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Graham Linehan — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Life and career

Graham George Linehan was born in Dublin in 1968 and attended Catholic University School, a Roman Catholic secondary school for boys. In the 1980s, he joined the staff of the Dublin politics and music magazine Hot Press, where he met his future writing partner, Arthur Mathews. In their early collaborations, they created segments in sketch shows including Alas Smith and Jones, Harry Enfield & Chums, The All New Alexei Sayle Show, The Day Today and the Ted and Ralph characters in The Fast Show. They continued their collaboration with Paris (one series, 1994), Father Ted (three series, 1995–1998), and the first series of the sketch show Big Train. They also wrote the "Dearth of a Salesman" episode for the series Coogan's Run, which featured the character Gareth Cheeseman. In late 2003, Linehan and Mathews were named one of the 50 funniest acts to work in television by The Observer. Father Ted won BAFTA awards for Best Comedy in 1996 and 1999.

Linehan wrote for the satirical series Brass Eye (1997), Blue Jam (1997–1999) and Jam (2000). With the actor Dylan Moran, he created the sitcom Black Books (2000–2004). Linehan wrote and directed the 2006 Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd, in which he sought to move away from the British trend towards mockumentary comedies. Unlike many series of the time, it was recorded before a studio audience. In November 2008, he was awarded an International Emmy for The IT Crowd. In 2013, he wrote and directed the sitcom The Walshes. He co-wrote the first series of the BBC sitcom Motherland and directed its pilot episode. In 2014, Linehan won his fifth BAFTA, for Best Writer, Comedy, for his work on The IT Crowd. He was also nominated for Count Arthur Strong.

In 2018, Linehan and Mathews announced plans for a Father Ted musical. Linehan said it would finish the series as they had planned it before the death of the lead actor, Dermot Morgan. The musical was cancelled by producers following the controversy over Linehan's views on transgender rights. In December 2024, Linehan announced plans to move to Arizona to work on a sitcom and create a production company with the comedians Rob Schneider and Andrew Doyle.

Linehan and Mathews made cameos in their programmes. They also appeared in the sitcom I'm Alan Partridge as two Irish TV producers considering Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) for a contract.

Before first Twitter ban

In 2018, Linehan praised anti-transgender protesters at that year's London Pride event who had carried banners and flyers saying that "transactivism erases lesbians", calling them "heroes".

In a December 2018 interview with Derrick Jensen, Linehan said: "I'm now in a position where I can answer the question honestly of 'if you were around at the time of something terrible happening like Nazism, or whatever it happened to be, would you be one of the people who said "no, this is wrong", despite being opposed?'" He also said the trans movement provides "cover" for "fetishists, con men, and simply abusive misogynists". In an interview with the BBC television programme Newsnight in February 2020, Linehan said that the Tavistock Centre's practice of treating children with puberty blockers such as Lupron was comparable to Nazi eugenics and experiments on children. Following this interview, Eric Pickles, the United Kingdom Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, accused Linehan of trivialising the Holocaust.

In January 2019, Linehan expressed concern over the news that Mermaids, a charitable advocacy organisation for transgender children and teenagers, was to receive a £500,000 lottery grant to open clinics around the United Kingdom. He posted to the internet forum Mumsnet encouraging its users to lobby the National Lottery Community Fund to reverse its decision. The grant was reviewed and went ahead. In response to Linehan, YouTuber Hbomberguy held a 57-hour fundraising livestream that raised £270,000 more for Mermaids. The same year, British journalist Dawn Foster accused Linehan and others of targeting a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) employee who had been responsible for hiring model and activist Munroe Bergdorf, a transgender woman. Foster called the online abuse "transphobic" and "flatly homophobic". Journalist Chris Godfrey called the treatment of the employee "insidious homophobia".

In June 2020, Linehan criticised comments about author J. K. Rowling after she made comments that were described as transphobic. He linked to a blog post featuring screenshots of replies Rowling had received, which Linehan described as abuse, followed by describing those who wrote them as "ignoring the abuse received by women who speak out against gender ideology" and "literally useless". Hozier, tagged in Linehan's tweets due to his trans-rights advocacy, responded by saying Linehan was conducting an "obsessive little culture war".

Twitter ban and evasions

On 27 June 2020, Linehan's Twitter account was permanently suspended after what Twitter called "repeated violations of our rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation". In December, Linehan evaded the suspension with an account posing as a transgender man. He used the account to call Colm O'Gorman "a traitor to women, gay people and yourself" for signing an open letter published by the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland. The account was banned but Linehan said he had created another.

In February 2021, Linehan created a fake account on the lesbian dating app Her and publicly posted screenshots of non-binary people and trans women using it. The developers of Her clarified that transgender women are welcome on the app. In March 2021, Linehan gave oral evidence to the Communications and Digital Committee of the House of Lords on the subject of freedom of expression online, discussing his Twitter ban.

In an interview in the Irish Independent that month, Linehan ruled out working with Channel 4 again as they would not return the controversial IT Crowd episode to broadcast, and he said he would not work with the BBC as they had depicted a transgender lesbian couple, which Linehan described as "a heterosexual couple", in a CBeebies video. Ahead of the 2022 Australian federal election in May, Linehan used his online platforms to rally international support for the Liberal Party candidate Katherine Deves, who had attracted controversy for anti-trans comments. In September 2022, Linehan said that his anti-transgender activism had led him to question the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations and the scientific consensus on climate change "because I've been lied to so conclusively by all the people I used to trust". In 2022, Linehan wrote articles criticising transgender woman Mridul Wadhwa's appointment as director of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, and published part of her home address. Wadhwa stated that being doxed by Linehan was "the first time she truly feared for her life".

In interviews in 2022 and 2023, Linehan said the debate over transgender issues had "consumed his life": it had lost him work, made him financially destitute, and ended his marriage. Linehan said the Father Ted musical, on which he had been depending financially, was cancelled when the production company decided his involvement would make it impossible to stage. He had previously called for all people working on the musical to sign a declaration agreeing with some of his views on trans people while describing clashes he was having with colleagues over their views on trans rights, and read out a letter he had written to collaborators saying: "I don't think you all have my back as collaborators or as business partners or as friends. Far from being on the wrong side of history, JK Rowling and I have been proved right over and over again that this is a poisonous ideology that is destroying lives." The journalist Megan Nolan wrote that Linehan "is able to persevere with his campaign because he has convinced himself he is battling the greatest danger currently at play in the world".

Linehan blamed cancel culture for his situation, and said: "Every comedian at the moment is living under a kind of state of permanent blackmail ... There's a few hot-button issues where you have to follow a certain line, and if you don't, you'll be destroyed." In 2023, he denied disliking transgender people, but said using their preferred pronouns was "immoral". He said he did not have a problem with "men calling themselves women" and that "as we keep pointing out, we are only talking about places where conflict arises".

Legal issues

In 2018, Stephanie Hayden, a transgender woman, sued Linehan for harassment. Hayden alleged that Linehan had shared photos on Twitter of Hayden's family and her life before transition, suggested she was a criminal, and repeatedly misgendered and deadnamed her. Linehan in turn alleged that Hayden publicised several private addresses linked to his family to silence him. Police issued Linehan a verbal warning not to contact Hayden.

In August 2024, Scottish actor David Paisley brought a defamation claim against Linehan in the High Court. Paisley alleged several statements about him on Linehan's Substack and social media were defamatory. At a pre-trial hearing, a judge ruled that several publications about Paisley were potentially defamatory. Linehan said he would prove he had not libelled Paisley during the trial and launched a crowdfunding campaign for his defence.

In April 2025, Linehan was charged with harassment and criminal damage following an incident at the Battle of Ideas conference in London in October 2024. Linehan was charged after posting comments about Sophia Brooks, a 17-year-old transgender activist, calling her a domestic terrorist and a groomer, and throwing her phone on the ground after confronting her in public and asking how many children she had groomed. In May, Linehan pleaded not guilty to both charges at Westminster Magistrates' Court and was released on bail with a condition not to contact Brooks.

Linehan's trial began on 4 September 2025. On 5 September, after having heard evidence over two days, the judge adjourned the trial until 29 October. On 25 November, Judge Clark cleared Linehan of the harassment charge and said she was not certain that Linehan had demonstrated hostility based on Brooks's being transgender. Clark found Linehan guilty of criminal damage to Brooks's phone. She fined Linehan £500 and ordered him to pay court costs of £650 and a statutory surcharge of £200.

On 1 May 2026, the conviction was quashed on appeal. The court stated that, due to the lapse of time between the incident and Brooks taking her phone for repair, it could not be sure that the damage had been caused by Linehan.

On 1 September 2025, after arriving at Heathrow Airport from Arizona, Linehan was arrested by armed police on suspicion of inciting violence. He was questioned in relation to three posts on X, including one in which he posted: "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls." He was briefly hospitalised for high blood pressure and then released without charge on police bail. He said his bail condition was that he must not post on X; he said the following week that the bail condition had been dropped. Linehan's arrest was criticised by J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and British politicians such as Nigel Farage. On 8 September, Linehan told the BBC he planned to sue the police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment. On 20 October, Linehan was informed that, following an investigation, he would face no further action. In May 2026, the Metropolitan Police apologised to Linehan for "distress and impact" and later paid him £25,000 in compensation.

The controversy over the arrest prompted widespread debate and calls for a change in the law. The Metropolitan Police announced it would no longer police Non-crime hate incidents and its commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said that policing "has been left between a rock and a hard place by successive governments", with officers having little discretion over whether to investigate Linehan's tweets. Rowley also said: "I don't believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position. I have offered to provide suggestions to the Home Office on where the law and policy should be clarified."