Laurence Fox loses libel battle with Twitter
users he called paedophiles
Reclaim party founder defamed two men on site now
known as X after they called him a racist, judge rules
Matthew
Weaver
Mon 29 Jan
2024 16.42 CET
The actor
and rightwing activist Laurence Fox has lost a high court libel battle with two
men he called paedophiles after they called him a racist. The former actor
defamed the men when he used the slur on social media, Mrs Justice Collins Rice
has ruled.
The Reclaim
party founder was sued by Simon Blake, a former Stonewall trustee, and Crystal,
a drag artist, over a dispute on Twitter, now X, in October 2020.
Fox, 45,
called Blake and the former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, whose real name is
Colin Seymour, paedophiles in an exchange about a decision by Sainsbury’s to
provide a safe space for black employees during Black History Month.
Fox’s call
for a boycott of the supermarket had prompted claims by Blake, Seymour and
Nicola Thorp, a former Coronation Street actor, that he was a racist.
Fox
countersued, telling the high court that being accused of racism was a
“reputation-destroying allegation” and “career-ending”. His claims were
dismissed on Monday.
Collins
Rice said: “Mr Fox’s labelling of Mr Blake and Mr Seymour as paedophiles was,
on the evidence, probabilities and facts of this case, seriously harmful,
defamatory and baseless.
“The law
affords few defences to defamation of this sort. Mr Fox did not attempt to show
these allegations were true, and he was not able to bring himself on the facts
within the terms of any other defence recognised in law.”
She added
that the issue of damages and any other remedies would be discussed at a later
date.
The judge
did not make a ruling on whether describing Fox as “a racist” is “substantially
true”, after finding that the three tweets cited in his counterclaim were
unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation.
Lorna
Skinner KC, representing Blake, Seymour and Thorp at the six-day trial in
November, said the three “honestly believed, and continue honestly to believe,
that Mr Fox is a racist”.
In his
written evidence for the case, Seymour, a Canadian artist, said he had faced
“overwhelming and distressing” abuse after Fox’s tweet, adding that he felt
less safe as a drag performer. Blake, now chief executive of Mental Health
First Aid England, said the false suggestion that all gay men were paedophiles
was “a trope as old as the hills”.
Fox said he
faced a “significant decline” in the number and quality of roles he was offered
after he was accused of being a racist in the social media row.
Under
cross-examination, Fox suggested there were contexts in which the phrase “I
hate black people” was not racist. He said: “If a man is just released from a
Ugandan jail where he’s been gang-raped by several men and he walks out and he
goes: ‘I hate black people’, it’s a sort of understandable response.”
Asked
whether it was racist to say “Black people in the UK should go home”, Fox
replied: “Depends on what context.”
During the
trial, Fox dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as “grift” and “a Ponzi
scheme”. He added: “We’re all equal in the eyes of god, so all lives matter.”
Fox also insisted that he had been subjected to anti-white racism.
When
Skinner put it to him that he had not had a lived experience of racism, Fox
said: “Yes, I have … There’s huge quantities of anti-right white racism in the
world. It’s the only acceptable form of racism there is left.”
He also
described the idea of white privilege as “disgusting racism” and added: “I
choose to understand white privilege as a racist insult because it’s about the
colour of your skin, and it’s not about the content of your character.”
The court
heard Fox defending his criticism of successful black actors who complain about
racism. He told the court: “Would I be allowed to stand up and go: ‘It was just
so difficult as a kid from Harrow, you know, as a missionary’s son, it was so
hard’? I wouldn’t.”
The actor
claimed there was an “incongruity” in black actors playing white characters. He
told the court that casting a black actor in the role of Anne Boleyn was “done
for political reasons. It was done in my view to virtue signal to an audience …
My point is a philosophical point, which is: if Anne Boleyn can be black, then
Nelson Mandela can be white, surely.”
Fox also
told the court that footballers who took the knee were cowards, and loudly
chanted a New Zealand haka to try to illustrate his point. He told the court:
“The New Zealanders going to a rugby game going, ‘Whakaka tu ka pu pu’, you
know, it’s to intimidate your rival because you’re about to beat your rival.
“I think
kneeling before your rival makes you look like a bit of a coward who’s going to
lose the game.”
Speaking
outside the court, Fox described the verdict as a “nothing-burger” and said he
was considering an appeal. “I’m not a racist,” he said.
Seymour
said he was “incredibly pleased” by the verdict. He said: “Mr Fox could have
made this go away very early on with a meaningful apology and settlement.
Instead, and despite his protestations about the importance of ‘free speech’,
he sued me for holding the opinion that he is a racist. I suggest Mr Fox spend
some time reflecting on the serious harm he causes rather than fixating on his
own self-inflicted martyrdom.”
Thorp said
Fox’s own views had damaged his career.
In a post
on X, she said: “The same man who later told a black man to ‘fuck off back to
Jamaica’, posted pride flags in the shape of a swastika and shared blacked-up
images of himself … It’s time that Mr Fox accepted that any damage to his
reputation is entirely his own doing.”
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