NXT Laurence Fox Ordered To Pay £90,000 To Drag Race UK Star & Stonewall CEO After Calling Them ‘Paedophiles’
Bad day at the office for Laurence Fox. He’s just been ordered to pay a combined £90,000 to Drag Race UK star Crystal and Stonewall CEO Simon Blake after losing his libel appeal, although the judge did halve the amount from £180,000, so that is something that worked out in his favour.
In case you hadn’t heard, Fox was being sued by the pair for calling them ‘paedophiles’ on Twitter in October 2020. In return, Fox was counter-suing them for calling him a racist on the same platform.
The argument kicked off on a post where Fox, 45, objected to Sainsbury’s celebrating Black History Month. Blake and Crystal called him out as a racist, and he responded by calling them paedophiles (as you do).
Unfortunately for Laurence Fox, the courts ruled against him and he was ordered to pay a combined £180,000 (now £90,000 following the appeal) in damages to Simon Blake and Crystal. Worst still though, Fox had pushed for a jury trial, which is uncommon in civil cases, which means he also now has to pay the victims’ fees on top of his own – £150,000 all in all. More than the damages themselves!
But wait, it gets even worse – as Fox’s own countersuit (about them calling him racist) was thrown out, it means as well as having to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for being a Twitter edgelord, he also secured a ruling that means describing Laurence Fox as racist is NOT defamatory. Oof.
Amusingly, the judge claimed that Fox being called a ‘racist’ on social media was unlikely to do harm to his reputation, which basically means enough people think he’s a racist already. I guess turning up to court with his mixed-race girlfriend wasn’t enough to convince the judge otherwise.
For the record, Lorna Skinner KC, representing Simon Blake and Crystal, cited several of Fox’s posts as examples of his racism, including a June 2022 tweet of four pride flags arranged in the shape of a swastika and an August 2023 tweet where shared a photo of himself in blackface saying he had ‘racially transitioned’:
It’s an extremely gutting verdict for Laurence Fox, who claims he lost out on a role on hit HBO series Succession due to the Tweets calling him a racist. He also claims he was uninvited from an audition he had booked for Disney’s Obi-Wan series, a chance to appear on The Masked Singer, and as a contestant on Celebrity Catchphrase.
I wonder what role Fox would have had in Succession, anyway? Maybe they had him in mind for the role of Connor Roy, who had a failed political run just like Fox did? I guess we’ll never know.
