Ellen Roome’s fight for answers over son’s death may be TV drama

The true story of a mother’s fight to access her son’s social media accounts after his death is being developed into a TV drama.

Ellen Roome, from Cheltenham, has been campaigning both for answers and fellow parents since her son Jools’ death in 2022.

An inquest ruled he had taken his own life, but Roome believes her 14-year-old son died after an online challenge went wrong.

Now her fight to hold social media companies to account has captured the interest of TV producers, who are now working on telling her story on the screen.

“You see this strong persona on TV and radio campaigning for changes in the law and online safety for children,” said Roome, who was appointed an MBE in the 2026 New Years Honours list.

“You don’t see the personal journey alongside that – where there’s heartbreak, pain falling into a pit of doom, and then me finding myself and picking myself up to go ‘right, I’m gonna fight for answers’.

Following the death of her son, Roome said she was shocked by how difficult it was for parents to gain access to their children’s social media after the death, and fears vital information about what Jools was seeing online was lost due to the fact data is not automatically preserved.

In response to this, Roome is now campaigning for Jools’ Law, which calls for children’s online data to be automatically preserved when a death is reported, the release of this data to coroners and clear processes and standards in place to make sure parents and officials do not miss relevant data.

It was announced in December that Roome had signed a life-rights agreement with London-based production company Featuristic Films.

It means that while no script has yet been created, her story could be developed in the future to be told on screen. Separately, her fight for justice is also being filmed for a documentary.

In a post shared on Instagram, Featuristic said it was “honoured and humbled” to be working with Roome.

Working on a pilot episode, it said it aimed to bring the story of “a mother’s courage, the search for truth, the fight for change and a campaign that could protect countless children around the world” to screen through a six-part series.

“It’s going to be a hard journey because I’ve got to relive it all. I have to relive all the hard days, where I couldn’t get out of bed, where I couldn’t move,” said Ms Roome.

But underneath it all, she said, was the aim to make sure “no parent” would ever have to “fight so hard to try and understand why their child has died”.

Speaking to BBC Radio Gloucestershire on Thursday, Roome said two specialist investigators she had employed had “uncovered some new lines of enquiry”, which had been submitted to Gloucestershire Police.

The force has since confirmed a small team would be reviewing the information, in line with its agreement with Jools’ parents that “any new lines of enquiry” would be “fully investigated”.

A government spokesperson said the Online Safety Act “compels companies to share data and cooperate fully with coroners’ inquiries where there is evidence of a link between a child’s death and their social media use”

“We have strengthened this further by giving coroners the power to require platforms to preserve data immediately, so vital evidence cannot be deleted,” they added.

“We will continue to monitor these powers and will not hesitate to act where evidence shows we need to go further.”