Drag Race UK’s Crystal wins libel case against Laurence Fox following High Court battle
Exclusive: "Hopefully it emboldens other people to fight the same fight," the star told Attitude
By Dale Fox
RuPaul’s Drag Race UK star Crystal has won a libel case against actor Laurence Fox, after he branded her and former Stonewall trustee Simon Blake “paedophiles” on social media.
In 2020, Fox made the claim during an argument on X (formerly Twitter) after Crystal, Blake, and actress Nicola Thorp accused him of being racist in response to supermarket chain Sainsbury’s celebrating Black History Month.
Crystal and Blake sued Fox, who filed a countersuit against all three for making allegations of him being racist.
Speaking to Attitude, the drag artist, real name Colin Seymour, said she was compelled to fight back after being “backed into a corner,” adding, “we just did what we had to do to see it through to the end.”
Mrs Justice Collins Rice said in court: “Mr Fox’s labelling of Mr Blake and Mr Seymour as paedophiles was, on the evidence, probabilities and facts of this case, seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless,” the Guardian reported. The judge also found that the tweets cited in Fox’s counter-claim were “unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation.”
“We can’t stand for the normalisation of these baseless slurs” – Crystal on the verdict
“I really wanted to show why what he did was wrong and why it was damaging,” Crystal told Attitude. “The judgement that’s come out today really demonstrates that. It shows the potential and actual harm that what he said caused me. It also rubbished the idea that anything I said caused him any harm at all.”
Explaining what the win means for the community, Crystal added: “We live in a time when queer people, drag queens, and anyone gender-non-conforming is being labelled a groomer, unsafe for children, a paedo, a nonce – it happens all the time. Hopefully, this reminds people that saying those things is defamatory. And if someone’s going to do it from a publicly verified account, there are going to be consequences. This is a lesson: we will not take it.
“Hopefully it emboldens other people to fight the same fight” – Crystal
“We can’t stand for these baseless stories, and we can’t stand for the normalisation of these baseless slurs. Hopefully this is part of a much broader pushback against that. Hopefully it emboldens other people to fight the same fight.”
During the trial, Fox had dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as a “grift” and “Ponzi scheme”, saying: “We’re all equal in the eyes of God, so all lives matter,” the Guardian noted. He also told the court that the casting of Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn was “done in my view to virtue signal to an audience,” adding: “… if Anne Boleyn can be Black, then Nelson Mandela can be white, surely.”
The actor-turned-broadcaster was also dismissed from his role at GB News in September 2023 for telling presenter Dan Wooton (who was also suspended): “Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman ever,” when talking about journalist Ava Evans.