Syvret looks over the wide, grassy fields surrounding his front porch and says he's still getting acclimatised. It is not easy to embrace a new life, especially one so far away.

He recently learnt that the Jersey government had repossessed his flat, disposing of all his things. Friends who had come to retrieve his belongings found the front door padlocked, without notice. It's little underhanded moves like that, he says, that make this feel personal, that cause him to wonder if the malevolence will ever end.

He's also recently adopted a family of cats – a mother and two kittens.

"It helps," he says, "But I miss the island. I miss its beauty and my friends. I don't know if it will ever be safe enough to go back."