Defamation cases
In October 2020, Fox announced he would boycott the supermarket Sainsbury's because they "support racial segregation and discrimination", making reference to the store establishing "safe spaces" for black employees, while asking others to do the same. Sainsbury's later clarified that the safe spaces were online support groups established in response to Black Lives Matter and were promoted as part of support for Black History Month. Feeling he was "falsely smeared as a racist", Fox replied to a number of tweets reacting to that announcement by calling their authors paedophiles. Two of those people, RuPaul's Drag Race UK contestant Crystal (Colin Seymour) and Simon Blake, deputy chair of the LGBT rights charity Stonewall, both gay men, later announced they would sue Fox for defamation. Fox deleted the tweets and explained in further tweets that he wanted to teach people a lesson in calling people something which they are not.
In April 2021, Crystal and Blake lodged a claim for defamation in the High Court and were joined in the legal action by actress Nicola Thorp, whom Fox also called a paedophile. In response, Fox filed a countersuit over the accusations of racism. In December 2021, judge Barbara Fontaine urged the protagonists to reach a compromise; Fox's lawyers had estimated his legal costs would be between £360,000 and £500,000 for a full trial.
In April 2022, Fox requested a jury trial and said that "a judge could show involuntary bias", the first such request since the Defamation Act 2013. It was refused. Court documents revealed that this request cost Fox legal fees of more than £116,000. Later that month the High Court ruled that Fox must pay more than £36,000 in legal fees to Blake, Seymour and Thorp.
The trial progressed at the High Court to decisions on preliminary issues such as the "natural and ordinary" meanings of the tweets, which included that they were a factual claim that "Ms Thorp was a paedophile". Fox took this decision to the Court of Appeal, who ruled in August 2023 that they were "satisfied that the ordinary reasonable reader of that tweet would not have taken the word [paedophile] literally", but dismissed Fox's other challenges.
The libel trial and trials for counterclaims were heard between 22 November and 1 December 2023 at the High Court by Mrs Justice Collins Rice as judge, with Blake and Seymour as claimants, against Fox as defendant and counterclaimant, and Thorp as defendant to the counterclaim.
On 29 January 2024 a judgement was given with Justice Collins Rice ruling in favour of the claimants. The judge ruled that Fox's labelling of Crystal and Blake as paedophiles was "seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless" and Fox's tweets "the very epitome of 'mere retaliation' – an escalatory and disproportionate response by way of entirely irrelevant statements." In ruling against Fox, the judge summarised that "the law affords few defences to defamation of this sort. Mr Fox did not attempt to show these allegations were true, and he was not able to bring himself on the facts within the terms of any other defence recognised in law."
Fox's counterclaims of defamation against Crystal, Blake and Thorp were also dismissed. Whilst the judge did not make a judgement on whether or not describing Fox as "a racist" was "substantially true", the judge ruled that the expression of such opinions were unlikely to significantly damage his reputation and that there were multiple other probable causes to any reputational damage. The judge summarised that "Mr Fox did not attempt to show these allegations were true, and he was not able to bring himself on the facts within the terms of any other defence recognised in law".
On 25 April 2024, it was announced that Fox would have to pay a total of £180,000 in compensatory damages to Crystal and Blake. Fox appealed the verdict, and in October 2025 the Court of Appeal reduced the sum of damages to £90,000 and ordered the cases brought by Fox to be re-tried. In April 2026 Fox was denied leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.
During the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris on 26 July, Fox commented on a segment featuring French drag performer and host of Drag Race France Nicky Doll, along with other French drag performers, calling them "deviant little pedos" and "child fuckers" on Twitter. Nicky Doll responded the following day on Twitter saying "Lawyer on the line, see you in court!" Doll later posted on 2 August that he had filed a defamation complaint against Fox and other Twitter users through lawyer Anne-Sophie Laguens and NGO STOP Homophobia.
On 31 January 2024, a hearing was held at the High Court whereby Fox took legal action against a man who called him a "racist" on social media. Fox sued Mukhtar Ali Yassin for libel over a row on X (formerly known as Twitter) over four tweets sent during the exchange in May 2023. Ben Gallop, representing Fox, told the court that Yassin had made "seriously defamatory allegations of racism against my client that are bare comments". Judge Mrs Justice Collins Rice ruled that a hearing should take place to decide whether the posts were statements of fact or opinion, and what should be included in any future trial. Fox said in March 2024 that he had discontinued the case; Yassin said Fox had agreed to its dismissal, paying thousands of pounds of legal fees to do so.
