For years, the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan has attacked and disparaged the transgender community on his social media accounts, alienating friends, cratering his career, and even destroying his marriage in the process. But it was only this week that he found himself on trial for allegedly harassing teenage trans activist Sophia Brooks — a charge he has vehemently denied.
On the stand, Linehan sought to present himself as a crusading truth-teller rather than an agitator, though he seemed determined to make a spectacle nonetheless: On Thursday, before the proceedings got underway, he stood outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London wearing a sandwich board that displayed the slogans, “There’s no such thing as a ‘transgender child’” and, “Keep men out of women’s sports.”
Inside, under questioning from the prosecution, Linehan, 57, rejected the idea that he had “become a bit obsessed” with Brooks last October, when he posted multiple hostile comments about the then 17-year-old. Repeatedly misgendering her, he said that Brooks, now 18, was a “young soldier in the trans activist army,” calling her “misogynistic,” “abusive,” and “snide.”
On Oct. 11, 2024, the British advocacy group LGB Alliance, an anti-trans organization that opposes Stonewall, the largest LGBTQ alliance in the U.K., had a conference disrupted when protesters released a swarm of crickets into the venue, forcing hundreds to evacuate. Online, Lineham began accusing Brooks of taking part in the action, calling her a “domestic terrorist.” The prosecution contends that he had no evidence of this. Nevertheless, they said, Lineham claimed that Brooks had been behind “countless episodes of harassment of women and gay men both online and off,” smearing her as a “deeply disturbed sociopath.”
“The nature of trans activism is that it is very male,” Lineham insisted in court on Thursday. “It’s abusive, it’s sadistic. The police are basically working for trans activists these days. They don’t understand the issue and they believe everything trans activists say to them. A lot of institutions have been captured by trans ideology.”
On Oct. 19, 2024, Brooks and Lineham came face to face outside a London conference called Battle of Ideas. Brooks began recording a video on her phone, asking the writer, “Why do you think it’s acceptable to call teenagers ‘domestic terrorists’?” Lineham lunged for her phone, knocking it out of her hand and allegedly damaging it. He told police it was a “reflex response” in response to taunts from Brooks about his divorce, though in an X post three days later, he wrote, “I’m quite proud that I grabbed [her] phone and threw it across the road. [She] was furious!”
After Brooks retrieved her phone, the pair continued to trade words while filming one another. Linehan told her, “Go away groomer,” “Go away you disgusting incel,” and called her a “sissy porn-watching scumbag.” Asked in court whether he hoped to incite violence against Brooks, he replied: “No, because the violence and toxicity in the trans debate comes entirely from the trans side. I intended to make sure that the next time [she] came to any similar event, people would know to expect trouble and people would be on their guard.”
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The prosecution said that Linehan’s social media posts about Brooks preceding this confrontation were “clearly not merely to relay events, to express political opinion, to criticize, to help identify perpetrators or to try to solve any crime.” Nor, they said, did his comments merely present “ideas that may shock, disturb or offend.” They argued that the posts “were verbally abusive and vindictive, and reflected Mr. Linehan’s deep disliking of Ms. Brooks.”
Brooks told the court that she was “alarmed and distressed” by what Linehan had been saying about her. “I was being branded as a ‘deeply disturbed sociopath’ by a relatively famous person with over 500,000 followers — any of which could see Mr. Linehan’s post and cause great harm to me,” she said. The prosecution said that “the defendant did not accept it amounted to harassment. As a journalist — as he described himself — he believed exposing tactics of trans activities was in the public interest.”
Linehan was arrested the following April and pleaded not guilty in May, with a condition of his bail being that he not contact Brooks. When he traveled from his current residence in Arizona back to the U.K. on Monday to face trial, he was arrested again at Heathrow Airport and questioned about other posts targeting trans women and activists, including one that allegedly encouraged violence against them. His detention drew outrage from prominent anti-trans figures including Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, and the former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines, as well as civil liberties advocates and organizations who have said that the British government is chilling free expression with its policing of online speech. Mark Rowley, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, suggested that law enforcement limit their investigations into social media posts to keep officers out of “toxic culture-wars debates.”
This time, the sole condition of Linehan’s bail was that he stop posting on X. On Thursday, he appeared to violate that condition, replying to a supportive post from Gaines, who had shared a video of Linehan wearing his sandwich board outside court, writing, “This is how you deal with the trans mob.” In response, Linehan wrote, “Dawwww mate!” That post has since been deleted.
Linehan’s grudge against the trans community dates back to 2013, when an episode of the sitcom The IT Crowd, which he co-created, came in for public reexamination. The 2008 episode, which Linehan wrote, features a character finding out that the woman he’s dating is trans and then getting in a physical fight with her. Linehan has said he started researching trans issues when some began calling the premise transphobic, while he felt the joke was “harmless.” In 2020, Channel 4 removed the episode from syndication.
By then, Linehan was a full-time anti-trans activist. The same year, he was permanently suspended from Twitter for violating platform rules against hate speech. His account was reinstated in December 2022, shortly after Musk bought the site, which he later rebranded as X.
Sentences in the U.K. for harassment widely vary based on the severity of the offense, but if convicted in his present trial, Linehan could potentially face up to six months jail time or a maximum fine of £5,000. It is unclear whether he will be prosecuted over the posts that led to his second arrest, though people convicted of inciting hatred during the U.K.’s race riots last summer are now serving sentences of up to 38 months in prison.
From Rolling Stone US
