Linehan Inexplicably Cleared of Harassment, Must Pay for Broken Phone
After repeatedly directing hundreds of thousands of rabid bigots to attack a trans minor, Graham Linehan was somehow excused of any wrongdoing. Besides breaking her phone.
Opinion by Aly Gibbs
Do you remember… the fifth day of September? ♫
I ask because that’s when I shared that Graham Linehan had been arrested at Heathrow for posting a series of tweets encouraging people to do violence against trans women. Don’t worry, Met Police have made it clear that this was a mistake, and that they intend to allow people like Linehan to threaten the lives of as many trans women as they want in the future. That’s good and normal, of course, so today we’re actually talking about something else that I mentioned in that article: Linehan’s trial for harassing a young trans woman and destroying her personal property, which just concluded yesterday.
Here’s the bad news: Linehan wasn’t found guilty of harassment, in spite of the wealth of evidence that he has serially harassed a young woman using his substantive social media platform. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, found guilty of damaging her phone, I suspect because that charge is basically impossible to refute.
Judge Briony Clarke’s decision here is suspect, to say the least. She said that the complainant, Sophia Brooks, was not sufficiently “alarmed and distressed” by Linehan’s posts about her on social media, and that those posts may be “unattractive, annoying and irritating," and "deeply unpleasant and even unnecessary,” they do not rise to the level of criminal harassment.
To be clear, Linehan called Brooks a "sociopath", "psycho", "domestic terrorist" and "groomer" on X, posting about her dozens of times since at least March of last year. He regularly misgenders and insults her to an audience of more than half a million people, calling her “a sociopathic misogynist who harasses women,” and a “dangerous sadist,” and talks about “[sticking] cameras up [her] arse.”
These comments were all made about Brooks when she was underage. Linehan also assaulted her and destroyed her property when she was a minor.
In the BBC’s online coverage of the case’s resolution, Ian Youngs and Paul Glynn say Brooks was “born a biological male but identifies as a woman,” leaving no doubt as to the inherent biases of BBC reporters against transgender Britons. They also explain that Linehan “has been fined £500 and ordered to pay costs of £650 and a statutory surcharge of £200,” which Brooks seems at least somewhat satisfied by. I say it’s a far cry from justice for more than a year of mass harassment.
In court, Linehan said that “trans activists” had made his life “hell,” but anybody who knows anything about the Irish former comedic writer knows that he has brought all of this woe and misery upon himself. Linehan’s refusal to simply walk away from this culture war has cost him his marriage and children, and at one point his brother-in-law, James Serafinowicz, begged him on Twitter to call it quits on his unhinged crusade if he ever wanted his family back.
Obviously, he has no intention of giving up.
How any arbiter of the law, or otherwise presumably sane human being, could look at this 57-year-old man’s incessant targeting of a teenage girl for public ridicule and declare it isn’t harassment, I simply do not know. What I do know is that Linehan is, and will always be, a pathetic worm unworthy even of the muck he writhes around in. He will experience no return to stardom and, I expect, will spend the rest of his life exactly as he was when the police arrested him at the airport: So furious over the existence of trans people that he’s just about to stroke out.
Check out the full ruling here.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
