The actor and rightwing activist Laurence Fox has been ordered to pay £90,000 each in damages to two people he libelled by referring to them as “paedophiles” on social media.
A high court judge made the order in London on Thursday. Fox lost his high court libel battle in January, after Mrs Justice Collins Rice ruled that he had defamed two men by calling them paedophiles after they labelled him a racist.
The Reclaim party founder was sued by Simon Blake, a former Stonewall trustee, and Crystal, a drag artist, over a dispute on X, formerly known as Twitter, in October 2020.
Fox, 45, used the slur against Blake and the former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, whose real name is Colin Seymour, in a row about a decision by Sainsbury’s to provide a safe space for black employees during Black History Month.
Fox called for a boycott of the supermarket, prompting Blake, Seymour and Nicola Thorp, a former Coronation Street actor, to say he was a racist.
Fox countersued, telling the high court that being accused of racism was a “reputation-destroying allegation” and “career-ending” and had resulted in a “significant decline” in the work he was offered. His claims were dismissed in the January ruling.
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.”
The judge did not make a ruling on whether describing Fox as “a racist” was “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 the 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”.
During the trial, Fox dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as “grift” and “a Ponzi scheme” and claimed he was a victim of 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.”
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, adding: “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: “It’s time that Mr Fox accepted that any damage to his reputation is entirely his own doing.”
