The Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan has been cleared of harassing a transgender activist on social media but found guilty of criminal damage of their mobile phone outside a conference in London last year.
The 57-year-old flew from Arizona to appear at Westminster magistrates court in person on Tuesday, where the judgment was delivered.
Linehan denied harassing Sophia Brooks on social media between 11 and 27 October 2024, and a charge of criminal damage of their mobile phone on 19 October last year outside the Battle of Ideas conference in Westminster.
Judge Clarke fined Linehan £500 and ordered him to pay costs of £650 and a statutory surcharge of £200. Linehan’s lawyer, Sarah Vine KC, asked that he be given 28 days to pay the full amount.
The trial heard that Brooks had begun taking photographs of delegates at the event during a speech by Fiona McAnena, the director of campaigns at Sex Matters, a UK gender-critical campaign group.
Outside the event, the activist asked Linehan: “Why do you think it is acceptable to call teenagers domestic terrorists?”
In response, the court heard that Linehan had called Brooks a “sissy porn-watching scumbag”, a “groomer” and a “disgusting incel”, with the complainant responding: “You’re the incel, you’re divorced.”
The judge found that Linehan had taken Brooks’s phone because he was “angry and fed up”, and had damaged it by knocking it to the ground. She said that while the offence was not aggravated by the fact the complainant was transgender, it was because they were 17 years old at the time.
She ruled that she was “not sure to the criminal standard” that Linehan had demonstrated hostility based on the complainant being transgender. She added that she did not find the complainant “was as alarmed or distressed” as they had portrayed themself.
The prosecutor Julia Faure Walker told the court that Linehan had written “repeated, abusive, unreasonable” social media posts about Brooks, whom he referred to as Tarquin.
Vine said: “The background of this case involves what I would describe as provocative conduct by the complainant, and the raising of allegations in the service of, broadly speaking, political point-scoring.”
She added that the costs to Linehan had “been enormous”, and resulted from a “momentary lapse of control” which led to behaviour that “could not be described as beyond reproach”.
The comedy writer, who has well-publicised strong views on gender issues, said his “life was made hell” by trans activists, adding that the complainant was a “young soldier in the trans activist army”.
The writer added: “He was misogynistic, he was abusive, he was snide. He depended on his anonymity to get close to people and hurt them, and I wanted to destroy that anonymity.”
He told journalists outside the court that he hoped the not guilty verdict would mean that “people in the future won’t be subject to those kind of tactics”.
