Laurence Fox To Pay £90,000 To Crystal And Simon Blake
Image: Sources: BBC News
Laurence Fox, right-wing activist and ex-husband of Billie Piper, has been ordered to pay two gay men ($172,392) each after falsely accusing them of being paedophiles.
Mental health campaigner Simon Blake and Drag Queen UK’s Crystal (Colin Seymour) sued Lawrence Fox for libel after Fox called them paedophiles in a Twitter/X rant.
Fox’s initial tweet proposed a boycott of the English supermarket Sainsbury’s for observing Black History Month. Seymour and Blake responded by calling him racist, to which Fox replied with the homophobic slur.
Fox counter-sued Blake, Seymour and actress Nicola Thorp for the tweets accusing him of racism.
In January, the court ruled in favour of Blake and Seymour, and dismissed Mr Fox’s counter-claims.
Justice Collins Rice did not rule on whether describing Mr Fox as racist was defamatory, after determining that this was unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation. Her ruling stated that Fox could not show it was their tweets, rather than his own actions, that had damaged his career.
According to the BBC, the judge stated that Mr Fox had tried to “attach blame and discredit” Mr Blake and Mr Seymour during the litigation, and hold them responsible “for a range of his own life’s adversities”.
“It was a gross, groundless and indefensible libel, with distressing and harmful real-world consequences for them.” Justice Collins Rice ruled.
“They are entitled by law to an award of money, to compensate them for those damaging effects, and to ensure that they can put this matter behind them, vindicated and confident that no-one can sensibly doubt their blamelessness of that disgusting slur and that they were seriously wronged by it.”
In an interview with Pink News, Seymour observed that “It’s unsurprising, but I think my biggest takeaway from all this is that we need to start teaching children, especially little boys, how to apologise.
“We need to teach people that it’s okay to be vulnerable and to say I’m sorry and I was wrong … He had the opportunity over three years ago to make a meaningful apology.”
Mr Fox said in a social media post that he intends to appeal.
