Michael Ward broke down in tears on Friday as a jury returned the verdict he had spent three and a half years waiting for. The Top Boy actor was unanimously acquitted of all five charges against him at Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London, ending one of the most high-profile criminal trials to overshadow a British acting career in recent memory.
The 28-year-old, best known for his role as gang leader Jamie in the Netflix drama Top Boy, stood quietly in the dock with his hand covering his mouth as each verdict was delivered.
When the last count was read, he wept. He was helped out of the courtroom by his defence barrister. At the same time, family members and friends in the public gallery reacted with visible emotion.
The charges stemmed from an alleged encounter on January 2, 2023, the night after a New Year’s party for around 250 people in Gants Hill, east London. Ward had attended the event during a break from an already packed professional schedule.
According to trial testimony, he and the woman met outside the gathering, exchanged conversation, and eventually ended up in the back of a friend’s Mercedes. That is where the two accounts diverge sharply.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court she asked Ward to stop “on multiple occasions” and that she “completely shut down” during the encounter. She also told the jury she would never have got in the car had she known what was going to happen.
Ward’s account was the opposite. He described the encounter as entirely mutual, telling the jury he believed she was “reciprocating the energy” and that she never indicated wanting to leave.
“Everything we did was wholly consensual. We engaged in consensual sex, had a great time and she was actively participating in what we were doing all the time,” he said. He also told the court he had been “shocked” when police arrested him upon returning to the UK from Italy.
After five hours and 25 minutes of deliberation, the jury came back with unanimous not guilty verdicts on all five counts: two counts of rape, two counts of assault by penetration, and one count of sexual assault.
The cost of the investigation, which began in January 2023 and culminated in a formal charge in July 2025, extended beyond the legal process. Ward was dropped by his UK agency, Olivia Bell Management, after the charge was filed.
His solicitor Humzah Ilyas described the toll plainly outside court: three and a half years during which both his personal life and a career that had been building toward something genuinely significant were frozen in place.
That career is worth pausing on, because it makes the stakes of Friday’s verdict harder to overstate. Ward won the BAFTA EE Rising Star Award in 2020, received a BAFTA supporting actor nomination for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe the following year, and had already built a screen résumé that included Blue Story, Empire of Light, The Old Guard, and most recently Ari Aster’s Eddington alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, which premiered at Cannes last year. The question now is how quickly the industry moves to restore what the charges interrupted.
Ilyas, reading Ward’s statement outside court, said his client was grateful to the jury for their careful examination of the evidence and that he looked forward to returning to the work he loves.
He also noted that Ward wished to acknowledge victims of sexual violence, stressing that they deserve to be heard, treated with compassion, and taken seriously, whatever the outcome of any individual case.
A not-guilty verdict does not erase what the accuser went through in pursuing the case, nor what Ward endured while waiting for it to conclude. What it does is give him back his name and, with it, the chance to pick up a career that was always headed somewhere.