Laurence Fox Loses High Court Libel Case

The British actor had defamed two men by calling them pedophiles on social media, in response to their accusations of him being racist.

British actor Laurence Fox has lost a libel case against two men he called pedophiles on social media in response to their accusations of him being racist.
The High Court in the U.K. ruled that Fox had defamed Simon Blake, a former LGBT charity trustee, and Crystal, a drag artist, in a Twitter row over Black History Month in October 2020.
Fox had countersued, claiming that being accused of racism was a career-ending allegation, but the judge did not make a ruling on whether describing Fox as “a racist” is “substantially true,” after finding that the three tweets cited in his counterclaim were unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation.
The legal defeat is the latest in a series of setbacks for Fox, who has seen his acting career effectively come to an end as he increasingly leaned into hard right politics as a self-styled anti-woke crusader.
Fox, a long-time critic of Black Lives Matter, had also dismissed the social movement as “a grift,” telling the court that “all lives matter” and insisting that he had been subject to anti-white racism.