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9 months ago
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Laurence Fox has lost his libel case after calling two people including a former Drag Race contestant “paedophiles” on social media.
The actor-turned-politician, who was fired by GB News late last year for highly misogynistic remarks, heard his comments labeled “harmful, defamatory and baseless” by a High Court judge this afternoon in London, according to the BBC.
Fox was sued by former RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant Crystal and Simon Blake, a trustee of UK charity Stonewall, after referring to them as “paedophiles” on X, formerly Twitter.
Both have previously said they faced abuse after the former Lewis star’s tweet and today posted on X after the trial that “a huge weight” has been lifted. Crystal, whose real name is Colin Munro Seymour, competed in the first season of Drag Race in the UK.
Fox counter-sued the pair over tweets accusing him of racism but the judge did not make a ruling on whether this was “substantially true,” after finding the three tweets in Fox’s counter-claim were unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation, the BBC said.
Fox has vowed to appeal the latter ruling. “It means that we’re going to have to go back to court, to appeal, to get a meaning of this word,” he was quoted as saying. “What is a racist? Every single person in this country knows what a racist is, except the people that dominate every single national institution that we have.”
Fox has become outspoken over the past few years and has launched his own political party, Reclaim. Last year, his misogynistic rant on GB News’ Dan Wootton Tonight was the most-complained about TV show of the year to regulator Ofcom. He was dropped soon after, having said no “self-respecting man would climb into bed” with a female journalist. Bizarrely, he was arrested in the same week on suspicion of conspiring to commit to damage an Ulez camera in London.
