The sector leader Simon Blake has been awarded £90,000 in damages after the actor-turned-politician Laurence Fox called him a paedophile on social media.
Simon Blake, chief executive of Mental Health First Aid England, filed a defamation lawsuit in 2021 with the RuPaul’s Drag Race star Crystal after they were subjected to the same slur by Fox on Twitter, now X, in October 2020.
The row began when Fox tweeted that he would no longer shop at Sainsbury’s, and encouraged others to boycott the retailer, after it tweeted about its plans to recognise Black History Month.
In January this year, the High Court ruled that Fox had defamed both men and dismissed his counter claims.
In a ruling published today, Mrs Justice Collins Rice said Blake and Colin Seymour (who performs as Crystal), had been “seriously libelled” and were entitled to “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”.
The judge said Blake and Seymour had been “forced to fight a libel claim all the way through to trial with every single conceivable point being taken against them”, as well as being subjected to a “sustained hailstorm” of public comments from Fox.
She ruled Fox must pay £90,000 each to Blake and Seymour, “to achieve the purpose of publicly vindicating Mr Blake’s and Mr Seymour’s reputational standing, compensating them for their subjective experience of being libelled, and compensating them for the objective harm to their reputation of having been publicly associated with paedophilia”.
Blake, a former chief executive of the National Union of Students and a former Stonewall trustee, told Third Sector he was glad justice had prevailed.
“The case was important because for centuries people have got away with equating same-sex attraction with paedophilia,” he said.
“It proves that there are rightly consequences for making such a grotesque and serious allegation.”
He said the process had “taken an enormous amount of time and energy and caused considerable distress”, which could have been avoided Fox had apologised swiftly.
“It has been three and a half long years and I am glad that justice has prevailed,” said Blake.
“Like most gay men who grew up in the eye of the Aids epidemic I experienced fear and prejudice, I heard the whispers, I read the papers, and I learned that gay men were a danger,” he added.
“I learned the false and dangerous perception that gay men are not safe to be around children – a bigoted trope that, as I said during the trial, is as old as the hills.”