Graham Linehan’s Years of Persecution: Court Clears Him of Harassment

Graham Linehan’s long, punishing clash with gender-identity activists has taken yet another turn. After years of being hounded, blacklisted, and professionally destroyed for speaking out on what he argued were material, sex-based realities, the Father Ted co-creator has now been cleared of harassing a teenage trans activist online, though Westminster Magistrates’ Court convicted him of damaging her phone.

The case stems from an incident outside a gender-identity conference in London last October, where Graham’s path collided with 18-year-old Sophia Brooks, a trans woman born male. The court heard that Graham “deliberately whacked” her phone from her hand before it landed in the road. Graham denied this was intentional, insisting it was a “reflex response” as Brooks filmed him aggressively at close range.

Prosecutors attempted to paint Graham as a relentless online pursuer, claiming he had posted abusive comments about Brooks across social media platforms. Yet on Tuesday the judge dismissed all harassment allegations, ruling that Graham’s posts, while critical and uncompromising, did not cross the threshold into criminal harassment. It is a rare institutional acknowledgement that criticising gender-identity ideology, or calling out activists’ behaviour, is not in itself a crime.

Only the minor charge of criminal damage was upheld, relating solely to the broken phone.

Throughout the trial Graham was frank about the toll the past decade has taken on him. He told the court he believed exposing the tactics of gender-identity activists was unquestionably in the public interest, especially where safeguarding, women’s rights, or children’s medicalisation were concerned. His life, he said, had been “made hell” by a network of activists and sympathetic journalists determined to destroy his reputation rather than engage with his arguments.

And the record supports him. Graham’s years of persecution saw him de-platformed, professionally exiled, and financially devastated—his sitcom projects cancelled, his TV writing career effectively erased, long before he ever saw the inside of a courtroom. His “crime” was to publicly question an ideology that powerful institutions adopted wholesale without public debate.

Tuesday’s ruling doesn’t undo the years of smears, cancellations and punitive ostracisation Graham has endured. But it does mark something important: a line drawn by a judge acknowledging that dissent is not harassment, criticism is not abuse, and speaking uncomfortable truths in defence of women’s rights is not a criminal offence.

As the gender-identity debate continues to fracture British politics, Graham’s case stands as a symbol of a broader question: How many careers must be destroyed before the country admits the obvious, that safeguarding, free speech, and biological reality are worth defending?