A UK court has ruled that a conservative activist had no right to call a drag queen a “pedophile” in a libel case that will hopefully have other conservatives thinking twice before labeling queer and trans people with insults like “groomer” from now on.
RuPaul’s Drag Race UK season 1 star Crystal has won her libel suit against British actor and conservative activist Laurence Fox after he called her a pedophile in an October 2020 social media exchange.
At that time, Fox had tweeted against regional supermarket chain Sainsbury’s for supporting Black Lives Matter. When people including Crystal and ex-Stonewall chair Simon Blake called him a racist for the tweets, he replied by calling them pedophiles.
Fox had countersued Crystal and Blake, as well as actress Nicola Thorp, claiming that them calling him racist was libel, but the court dismissed his counterclaim, saying that the tweets were unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation.
“I’ve said it before, but paedopholia is one of the oldest and most damaging homophobic tropes. Since Mr. Fox used that word about me, I have been re-labelled as such dozens of times, been physically threatened, and been afraid for my safety in public,” Crystal said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “This judgement unequivocally states that his tweet was defamatory and that it caused me harm. I am very happy to have this finalized, and I hope it will make some difference in the ongoing demonization of queer people as 'groomers' or 'dangerous.' This is a lesson: we will not take it.”
Fox has said that he plans on appealing the case about people calling him racist as he believes he is not a racist, and none of the judges defined what a racist is for him.
“The life blood of progressivism is the myth of ‘white privilege’ and systemic racism. Both lies,” he tweeted about the established facts of white privilege and systemic racism. “Certainly in this wonderful country, which is being eaten away at from the inside by those who want to replace a meritocracy with a melaninocracy.”
“So, I just want you to know that I am not going away. I have had to appeal decisions in this case and won before, and I will do so again,” he wrote.
The UK and America have different laws when it comes to proving libel. In the UK, it is up to the person who wrote or said the statements to prove that there is merit to them, while in the US, the burden of proof is on the person who brings the claim that someone has libeled them.
This means that the person who made the defamatory statements loses more often in the UK than in the US.