Laurence Fox ordered to pay £180,000 in libel damages for paedophile allegations

Simon Blake, a former trustee of charity Stonewall, and Colin Seymour, the drag artist Crystal, have each been awarded £90,000 in damages following their successful libel claim against Laurence Fox, the founder of the right-wing populist Reclaim Party.

History of the claim

The claim arose after Fox said he would boycott Sainsbury’s supermarket when it tweeted to celebrate Black History Month.  Blake and Seymour labelled Mr Fox a racist, and he responded calling them paedophiles.

Blake and Seymour sued over the ‘paedophiles’ allegation, and Fox counterclaimed over the ‘racist’ allegation.  Fox’s counterclaim failed because the judge, Mrs Justice Collins Rice decided that his reputation was not seriously harmed by the tweets.  Blake and Seymour’s claims succeeded because, in Collins Rice J’s words, the allegation that they were paedophiles was “a gross, groundless, and indefensible libel, with distressing and harmful real-world consequences for them”.   The judgment on liability (Blake & Anor v Fox [2024] EWHC 146 (KB) can be found here.

Damages

In a judgment on damages handed down today (Blake & Anor v Fox [2024] EWHC 956 (KB)), Collins Rice J has awarded Blake and Seymour £90,000 each.  In her judgment, Collins Rice J took into account Fox’s conduct of the litigation – stating that Blake and Seymour had been forced to fight a claim through to trial “with every conceivable point being taken against them”.  She also referred to Fox’s conduct outside of the litigation, in attempting to undermine the vindication Blake and Seymour may get from the liability judgment, saying “Where vindication is not volunteered, and all the more where any vindication is heavily overqualified and collaterally undermined, it must be completed by way of damages. That is particularly so where such vindication as is provided by a liability judgment in its own right has been placed by a defendant at risk of being less resonant than it might otherwise have been.”.  This refers, it seems, to Fox’s post-judgment conduct publicly disagreeing with the judgment and describing it as, amongst other things, a “bullies[sic] charter”.  Collins Rice J summed up her decision on Fox’s conduct neatly, saying of Fox that “The effects of his own conduct fall to be taken into account in the global exercise of assessment of quantum”.

Injunction

It is typical in libel trials for the successful claimant to obtain an injunction to prevent the defendant repeating the libels in future.  It is an uncontroversial remedy, and rarely the subject of intense argument in court.  Unusually, Fox’s barrister, Patrick Green KC, made the argument that Fox could not be the subject of an injunction preventing him (Fox) from calling Seymour and Blake paedophiles in future because it would interfere with his (Fox’s) freedom as a politician to engage in the debate around the suitability of drag entertainment as family viewing and/or generally.  Collins Rice J did not seem impressed with this argument, deciding that “Mr Fox is eminently able to engage to the full in public debate about drag performance, and about individual drag artists including Mr Seymour, without needing to allege that which he has no right to do, namely that Mr Seymour is a paedophile.”  It is surprising to see Fox attempt to argue that, despite losing his claim, he should have the right to call Seymour a paedophile again in future, and it may be that the simple submission that he ought to be allowed to led the judge to conclude the judgment with a barb:-

“I am also ordering Mr Fox not to repeat the same or similar allegations about Mr Blake and Mr Seymour, on pain of being found guilty of contempt of court. He has no right whatever to do so, and his track record of public utterances persuades me that this discipline is necessary and proportionate in order to ensure Mr Blake's and Mr Seymour's vindicated legal rights are fully respected for the foreseeable future.”

Comment

This judgment is worthy of attention.  While it traverses all of the usual matters in assessing quantum of damages, it places a significant focus on Fox’s own conduct (both of the litigation and in his public statements about it).  It should serve as a warning to litigants, especially those with a penchant for petulant lambasting of the judicial process, that poor behaviour and a lack of decorum in litigation can increase the damages a libel claimant may be awarded.

The sum - £90,000 per defendant – is towards the upper range of the expected damages sum in a case like this, with relatively extensive publication and a serious allegation of criminality.  That allegation of criminality was also particularly grave in that it was levelled against two people from communities in which allegations of paedophilia are an abusive and lazy trope often trotted out by the intolerant.