British actor-turned-politician Laurence Fox has been ordered to pay a total of £180,000 (approx €210,000) in damages to two people he referred to as paedophiles on social media after losing a High Court libel battle.
Fox was successfully sued by former Stonewall trustee Simon Blake and drag artist Crystal over a row on Twitter, now known as X.
Fox called Blake and the former RuPaul's Drag Race contestant, whose real name is Colin Seymour, "paedophiles" in an exchange about a decision by British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s to mark Black History Month in October 2020.
The Reclaim Party founder – who said at the time that he would boycott the supermarket – counter-sued the pair and broadcaster Nicola Thorp over tweets accusing him of racism.
In a judgment in January, Mrs Justice Collins Rice ruled in favour of Blake and Seymour, dismissing Fox’s counter-claims.
In a ruling on Thursday, the judge said Fox should pay Blake and Seymour £90,000 (€105,000 approx) each in damages.
She said: "By calling Mr Blake and Mr Seymour paedophiles, Mr Fox subjected them to a wholly undeserved public ordeal. It was a gross, groundless and indefensible libel, with distressing and harmful real-world consequences for them."
In her 14-page ruling, the judge said Blake and Seymour are "entitled to a complete vindication, the undoing of the reputational impact of the libels and the resumption of public and private life without any trace on their characters of the long and dark shadow cast by even the most casual public bandying about of allegations of criminal paedophilia".
She continued: "They have been forced to fight a libel claim all the way through to trial with every single conceivable point being taken against them … They have done so under the sustained hailstorm of Mr Fox’s exercise of his rights of amplified free speech, and if they, or at any rate Mr Seymour, have sometimes tried to make their own voices heard above the din and exercise their own rights to free speech, that has been an occasion of further hailstones."
Mrs Justice Collins Rice later said there "is no element of punishing Mr Fox" in awarding the sum of damages, adding: "It is a purely compensatory award to redress the damage done and restore the equilibrium that his libels violated, and which he has not taken the opportunity to restore more fully himself."
As well as the sum of damages, the senior judge also ordered Fox to not repeat the allegations against Blake and Seymour "on pain of being found guilty of contempt of court".
In a post on X following the ruling, Fox said he intended to appeal.
Source: Press Association
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