Only the most grim-faced of churls would refuse to recognise the progress Mikel Arteta’s outstanding Arsenal side have made this season. The very fact a title win is on the table this weekend says more than enough and now they must make sure that, just in case West Ham cause an almighty stir at the Etihad, they do not taint it with unnecessary regrets. When Everton pitched up in London on the final day two years ago the home side cruised to a 5-1 win; nostalgia buffs among the support might prefer the 4-3 rip-roarer in 2002 that rubber-stamped the double winners’ season and ended with a Premier League trophy presentation. Even if the latter scenario is an outside bet this time, Arteta will expect his players to block out any noise – including dispatches from Manchester – and put an opponent to the sword one last time, making sure they at least do their bit. An opportunity to make dreams come true may yet present itself. Nick Ames

Spain has refused permission for a ship carrying arms to Israel to dock at a Spanish port, its foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, said on Thursday.

“This is the first time we have done this because it is the first time we have detected a ship carrying a shipment of arms to Israel that wants to call at a Spanish port,” he told reporters in Brussels.

“This will be a consistent policy with any ship carrying arms to Israel that wants to call at Spanish ports. The foreign ministry will systematically reject such stopovers for one obvious reason: the Middle East does not need more weapons, it needs more peace.”

Albares did not provide details on the ship but the transport minister, Óscar Puente, said it was the Marianne Danica that had requested permission to call at the south-eastern port of Cartagena on 21 May.

El País said the Danish-flagged ship was carrying 27 tonnes of explosive material from Chennai in India to the port of Haifa in Israel.

The announcement comes during a row between prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists and his coalition partners, the leftwing Sumar alliance, over another ship, the Borkum, which is due to dock in Cartagena on Friday.

Pro-Palestinian groups say the Borkum is carrying arms to Israel, prompting Sumar to demand that it be turned away. But Puente said the Borkum was transporting military material to the Czech Republic, not Israel.

Spain has been one of Europe’s most critical voices about Israel’s Gaza offensive and is working to rally other European capitals behind the idea of recognising a Palestinian state.

Spain halted arms sales to Israel after it launched a military onslaught against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza war began on 7 October when Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s military retaliation has killed more than 35,000 people, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023.

The Republican governor had previously ordered the board to review Perry’s case and said earlier that he would sign a pardon if recommended. The board, which is appointed by the governor, announced its unanimous recommendation in a message posted on the agency website, and Abbott’s pardon swiftly followed.

Abbott’s demand for a review of Perry’s case followed pressure from the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who on national television had urged the Republican governor to intervene after the sergeant was convicted at trial in April 2022. Perry was sentenced to 25 years in prison after prosecutors used his social media history and text messages to portray him as a racist who might commit violence again.

A jury in Austin had convicted Perry of murder in the death of 28-year-old Garrett Foster, an air force veteran who had been legally carrying an AK-47 while marching in a Black Lives Matter protest. Perry was working as a ride-share driver in July 2020, when he turned his car on to a street crowded with demonstrators and shot Foster before driving off.

Prosecutors argued at trial that Perry could have driven away without opening fire and witnesses testified that they never saw Foster raise his gun. The sergeant’s defense attorneys argued Foster, who was white, did raise the rifle and that Perry had no choice but to shoot. Perry, who is also white, did not take the witness stand and jurors deliberated for two days before finding him guilty.

A woman who alleges she was raped at knifepoint by the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has told a court she would never forget the eyes of her attacker, which “bored into my skull”.

Giving evidence in the trial of Christian Brückner, who stands accused of five sexual assaults in Portugal of women aged between 10 and 80 between 2000 and 2017, Hazel Behan, 40, who was raped in June 2004, told the court: “I believe that this man was my attacker.”

She was sitting just metres away from Brückner, who looked on impassively. Behan, an administrator and mother of three from Ireland, told the court on the second and final day of testimony, delivered over 10 hours, that she still bears the scars of the attack, which took place in Praia da Rocha, in the Algarve, where she was working as a holiday representative.

Brückner, 47, who was named by German police in 2020 as the main suspect in the disappearance of the British toddler Madeleine McCann – not the focus of the trial – was at one point asked by the judge, Uta Engemann, to approach the bench so that she could examine his eyes, after Behan said she would “never forget” the eyes of her attacker.

“When you spend time in a situation like that with a person and there’s nothing else you can see on this human except their eyes, it’s the only thing you can remember. They bored into my skull. I’ll never forget it,” she said. She added that she thought the effect of her attacker’s eyes was intensified by the fact that otherwise he was completely dressed in black.

“They were just so blue … everything so dark … they were like lights, they were so bright. I just know them,” she said.

She said she suffered from recurring post-traumatic stress disorder and frequent panic attacks as a result of the assault. The court was shown pictures of scars on the backs of her legs that remain to this day, from where she was tied with rope to a breakfast bar during the prolonged attack at the flat where she lived.

She also said she still bled from wounds received during the violent attack.

Her attacker had been masked and was covered head to toe in a leotard-style body suit of about 60-denier thickness, and wore leather, or fake leather, gloves, she said, adding that only his eyes had been visible.

He spoke to her in English, in what she said was a German accent. Behan’s testimony has come at what prosecutors have described as a crucial moment in the trial, which began in February and is expected to last into the autumn, hearing from about 40 witnesses and a range of experts. Brückner is serving a seven-year sentence for the 2005 rape of an American tourist in the Algarve.

He is due for release from the end of next year.

Behan described how she had come forward to offer the account of her ordeal to British police in 2020 in response to an appeal by the Metropolitan police, working on the McCann case. The appeal included an official police identity photo of Brückner, requesting eye witnesses to contact them.

The sight of the picture and the physical description of him had made her feel nauseous, and later caused her to vomit, she said. She subsequently learned of Brückner’s conviction in 2019 of the rape of an elderly American tourist, and shared with Irish, British and German police the striking similarities in the modus operandi of the attacker in the woman’s case and hers.

Over two days, Behan told the court in graphic detail how she was repeatedly raped, whipped and tied up in her apartment, the attacker filming the ordeal on a camera he had set up on top of the television in her room. The attacker threatened her, saying: “If you scream, I’ll kill you.” At one point she said she feared she would be beheaded after he wielded a knife at her.

Brückner, who denies the sexual assault charges and also denies involvement in the disappearance of McCann, sat metres away from Behan. Wearing a grey linen jacket with elbow pads and a white shirt, he leaned back in his chair for much of the testimony, often holding his chin in his left hand but appearing to show no emotion.

The trial continues.

This is an extract of this week’s Down to Earth newsletter, to get more exclusive environmental journalism in your inbox every Thursday sign up here

It’s common to think about the climate crisis as something that will happen in the future, in the global south.

But for several months I’ve been investigating the devastating impact of extreme flooding in Europe for my Guardian series The floods. What I saw, through my travels to Chesterfield, England, Germany’s Ahr valley and Wallonia in Belgium, was that the climate emergency is in Europe, now. And it’s been happening for years.

Climate breakdown increases the risk of flooding, because hot air retains water, which increases precipitation. Climate scientists have found a 1C temperature increase means that 7% more water is retained in the air. The 2021 floods which devastated central Europe, specifically Belgium and Germany, were made more likely, some researchers think, by the climate crisis.

The aftermath was akin to a disaster movie. In the Ahr valley, a picturesque tourist region known for its hiking and pinot noir, the water level is believed to have reached up to 10 metres on the night of 14 July, 2021. The destruction was still clear to see. Mangled railway tracks loomed like twisted rollercoasters. Bridges were demolished by the force of the water. Entire houses were washed away with their inhabitants trapped inside.

And what’s terrifying is that floods of that magnitude could happen again in central Europe – in fact, some scientists think they will happen once or twice before 2050. But the people are not prepared.

More on what I found, after this week’s climate reads.

Essential reads

In focus

I arrived in Brussels on a frozen January afternoon. I was there for a sombre occasion: the memorial service for Rosa Reichel (pictured above), who died in the 2021 floods in Belgium. The service took place on what should have been Rosa’s 18th birthday. Instead, she was swept away by a flash flood while at a summer camp. I was there to meet her friend Benjamin Van Bunderen Robberechts, 17, who jumped into the water to try to save her, narrowly avoiding drowning himself. Now Ben’s a climate activist, travelling the world to raise awareness of the climate emergency as part of his Climate Justice for Rosa campaign.

As I travelled through Belgium’s Vesdre valley, I saw a community still reeling. Many had fallen victim to cowboy builders and were living in half-finished building sites, years on from the floods. They’d only been able to rebuild with the heroic efforts of unpaid volunteers. But alarmingly, people had rebuilt their homes almost exactly as before, without mitigation measures in place to protect them from future flooding. If the valley floods again, many of these homes will be destroyed – with further catastrophic loss of life.

In Germany, too, I saw similar short-termist thinking. There’s even a term for it: flood dementia. The idea that catastrophic flooding will not happen in the same place twice, even when the conditions for those floods – steep hillsides, communities built too close to the water, impermeable bedrock with limited opportunities for drainage – means that they probably will. It’s a kind of magical thinking, and one that can prove fatal: in Germany, 188 people died in the 2021 floods. But in the Ahr, I also met two sisters and winemakers who were bucking the trend by relocating their vinery to the top of a hill, after narrowly escaping death during the floods.

And the UK is already seeing the fingerprints of climate breakdown in extreme weather events. In Chesterfield, I met the family of Maureen Gilbert, a beloved grandmother who died alone in her home during last October’s Storm Babet. Since Babet, the UK has equalled its record for the most named storms during a storm season, with four months of the storm season left to go. March 2024 was the hottest recorded globally, and the 10th month in a row to break records.

Climate scientists have warned that we are entering unprecedented territory. As the world gets warmer, biblical flooding won’t be a one-off, exceptional event, but a new normal. We are not prepared.

Composted Reads

The good news

The bad news

The change I made – Growing my own salad

Down to Earth readers on the eco-friendly changes they made for the planet

A simple tip this week from reader Lyn Wills, which benefits you and the planet: giving up plastic-wrapped salad leaves for some grown in your own garden.

“I started growing my own salad due to the abysmal quality and price of the salad bags in the supermarket, which go slimy a day or so after opening and often are very ‘stalky’,” says Wills.

You don’t even need a big patch to make it work, Wills is quick to stress. “I have a very small space which is sunny enough and I just grow and pick what I need. This year I planted a tray each of lettuce and beetroots, instead of seeds, the rocket and chives come back every year. It’s more foolproof than seeds but a bit more expensive.”

Let us know the positive change you’ve made in your life by replying to this newsletter, or emailing us on [email protected]

Creature feature – Chimpanzee

Profiling the Earth’s most at-risk animals

Population: 175,000-300,000
Location: Forests of central Africa
Status: Endangered

Highly social animals who can live to be older than 50, chimps are our closest cousins – we share about 98% of our genes. Threats include poaching and habitat loss – exacerbated by a slow reproductive rate. Ecotourism initiatives in Africa aim to protect chimps from poaching by providing alternative incomes for communities.

For more on wildlife at threat, visit the Age of Extinction page here

Picture of the week

One image that sums up the week in environmental news

It’s hard to pick just one photograph from this beautiful Guardian gallery celebrating “eco-brutalist” architecture, but this shot of Paris’s dense but leafy Les Étoiles d’Ivry housing block wins out.

Each of the 13 photographs in the piece, taken across the world from Brazil to Bosnia, feature in the new book Brutalist Plants by Olivia Broome. “Brutalism can be this quite harsh, austere architecture style, but with nature involved, it balances it all out,” she says.

For more of the week’s best environmental pictures, catch up on The Week in Wildlife here

It was September 1991 in New York and the grand finale of Look of the Year, a prestigious modeling contest that had helped launch the careers of supermodels Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen.

The celebrity magician David Copperfield, one of the judges, watched from the front row as 58 contestants paraded across the runway in their branded hot pink and sorbet yellow swimsuits. Nearly all the contestants were teenagers; some were as young as 14.

Today, more than three decades later, five former contestants say that they were subjected to behavior by Copperfield that they now regard as inappropriate or worse. The women – who were all teenagers at the time – met him at the New York contest in 1991 or three years earlier in Japan, when he was also a judge. Others who attended the events also say they witnessed Copperfield behaving inappropriately towards the girls.

The claims include allegations of unwanted sexual touching and sexual harassment. In one case, a former contestant alleges she was drugged and sexually assaulted by Copperfield in the months after the competition. She was 17 years old at the time, she says.

The claims follow a report in yesterday’s Guardian US, which detailed allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior by Copperfield from women who had met him in connection with his performances. There was also an allegation of drugging in that story: one woman told the Guardian that she believes she and a friend were drugged by Copperfield before he had sexual relations with them, leaving them unable to consent.

In written responses to questions from the Guardian, lawyers for David Copperfield denied all the allegations of misconduct and inappropriate behavior. Copperfield’s lawyers said he has “never, ever acted inappropriately with anyone, let alone anyone underage”.

Look of the Year 1991

In 1991, Look of the Year was hosted by real-estate mogul Donald Trump at the Plaza Hotel in New York, which he owned. Former US President Trump and Copperfied were among the 10 judges.

Other judges included a former Look of the Year winner and an executive at an advertising agency. Top fashion photographer, the late Patrick Demarchelier, and Gérald Marie, head of the Paris office of Elite Model Management, the agency that ran the competition, were also on the judging panel. Elite was then the world’s leading modeling agency. In recent years both men have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct towards young models, which they both denied.

The judges and the contestants stayed in rooms at Trump’s luxury hotel overlooking Central Park during the week-long contest.

Behind-the-scenes footage and photographs from the event show Copperfield mingling with contestants during the events. At the grand finale, Elite’s founder and owner, John Casablancas, introduced the illusionist, who was wearing a black dinner jacket with shoulder pads, as “the Emmy award-winning master magician, my friend, David Copperfield.”

Trump sat alongside him in the front row, with his then nine-year-old daughter Ivanka, who would later work for Elite as a model, perched on his knee. Naomi Campbell, then an Elite supermodel, co-hosted the black-tie gala with Casablancas.

The event attracted aspiring models from all over the world, aged 14 to 21. The average age of contestants – according to a Fox documentary the following year – was just 15. Some traveled there alone and were away from home for the first time. The pressure to impress the judges was intense.

Jenniffer Diaz, a Venezuelan contestant, had just turned 18 when she arrived in New York. In the evening, after the day’s events were done, she says the phone in her hotel room rang and a voice said: “Hi, so this is me, David Copperfield.” She claims he repeatedly called her room and invited her to join him in his room.

She recalls being in her pyjamas and being asked by him what she was wearing.

“I really didn’t speak much English and I had no idea what he meant,” she says now.

Only later, she says, did she realize that there was a sexual implication. Diaz, now 50, says she is relieved she declined the invitations, but says that at the time she felt uncomfortable saying no to the celebrity judge. “Even at that age, I was very young and naive, but still, I knew very clearly that you don’t go to a guy’s room at night.”

Copperfield’s lawyers denied that he called Diaz or any other contestants at their hotel rooms . “The allegation against our client is false and makes no logical sense,” lawyers said.

They said that during the event young male scammers would call contestants’ hotel rooms, using Copperfield and other judges’ names in order to “try and meet girls”. Copperfield’s assistant at the time, Linda Faye Smith, said in a statement to the Guardian that there was a “group of scammers calling contestants’ rooms at random – posing as celebrity judges” and “saying they were David”. Copperfield’s lawyers confirmed that he and Smith had been in contact before she sent the statement to the Guardian.

The Guardian spoke to eight attendees of the 1991 event, including an organizer from Elite, and none recalled hearing anything about scammers calling contestants. Diaz says she believed it was Copperfield’s voice on the phone.

Diaz’s account was corroborated by two witnesses. An American contestant, who didn’t want to be named, recalled translating a phone call between Copperfield and Diaz. “I was like, what the hell is going on?” the woman told the Guardian in 2020. Diaz’s then roommate, Stacy Wilkes, 16 at the time, also corroborated Diaz’s account of the calls. During the contest, Wilkes adds, the presence of men with no apparent connection to the modeling industry felt “inappropriate”.

Diaz claims Copperfield continued to contact her even after the competition ended. He called her multiple times at her family home in Venezuela and left messages with their housekeeper, she says. She did not respond. Diaz, who is now an actress and real estate agent, says, in hindsight, she feels it was “absolutely predatory behavior”. Copperfield’s lawyers said he did not call contestants at their family homes “as claimed”.

Diaz says she believes her agency, Elite, may have given Copperfield her home number without her permission. She says it appeared to her that her then boss, Casablancas, and Copperfield, were friends.

Aimee Bendio, a 15-year-old American contestant, says she believes Copperfield also showed an interest in her during the 1991 competition. Footage from the contest shows Aimee being interviewed by the panel of judges in her swimsuit. Immediately after, the camera cuts to Trump and Copperfield leaning back in their chairs to talk to one another.

Bendio says Copperfield approached her on the evening of 1 September 1991, when all the contestants, judges and other “friends of the agency” were taken on a private yacht around the Statue of Liberty.

Bendio first told her story in a 2020 Guardian investigation, which revealed allegations of inappropriate behavior by several men connected to Elite’s Look of the Year, including accounts from contestants that Trump would sometimes appear backstage as they were getting dressed. Trump denied “in the strongest possible terms” behaving inappropriately with the contestants. In response to the article his representatives said he was not aware of any predatory environment at the time.

On the evening of the boat party, Trump and Copperfield posed for photos with the contestants. Bendio claims Copperfield – who was nearly two decades her senior – came up to her and grabbed her around the waist. “He just thought he could do it and it made me feel really uncomfortable,” she tells the Guardian. Copperfield’s lawyers denied Bendio’s allegation and claimed that security, press and chaperones were everywhere at all times.

Copperfield and his assistant contacted Bendio at her family home several times over the course of seven months after the contest, she says. They mainly spoke to her mother, “checking in to see how my career was going.” Bendio says: “We didn’t come from a lot of money and I know that he had offered to help.” Copperfield invited her to his shows and on one occasion offered to send a limousine, but her mother told her to decline, she recalls. Bendio, now a school bus driver in her 40s, says: “We just thought the whole thing was creepy.” Copperfield’s lawyers denied he contacted contestants “as claimed”. They described the offers of free tickets to his shows as “friendly and innocent” behavior.

Like Diaz, Bendio says she is not sure how Copperfield got her contact information.

In addition to Diaz and Bendio, sources say Copperfield contacted at least two other contestants from Look of the Year 1991 after the event.

The same year, Copperfield allegedly connected with another teenage model through one of his stage performances. Carla*, whose story appeared yesterday in the Guardian, says she met Copperfield at one of his shows when she was 15. Afterwards, she alleges, Copperfield repeatedly called her at her family home, sending gifts and tickets to his shows. Like other women who agreed to be quoted by the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, she is being identified with a pseudonym marked* with an asterisk.

Carla now feels she and her family were being “groomed” by Copperfield. When she turned 18 she says he was the first man she had sex with. His lawyers denied her allegations.

The earlier Guardian investigation reported teenage models’ misconduct allegations against Elite’s boss, Casablancas. This included a lawsuit in 2019 that alleged Casablancas sent a 15-year-old model to a “casting call” with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, during which she says Epstein sexually assaulted her. The alleged victim, Jane Doe 3, later reached a settlement with Epstein’s estate.

Four men who attended Look of the Year in 1991 told the Guardian that Copperfield’s interest in the contestants appeared evident to them.

Ohad Oman, a young journalist who attended the event, claims he witnessed Copperfield flirting with a 16-year-old Israeli contestant, which he says he found inappropriate. One European modeling agent says he intervened at one point during the event when he saw the illusionist talking with a contestant he represented who was also around the age of 16. “From the corner of my eyes I saw she wrote her telephone number on a little booklet” for Copperfield, he says. “I took that, threw it on the floor and took her away.”

The agent says: “People in the industry knew why Copperfield wanted to be invited to these events.” He says models at such events were a big attraction for some high-profile men.

“Lots of people in the industry knew of his reputation as a creep. It was obvious,” says fashion photographer Roberto Rabanne, who took photos and video for Elite during the event.

Copperfield’s lawyers said that any portrayal of their client taking part in Look of the Year to exploit teenage models is “simply wrong”. They note many celebrities served as judges and that it was a “high-profile event in the modeling calendar”.

Look of the Year 1988

Three years before the 1991 competition, Brittney Lewis, a 17-year-old high school student from Salt Lake City, Utah, arrived at Look of the Year 1988.

It was September and the contest was held at the beach resort of Atami, Japan. Copperfield, one of the judges, was on a tour of Asia at the time. He was then known for his giant death saw trick and the year before had performed his famous “escape” from Alcatraz prison.

Lewis, according to an article in her local newspaper, The Salt Lake Tribune, skipped the first day of school to attend the event. In an interview with the Guardian, she recalls that Copperfield “got to interview us [the contestants] alone in a room and he asked things like, who was my boyfriend”. It felt “a little uncomfortable,” she says.

Soon after returning to her home in Utah, Lewis says, the phone calls began.

She says Copperfield, then 32, invited her to one of his upcoming shows in California. Lewis says she was excited. At the time she lived with her grandparents and saw her father, Gus Lewis, occasionally. Since she was only 17, they were not sure she would be safe going to meet a man they did not know. Over the course of multiple conversations, Lewis says, Copperfield reassured Patricia Burton, her late grandmother, and her father, that she would be looked after by his female staff.

“He was pleasant on the phone,” her father tells the Guardian now. “My daughter must have told him I was into motorcycles and Harleys at the time, which I was. And so he brought that up first thing…. just trying to be buddy, buddy.” He says Copperfield told him he “would take good care of her and they’d be in separate rooms”.

Lewis says: “My parents are just super good, honest people and trusting … They were starstruck and believed everything he said.”

In late 1988, Lewis recalls, she traveled to California to meet Copperfield ahead of the show. They spent the day together and went shopping, she recalls. “He took me to a mall and he wanted to hold hands and his hand was super sweaty.”

Backstage “he tried to kiss me up against a wall and I ducked and dodged and I was like, no, no, that’s not what I’m here for,” she says. She told him they were “just friends”.

“After the show, he took me to a bar,” Lewis says. “I remember looking down and seeing him pour his drink into mine and I looked at him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m just sharing’.” The rest of the night is hazy, she says.

She says she remembers flashes of being carried out to a car and being helped into a hotel room, where Copperfield had an adjoining room. She says he laid her on the bed, and she remembers “him on top of me, my clothes coming off and then him kissing down and going down towards my crotch.” Then she blacked out, she says. “I don’t remember anything after that.” Lewis says she believes she was drugged.

In the morning she woke up feeling “nauseous and sick to my stomach”. Yesterday’s Guardian story reported that another woman, Gillian*, believed she and a friend had been drugged by the magician. Copperfield denied Gillian’s allegations, saying: “Anyone who knows our client knows drugs have never been a part of his life in any shape or form.”

Lewis says Copperfield came in through the connecting door shortly after, saying he wanted “to talk to me about what had happened.” She says he then said, “I just want you to know that I didn’t penetrate you because you’re underage.”

Lewis says Copperfield told her it would be best for her to return home that day, despite having a multi-day trip planned. Before she left, she says, he convinced her to write him a letter. She can’t recall the exact wording but says it suggested that nothing wrong had happened and that Lewis would not tell anyone about the alleged incident. “I feel like that note kept me hostage for a long time,” she says.

Copperfield’s lawyers have denied Lewis’s allegations. His lawyers said “our client did not act as alleged.”

Months later, Lewis says, Copperfield called her again, inviting her to one of his shows in her hometown. Lewis told him she never wanted to see him again and hung up, she says.

Lewis says her fear of Copperfield was compounded by a childlike sense that he was capable of real magic. Lewis recalls him telling her he was into black magic. When she returned home and realized one of her crystal earrings was missing, she was convinced Copperfield had taken it and was “really scared of what he could do”. Another woman in yesterday’s story, Lily*, who alleged she was groped on stage by Copperfield when she was 14 or 15, says for years after she had nightmares fearing that he would “use his magic on me”.

Lewis, now 53, gets emotional when she talks about the impact the alleged incident had on her life. She had been sexually assaulted as a teenager before she met Copperfield. “I fought the first time … and I thought if it ever happened again, I’d fight harder,” she says. With Copperfield, she says she believes she was drugged “so I felt really defeated and scared of men, scared to date, scared to have boys kiss me.” She “started drinking young,” she says. “I was just really self-destructive for a long time.”

On many nights for a decade after the alleged incident, Lewis says, she had nightmares, in which she was being attacked by a man on top of her. Eventually, she began opening up to those close to her about what she says happened, and got therapy. Now, a mother of three, living a quiet life in southern California with her husband, she says: “I just found a lot of really great alternative ways to heal.”

The Guardian corroborated Lewis’s claims by interviewing three friends and family members, as well as an acquaintance with whom she is no longer in contact. They recall her telling them about the alleged incident several years later. Lewis says she initially felt she couldn’t tell people because of the note she had written Copperfield.

In 2018, Lewis shared her allegations publicly in The Wrap, inspired by the #MeToo movement. Copperfield posted a statement on Twitter after the article was published praising the #MeToo movement while saying that he had been “falsely accused publicly in the past”.

The phone calls

Another contestant from Look of the Year 1988 also recalls getting phone calls from Copperfield at her family home after the contest. Natalie*, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had turned 17 just before the competition.

She had no idea, she says, that Copperfield was also allegedly contacting Lewis around the same time.

Natalie remembers the giddiness of having a celebrity taking an interest in her. They developed what she thought at the time was a friendship and describes being “enamored” of him. Over the phone, he would take the time to ask her how she was and how her modeling career was going, she says. “That made me feel special.” Copperfield told Natalie that he would be performing in her hometown soon and offered her and her parents tickets, she says.

They jumped at the opportunity. It hadn’t crossed their minds that anything inappropriate could happen with their daughter, who was still a minor, as they would be there with her, she says.

Lawyers for Copperfield said he did not call contestants as claimed, adding: “If people our client met asked his office for tickets to his shows our client would often provide complimentary tickets”.

Copperfield, who she says had built the family’s trust, invited Natalie to join him backstage alone, she recalls.

In an interview with the Guardian, Natalie, now 52, says: “He tried to have his way with me.” She alleges he kissed her, touched her breasts and “pushed me down” onto a couch. “He was trying to move forward and go further south and I just didn’t let him do that. I stopped him.”

Natalie, who says she had not had sex before, remembers feeling scared, not wanting to upset the man who had been so generous to her and her family. She notes that while she did not want him to touch her, he stopped when she asked him to stop. She remembers joining her parents in the audience after the incident.

When she returned home the phone calls continued, she says.

“Whenever he came back to [my hometown] he always offered tickets to my family,” she says. Natalie admits that at the time, part of her enjoyed the attention from a celebrity. “I was naive, I was foolish,” she says.

Natalie, who now runs a business in New York, never told her parents, believing for years that she was somehow to blame. “I don’t know, I felt guilty, maybe,” she says.

Copperfield’s lawyers said he denies Natalie’s allegations. They noted that the backstage environment at a magic show is “densely populated and inhospitable to the kind of outrageous conduct alleged. It would be like engaging in this sort of misbehavior during rush hour at Piccadilly Circus.”

A third contestant from 1988, Diana Long from Pennsylvania, says Copperfield “pursued” her during the Japan contest. Long, who was 19 then, says that the magician never crossed a line, but “I remember thinking he was pretty bold and why didn’t he get the message.”

She says that following the competition, Copperfield’s female assistant called her family home at least two times, speaking to her mother. They declined offers of tickets to his shows.

Long, now a mother of five, didn’t give much thought to her interactions with Copperfield at the time, she says, but if he was “talking that way to my 18-year-old, I would be really upset. It’s very inappropriate.” She describes it as “an abuse of power … I think he took advantage of his position, especially being a judge and being famous.”

Copperfield’s representatives denied Long’s allegation, saying it is “not our client’s practice” to offer tickets to shows.

Regarding the phone calls, Long adds: “I’m wondering how many of us he was doing this to and making each one of us [think] it was only us.”

Elite was forced into bankruptcy in 2004. The Elite brand continues to be used by two separate agencies, owned by different corporate entities. One, Elite World Group, said in a statement that the “current ownership since 2012 have no ties to John Casablancas. It never employed, consulted or conducted any business with Mr Casablancas during his lifetime.” It said the agency is “committed to providing safe work environments for our … models.”

The other inheritor of the brand, Elite Model Management, declined to respond to questions. In response to the 2020 article it also strongly distanced itself from the Casablancas-owned firm and era.

The industry

A decade or more after the 1988 and 1991 Look of the Year events, Valerie* – who was quoted in yesterday’s Guardian investigation – was working as an assistant to Copperfield. She recalls Copperfeld having a “little black book”, containing contact details for models and others from the modeling industry.

Valerie, who worked for the magician for 18 months from the late 1990s says some of Copperfield’s closest staff would use the list to “contact modeling agencies” and arrange for models to meet him at or after his shows. This included agencies across the US.

“There were always models coming in and going,” she claims.

The Guardian spoke to an American model agent from the list who confirmed that he received a call from a Copperfield employee asking for a group of models to attend his show.

In 1993 Copperfield began dating the Elite supermodel Claudia Schiffer. According to reports, they met when he brought her on stage to participate in a mind reading act and a flying illusion.

Copperfield reportedly proposed to Schiffer the following year on Little St James, the island that would later be purchased by Epstein. In the years that followed, Schiffer appeared on stage with Copperfield multiple times. Schiffer never married Copperfield and their relationship ended six years later in 1999. There is no suggestion she was aware of any alleged misconduct during their relationship. Schiffer declined to comment on the allegations against him.

Valerie said in yesterday’s story that she felt so uncomfortable about her boss’s behavior around young women that she quit and paid back her Christmas bonus.

The final trigger for her leaving, she says, was witnessing Copperfield’s behavior around a mother and her daughter, an aspiring model, who spent time with him over a number of days in his New York apartment. Copperfield’s lawyers said he is unaware of staff members quitting for the reasons cited.

Valerie says that a modeling agency had connected Copperfield with the pair and the illusionist appeared to be advising them on the girl’s modeling career.

Copperfield, whose lawyers said he denies acting as alleged, took the mother and her daughter – who Valerie recalls was still a minor – to nightclubs until late at night, she says. Valerie attended one such evening and recalls his behavior towards the girl as “creepy”. She says: “That mother seemed very naive, very starstruck.”

Valerie notes that she does not know of any misconduct between Copperfield and the girl, but adds that she felt “it was super wrong.” She felt she couldn’t work for him anymore, she says.

“I left as soon as I could after that.”

Mariska Iurevicz’s mother has been crying a lot recently. “She is always asking when I’ll be home”, the 22-year-old says. “I think we are feeling the same. We are nervous and some of us feeling unsafe. But we are very strong. We will do everything to change the situation.”

Iurevicz, a philosophy student at the TSU State University in Tbilsi, the capital of Georgia, belongs to one of a myriad of protest groups sprouting out of universities and schools that have been driving the mass protests against the “foreign agents” law being introduced in the east European country.

They have been horrified by the potential repercussions of forcing civil society organisations and the media that receive more than 20% of their revenues from abroad to register as “organisations serving the interests of a foreign power”.

The new law, adopted by parliament on Tuesday, is regarded by critics at home and internationally as a copy of that introduced in Russia in 2012 by Vladimir Putin to silence dissenting voices.

The EU says the law will reduce Georgia’s chances of joining the 27-member bloc. And a deluge of anti-western rhetoric from leaders in Tbilisi, including the prime minister, prompted Washington on Wednesday to warn Georgia, a former Soviet state, not to become an “adversary”. That intervention has already affected the share price of Georgia’s banking sector.

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets. Georgia’s past feels very present.

The protest group in which Iurevicz is active is called Georgian Students for a European Future. It is regarded as centrist, but the ideological underpinnings of this uprising cannot be pigeonholed. There is the Students for Liberty, which has some libertarian tendencies, and a group called Wave, which includes environmentalists but vehemently describes itself as “not leftist”.

The Franklin Group, named after Benjamin Franklin, a signatory to the American Declaration of Independence, promotes free markets, private property, and individual liberties, while the Shame group focuses on free and fair elections. Dafioni, or Sunset, describes itself as liberal nationalist and members swear an oath of allegiance.

It is a colourful mix, and inevitably the groups do not always get on. “It can be difficult”, said one insider. But the factors uniting all those braving what has often been a brutal response from the riot police is that they are resolutely pro-European – and most were born between 1997 and 2012.

This is a gen Z movement, with all the social media savvy and sensitivity this entails, said Konstantine Chakhunashvili, 32, a paediatrician who calls himself a classical liberal and is part of a protest group called Stubborn.

“Most of these groups are dominated by gen Z”, he said. “In my group of 130 people, only four or five of us are not gen Z.”

It is, he said, an impressive generation. “The younger people have it easier when they need to agree something. They come to a consensus. My generation and older are too rough. But, like with today’s event, they organise it in 30 minutes. With older groups and the politicians it is harder to do.”

Vano Abramishvili, a director at Caucasian House, an NGO that runs programmes for young people, said it should have been no surprise to the governing Georgian Dream party that young people would reject alignment with Moscow.

They grew up in a Georgia quite different from that of their parents, he said.

The country has been constitutionally committed to getting closer to the EU and Nato since the non-violent revolution of 2003 ended the Soviet-style presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze.

Abramishvili said people in their 20s were never likely to embrace what has appeared to be a sudden pivot, as the government criticised the west as part of a “global war party”, echoing the Kremlin’s narrative over the conflict in Ukraine and forcing Georgia to swallow the poison pill of a law that could kill its EU aspirations.

“The only thing they have heard as they grew up was that the European Union was our friend”, Abramishvili said.

Gen Z’s fury was made clear to the government in March last year when it first tried to introduce the “foreign agents” law, only to swiftly withdraw it in the face of the initial wave of protests.

What followed, said Abramishvili, was an attempt to buy young people’s affections. Unpaid internships were banned in state institutions. “Also, the government cancelled the debt of tens of thousands of students who could not afford to pay and continue their studies, and a couple of months ago they introduced a new strategy for young people”, he said.

Then, on 29 April, Georgian Dream hosted its own youth rally, led by Tsotne Ivanishvili, the teenage son of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder and controlling mind of the party. It did not convince anyone, Abramishvili said.

It is in this context, the young protesters say, that a darker strategy has come into play.

On 10 May, Georgia’s prime minister wrote an open letter to the “sincere youth”, naming a host of the troublesome protest groups and describing them as “violent youth organisations” with “dark and opaque money”. Some high-profile individuals found that they were followed; others were attacked. Parents received calls warning them of dire consequences.

“Half of my friends have had calls or been approached in the street”, said Iurevicz. “Two of my friends were arrested at the protest. They were beaten, and they were told terrible things.”

But, Abramishvili said, this generation was not used to – nor would accept – the repression that older Georgians had experienced. “They are quite fearless,” he said.

Older heads aligned with the opposition party, the United National Movement, had originally planned to hold protests only on days when parliament was debating the “foreign agents” bill. Zviad Tsetskhladze, 18, a law student at Tbilisi State University and founding member of Sunset, said it was the gen Z cohort that insisted there should be no break.

There is still plenty of energy to the demonstrations and, despite everything, even joy. The young protesters sing as they march from their universities to parliament, draped in the Georgian flag.

“We sing the anthem of the protest called Gaighime,” said Iurevicz. “It is a beautiful thing. The students are the kindest people. We are singing that everything will be fine and we are together and we will be together.”

A 29-year-old Dutch woman who has been granted her request for assisted dying on the grounds of unbearable mental suffering is expected to end her life in the coming weeks, fuelling a debate across Europe over the issue.

Zoraya ter Beek received the final approval last week for assisted dying after a three and a half year process under a law passed in the Netherlands in 2002.

Her case has caused controversy as assisted dying for people with psychiatric illnesses in the Netherlands remains unusual, although the numbers are increasing. In 2010, there were two cases involving psychiatric suffering; in 2023, there were 138: 1.5% of the 9,068 euthanasia deaths.

An article about her case, published in April, was picked up by international media, prompting an outcry that caused Ter Beek huge distress.

She said it was understandable that cases such as hers – and the broader issue of whether assisted dying should be legal – were controversial. “People think that when you’re mentally ill, you can’t think straight, which is insulting,” she told the Guardian. “I understand the fears that some disabled people have about assisted dying, and worries about people being under pressure to die.

“But in the Netherlands, we’ve had this law for more than 20 years. There are really strict rules, and it’s really safe.”

Under Dutch law, to be eligible for an assisted death, a person must be experiencing “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”. They must be fully informed and competent to take such a decision.

Ter Beek’s difficulties began in early childhood. She has chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and unspecified personality disorder. She has also been diagnosed with autism. When she met her partner, she thought the safe environment he offered would heal her. “But I continued to self-harm and feel suicidal.”

She embarked on intensive treatments, including talking therapies, medication and more than 30 sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). “In therapy, I learned a lot about myself and coping mechanisms, but it didn’t fix the main issues. At the beginning of treatment, you start out hopeful. I thought I’d get better. But the longer the treatment goes on, you start losing hope.”

After 10 years, there was “nothing left” in terms of treatment. “I knew I couldn’t cope with the way I live now.” She had thought about taking her own life but the violent death by suicide of a schoolfriend and its impact on the girl’s family deterred her.

“I finished ECT in August 2020, and after a period of accepting there was no more treatment, I applied for assisted dying in December that year. It’s a long and complicated process. It’s not like you ask for assisted dying on a Monday and you’re dead by Friday.

“I was on a waiting list for assessment for a long time, because there are so few doctors willing to be involved in assisted dying for people with mental suffering. Then you have to be assessed by a team, have a second opinion about your eligibility, and their decision has to be reviewed by another independent doctor.

“In the three and a half years this has taken, I’ve never hesitated about my decision. I have felt guilt – I have a partner, family, friends and I’m not blind to their pain. And I’ve felt scared. But I’m absolutely determined to go through with it.

“Every doctor at every stage says: ‘Are you sure? You can stop at any point.’ My partner has been in the room for most conversations in order to support me, but several times he has been asked to leave so the doctors can be sure I’m speaking freely.”

When the article about her case – which Ter Beek said had many inaccuracies and misrepresentations – was published in April, her inbox “exploded”. Most of the comments came from outside the Netherlands, many from the US. She swiftly deleted all her social media accounts.

“People were saying: ‘Don’t do it, your life is precious.’ I know that. Others said they had a cure, like a special diet or drugs. Some told me to find Jesus or Allah, or told me I’d burn in hell. It was a total shitstorm. I couldn’t handle all the negativity.”

After meeting her medical team, Ter Beek expects her death will be in the next few weeks. “I feel relief. It’s been such a long fight.”

On the appointed day, the medical team will come to Ter Beek’s house. “They’ll start by giving me a sedative, and won’t give me the drugs that stop my heart until I’m in a coma. For me, it will be like falling asleep. My partner will be there, but I’ve told him it’s OK if he needs to leave the room before the moment of death,” she said.

“Now the point has come, we’re ready for it and we’re finding a certain peace. I feel guilty too. But sometimes when you love someone, you have to let them go.”

Additional reporting by Senay Boztas in Amsterdam

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be as insignificant as a kernel of corn, you can now get a good idea in Kristiansand, a city in southern Norway. Standing on the fourth floor of its new Kunstsilo art museum, carved out of an old 1930s grain silo, you can peer down a vertiginous concrete tube that plunges towards huddles of ant-like people below. Or you can look up, through more concrete shafts, towards tiny circles of sky. You can mimic the journey of a grain by climbing a spiral staircase inside one of the cylinders, or test your nerves by walking on a glass-floored terrace suspended over another shaft, floating above a tubular abyss. It’s a dramatic spatial spectacle – and we haven’t even got to the art yet.

Once home to 15,000 tonnes of grain, this mighty concrete mountain is now a repository of the most important collection of Nordic modern art in the world. It is a 5,500-strong haul spanning paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and full-size architectural installations, telling the story of the past century of abstraction, surrealism and expressionism across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark – inside one of the ultimate symbols of modernity itself.

“The magnificent first fruits of the new age,” is how modernist maestro Le Corbusier described grain silos, to which he dedicated an entire chapter in his 1923 manifesto, Toward a New Architecture. For modernists, silos were the perfect expression of form following function, monuments of storage and symbols of global trade, stripped of surplus ornament. For Bauhaus boss Walter Gropius, they were “almost as impressive in their monumental power as the buildings of ancient Egypt”. They still hold an irresistible allure, standing as industrial cathedrals of pure geometric forms. But what should be done with these redundant hulks now?

“It was a real headache,” says Mathias Bernander, mayor of Kristiansand, where the 40m tall cluster of silos had stood vacant since 2008, occupying a prime waterfront spot. “The building was protected, but useless.” Designed by one of Norway’s leading functionalist architects, Arne Korsmo, the 30 concrete cylinders had been listed in 2010, but there was no idea what to do with them. Plans to turn the building into a hotel had proved impossible. “It was worth nothing,” says Bernander. “It actually had a minus value, because it was more of a problem than an asset.”

In 2012, a concert hall was built to one side of the silo, in the form of an extravagantly undulating shed. A few years later, a development of expensive waterfront flats started to appear on the other side. But the silo remained, a stubborn relic blocking the waterfront regeneration. Then, as if in a Nordic fairytale, along came one of the city’s former children, who had since become one of the country’s wealthiest men. And he was looking for an eye-catching place to house his sprawling collection of art.

“We walked around town thinking, ‘Where would be nice to have our museum?’” says Nicolai Tangen. “Then there it was – this incredible phallic landmark!” Tangen is no stranger to hunting for meaty opportunities. The 57-year-old made his fortune as a hedge fund manager in London, and now heads the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the largest of its kind in the world – lending him the nickname Norway’s “trillion-dollar man”.

He began collecting art in the 1990s, and became so enamoured he took a sabbatical to study for an MA at London’s Courtauld Institute in 2003. Amassing a museum-quality horde of Nordic modern art became an obsession, but realising his dream of a place to display it in his home town was no easy ride.

“It was all hunky dory and positive at first,” says Tangen. “And then, bang!” That was the sound of the citizens of Kristiansand learning that they were on the hook for co-funding the project. The building wasn’t to be just a private museum, but a joint home for the city’s existing art collection – a controversial deal that cost the then-mayor his job. Of the £52m total cost, Tangen’s foundation has contributed about £15.5m (half of the total cost came from public sources, the rest from private grants and a bank loan).

“I could have paid for the whole museum,” Tangen says, “but then it would not have been a gift. For something to be taken care of, people need to participate in the initial investment. If you get a kitten for free, you will look after it less than if you have to pay £10.”

Judging by the crowds at the opening event, most local residents seem thrilled with their new kitten, the controversies a distant memory. People flooded into the ground floor atrium, where the silos have been hollowed out to create a 21-metre high void, and windows look down into the space from landings above.

One silo holds the staircase, beautifully crafted in oak, its curved white steel balustrade bulging into the atrium, while another hugs a curved semicircular sofa on each floor. Evidence of the substantial surgical procedures has been left exposed, with the silos’ concrete edges sawn and ground, revealing chunky aggregate and rusted steel reinforcement bars.

“We wanted to make a contrast between the rugged silo and the new, precise elements,” says Magnus Wåge of Barcelona-based Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, who won the project in an open international competition, with Mendoza Partida and BAX studio. Their first idea was to turn the silos themselves into labyrinthine exhibition spaces, but they found it would have been almost impossible to display paintings. “So we decided it was better to make the silo into a kind of sculpture at the centre, opening it up into a basilica-like space.”

The galleries are arranged on either side of the momentous void, 3,000 sq metres of conventional white cube space across three levels, housed in a new block on one side, and a rebuilt former storehouse on the other. Mostly windowless, with relatively low ceilings, and separated from the atrium by two sets of sliding glass doors for environmental reasons, they feel a bit lifeless, creating a monotonous sequence relieved only by returning back into the gaping atrium.

It is a similar experience to visiting Thomas Heatherwick’s Zeitz Mocaa museum in Cape Town, also housed in a former grain silo, where the fiendish acrobatic feat of carving an ovoid volume out of the concrete tubes clearly trumped creating the best possible spaces for the display of art. In both buildings, the hollowed-out industrial cadaver is the real star of the show.

For all their claims of “adaptive reuse”, both projects are also heavily rebuilt. It turns out that ageing concrete silos are not actually capable of being sawn and sliced quite as much as architects might hope. As in Cape Town, the Kristiansand structure had to have a 250mm-thick sleeve of concrete cast around the existing 150mm-thick cylinders, as well as an additional lattice of concrete beams threaded through the tubes to stabilise the structure.

The freshly entombed silos were then insulated and finished with a white plaster render to restore the look of the original structure, only a bit chubbier. No embodied carbon assessment has been carried out, but the environmental argument of “reusing” the building in this way, when such a substantial amount of new concrete had to be poured, is questionable – especially when the spatial drama of the silos in both cases is confined to the atrium.

Still, it’s easy to forget about all this when you’re up on the roof. While Heatherwick’s building is crowned with an exorbitant boutique hotel, the Kunstsilo summit houses a restaurant with a spectacular roof deck open to all. Here, visitors can sit behind rows of glass fins, arranged to allow a frisson of sea breeze to flow through the gaps, and enjoy views across to the container port the other side of the harbour. You can also gawp at the colossal cruise ships, disgorging thousands of passengers a day into the town – their landing zone eventually to be connected to the museum’s waterfront promenade by a footbridge.

Until now, the chief lure of Norway’s sunniest city has been a zoo and amusement park, themed around the popular pirate character Captain Sabertooth, which attracts 1.2 million visitors a year. Its former director, Reidar Fuglestad, was poached to head up Kunstsilo, in the hope he might make it an equally popular attraction.

“It think this project takes Kristiansand from a small town to a big town,” says Tangen. “I don’t think it is turning into Bilbao straight away. But I love the idea of having an irritating little museum here putting on the best shows, so that these well-resourced museums in Oslo say, ‘Geez, what’s going on down there?’”

I have been hesitating for months. The wetsuit I swim in every week to keep me toasty warm in the winter and safe from jellyfish stings in the summer is riddled with holes. Yet I can’t bring myself to buy a new one because I’ve learned that comfortable, flexible and insulating neoprene is manufactured using some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

Neoprene, a synthetic foamed rubber, is made from the petrochemical compound chloroprene. Exposure to chloroprene emissions, produced during the manufacturing process, may increase the risk of cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

For the past three years, the film-makers Chris Nelson and Lewis Arnold have been investigating surfing’s links to the human health impacts of chloroprene manufacturing. Their documentary about the world’s toxic addiction to neoprene, The Big Sea, is due to be screened at film festivals worldwide from June.

“As surfers, we’ve been consuming neoprene for five decades, but Lewis and I both felt that we hadn’t been told the truth about where [our wetsuits] came from and what they were made of,” Nelson says.

As part of the film they travelled to the heavily polluted US region known as Cancer Alley, an area of Louisiana along the Mississippi River where smoke stacks fill the skyline.

The air is so toxic here that the cancer risk is 50 times higher than the national average, according to the EPA.

The nearby plant run by the Japanese chemical company Denka makes multiple forms of chloroprene, but is not breaking any state laws.

While editing the film, Nelson says he received “a spectrum of responses” from wetsuit companies. A few are actively phasing out neoprene, he says, but some have not engaged with the issue at all.

The Surf Industry Members Association (SIMA), which represents the surf industry, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment but Vipe Desai, its director , disputed the film’s claims in an interview with Wavelength magazine last year.

Desai said no brands that the SIMA knew of sourced neoprene from the Louisiana factory.

“Some limestone chloroprene rubber chips are indeed sourced via a Denka-owned facility, but in Japan,” he said. “These Japanese chips are not petroleum-based and research shows those facilities are not associated with elevated health risks.”

He also said the surf industry had “played a major role in moving away from materials causing harm and will continue to do so”.

Denka did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment but in March it told the publication Chemistry World that it strongly disagreed with the EPA’s assessment of the risks that chloroprene emissions posed to the local community and that this was based on “outdated and erroneous science that the agency released over 12 years ago”.

So what alternatives are there?

Surf wetsuit companies are increasingly pushing back against neoprene and offering plant-based alternatives.

In 2016, Patagonia went neoprene-free and Finisterre followed suit in 2021. The Dutch brand Wallien is using Yulex, a plant-based rubber, or other natural variants for all future production, and Buell in California is doing the same.

Last September, Xcel committed to using 100% natural rubber by 2026, the first of the traditional big brands to do so. Meanwhile, Billabong and Decathlon have added single lines of plant-based neoprene wetsuits.

Xcel does not label its current neoprene wetsuits – which are made using calcium carbonate mined from limestone rocks, rather than from petrochemicals – as “eco” because the process is still energy-intensive.

“That’s a stop on the bridge between neoprene and natural materials,” says Ian Stewart, of Xcel. “We’re moving off limestone as fast as we can.”

Meanwhile, surfers are fast becoming more conscious of the environmental and health impacts of their sport.

Giles Bristow, chief executive of the ocean charity Surfers Against Sewage, says: “With increasing awareness about where our materials come from, everything from our wetsuits to our boards, I think there will be a market transformation.”

Reuse and recycle

Last summer, Finisterre launched the world’s first rental service for natural-rubber wetsuits. For £30, customers can rent a £300 Yulex wetsuit for four days. As the company founder, Tom Kay, says, “not owning a product is a better form of consumption”.

Of course, there’s still no such thing as a biodegradable wetsuit – even natural-rubber wetsuits often have synthetic outer and inner linings – so Kay’s biggest challenge is working out how to prevent wetsuits ending up in landfills. Thermo-set neoprene, which has been irreversibly hardened by heat, is difficult to recycle as it cannot be melted easily.

At its factory in Bulgaria, a wetsuit recycling initiative, Circular Flow, breaks down neoprene waste from thousands of old wetsuits and factory offcuts into a crumb that is remoulded into yoga mats and bags.

Currently, wetsuits that Finisterre collects are transformed into changing mats, but Kay’s team are experimenting to see if microbes could break down natural rubber. “We’d like to make more wetsuits from wetsuits – that’s the dream,” he says.

Rip Curl has a “recycle your wetsuit” scheme, in association with the US-based recycling company TerraCycle, which has collected more than 20,000 old wetsuits from across the US, Australia, France, Portugal and Spain. Once zips, elastic and metal tags have been removed, the neoprene is processed to make construction materials such as flooring or soft-fall matting used in playgrounds.

Paul McCutchion, manager of the Centre for Alternative Materials and Remanufacturing at Exeter University, and his team are testing different wetsuit rubber materials for tensile strength, durability, stretch and thermal insulation.

When purchasing his next wetsuit, he says he will opt for brands that take back old wetsuits for some form of recycling, and choose natural rubber or limestone neoprene made from crushed oyster shells. That is because these are a waste product from the food industry, rather than from mined limestone.

“With no material having the perfect end-of-life solution,” he says, “the option with the least environmental impact is one that is derived from bio-based materials.” He expects brands to be using water-based glues, instead of solvents, and recycled liner materials at the very least.

So, back to my own dilemma. Faced with numerous not-quite-there-yet wetsuit possibilities, I consulted Sophie Hellyer, surfer, cold-water swimmer and environmental activist.

“The reality is that most surfers buy a new wetsuit at least every other winter,” she says. But she encourages everyone to look after their current wetsuit instead of rushing to buy a new one.

“Rinse it well, dry it out of direct sunlight, get it repaired or stitch it up with Black Witch neoprene adhesive when necessary, and then send to a recycle scheme when it’s no longer fit for purpose.”

Perhaps, after all, the most sustainable wetsuit is the one I already own. So for now I’m going to make do, mend and just keep swimming.