Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan branded a trans activist a “domestic terrorist” and an “incel” before smashing her phone at a women’s rights conference, a court has heard.
The Irish comedy writer, 57, is accused of aiming a string of slurs at Sophia Brooks when they met at an LGB Alliance event in Westminster, titled “Battle of Ideas”.
Linehan is then accused of grabbing Ms Brooks’ phone before throwing it away, causing £369 of damage to the handset.
The comedy writer denies the charges of criminal damage and harassment. Former Olympic athlete Sharron Davies is among those in court to support him.
Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard Linehan called Ms Brooks - then 17 - “Tarquin” in a stream of attack posts on X, which started before the incident at the conference on October 19 last year.
He branded her a “domestic terrorist” and a “sociopath” and repeatedly calling her a “man”.
Ms Brooks told the court she feared a “vigilante” may act on the Tweets, by “possibly stabbing me in the street or beating me up”.
Before the trial began, Linehan said the case against him amounted to “police acting as a goon squad for trans rights activists”.
The court has heard a decision was initially made not to bring criminal charges, but this was overturned by the Met was threatened with legal action.
Prosecutor Julia Faure Walker told the court Linehan is accused of “relentless” posts online about Ms Brooks, before they had even met.
“These posts were not merely irritating or annoying”, she said. “These posts were not provoked by anything she did to Mr Linehan. She was not even in contact when he began to post about her.
“The purpose of these posts, say the prosecution, was not merely to relay events, to express political opinion, to criticise, to help identify perpetrators, or to solve any crime.
“Rather, they were verbally abusive and vindictive and reflected, say the prosecution, Mr Linehan’s deep disliking of Miss Brooks.”
In his posts before the confrontation, Ms Faure Walker said Linehan had “mocked her gender identity”, and in one wrote: “Does anyone know this man?”
He accused of her of involvement in “domestic terrorism”, in a post aimed at the Met Police, and claimed she was one of a group of “very dangerous men”.
In another post, Linehan accused Ms Brooks of disrupting an event when crickets had been released, and suggested: “He is a deeply disturbed sociopath”.
On the day of the conference, at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster, Ms Faure Walker said Ms Brooks was filming people and events on her phone.
“Ms Brooks recalls that about 20 minutes later, Mr Linehan approached her with his phone, recording her and calling her a groomer and asking how many she had groomed. He also called her an ‘incel’.
“A few hours later, she was outside the venue, near the entrance. Mr Linehan exited with other people.
“While filming with her phone, Ms Brooks called out his name, ‘Graham’ and asked why he had called her a ‘domestic terrorist’.
“This was, clearly, referring to the phrase that Mr Linehan had used in his posts about her.
“Mr Linehan could have explained to her why he used this expression, if he had an explanation, or even ignored her and walked away. Rather, he responded in a way which is indicative of his extreme personal animosity towards her.
“He said ‘Go away groomer’, ‘Go away you disgusting incel’, and he called her, a ‘sissy porn-watching scumbag’.”
The court heard Ms Brooks approached Linehan while filming on her phone, and asked: “Why do you think it is acceptable to call teenagers domestic terrorists?”
The prosecutor said she “did not pose any physical threat” and “was not committing any crime that needed disrupting”.
“She was asking him to account for his defamatory and abusive posts about her, in effect”, said Ms Faure Walker.
“He didn’t answer the question, and didn’t explain why he had called her a domestic terrorist. He was angry. He deliberately whacked the phone out of Ms Brooks’ hand. This caused damage to the phone.”
Linehan is also accused of boasting about the incident online in the days afterwards, as well as posting his own footage from the day.
In a police interview in February this year, Linehan said he had been provoked, the phone was put into his face, and he grabbed it as a “reflex”, the court heard.
His barrister, Sarah Vine KC, suggested that Ms Brooks had “spent the afternoon harassing women and then harassing Mr Linehan”, and had been using her phone to carry out those activities.
Linehan denied harassment to police, described himself as a journalist, and suggested “exposing tactics of trans activities was in the public interest”.
‘I was alarmed and distressed’
Giving evidence, Ms Brooks told the court she is bisexual and denied holding homophobic views, as Linehan had alleged.
She said she started using the name Sophia in 2021 or 2022.
Asked about how she felt about a post calling her a “deeply disturbed sociopath”, Ms Brooks told the court: “I felt alarmed and distressed.
“I was being branded as a deeply disturbed sociopath by a relatively famous person who had over 500,000 followers, any of which could see his post and cause great to me.”
Turning to the day of the conference, Ms Brooks said she paid for a ticket to the event, and once inside she used her phone to film the speakers.
She said a woman “stormed” up to her and tried to block the filming with a brochure, and eventually she was ejected from the conference by security.
Ms Brooks told the court she was back outside when Linehan “crossed the street with his phone recording, he called me a groomer and he ask me how many kids I had groomed.”
She alleged Linehan went on to call her an “incel”, before going back into the conference.
Later in the evening, Ms Brooks said she confronted Linehan about “why he thought it was acceptable to call teenagers domestic terrorists”.
“I believe he called me a groomer and told me to go away”, she said. “(I felt) distressed as I’m not a groomer.”
Ms Brooks told District Judge Briony Clarke that her phone was snatched by an “angry” Linehan, who “put it behind his back and refused to give it to me”.
“He said ‘go and get your f***ing phone’ and threw it into the road.”
The court heard Ms Brooks was informed that criminal charges would not be brought. She then wrote to the Met, threatening to bring a Judicial Review over the decision, and Linehan was subsequently charged.
Ms Brooks faced accusations in cross-examination from Ms Vine that she had been a harasser during the conference, by standing and determinedly taking pictures of women who tried to block her view.
The court was shown social media posts from Ms Brooks, including ones where she used the slur “nonce” and one in which she expressed a wish for a female opponent to be doused in acid.
Linehan’s defence also produced audio recordings, including a podcast called “Fantastic Breasts and How to Grow Them” when Brooks boasted about concealing her identity from opponents in the trans debate.
Under questioning, Ms Brooks also confirmed she had attended the conference to gather information for trans activist bloggers, and had effectively gone undercover to blend in with the gender critical crowd.
When reporting Linehan to police, she provided his address and phone number, saying the latter had been sent to her anonymously and she had gleaned the address through sleuthing from an interview Linehan had given to the Daily Telegraph which was illustrate with an image from his home.
Linehan arrested at the airport
Linehan’s trial comes in the same week that he was arrested at Heathrow Airport as he stepped off a flight from Arizona, US, sparking a storm about freedom of speech laws.
Linehan says five armed officers detained him over three social media posts about trans people. He then required hospital treatment for stress, and has since released the audio of his arrest.
In one of the Tweets which led to his arrest, he wrote: “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.”
Linehan says the last part of the Tweet was intended as a joke.
The comedy writer has in recent years been a vocal activist and advocate for women’s rights, posting a torrent of sharply-worded social media messages and taking a stance which he says have cost him his career and marriage.
His airport arrest has sparked a renewed debate over Britain’s laws governing hate speech, and prompted an extraordinary statement by Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley who took aim at Labour and Tory governments for the current state of the law.
The senior police chief says officers have “no choice” but to record threats of violence against protected groups as crimes when they are reported, that this leads to an investigation and often to an arrest, and officers who must follow the law are “left between a rock and a hard place by successive governments”.
“I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position,” he said.
The Bafta-winning writer, has sitcoms The IT Crowd, Father Ted, Black Books and Motherland in his catalogue of works.
At his first court appearance, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Trans women are not women’ in a reference to the landmark Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.
Outside court he said he has faced “harassment, abuse, and threats” for the last six years.
In 2023, he recalled in his book titled Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy, that he lost his career after he “championed an unfashionable cause”.
Reacting to news of the criminal case, he suggested the allegations are “part of a long history of the police acting as a goon squad for trans rights activists”, adding: “I look forward to exposing him and them in court."
He went on to post videos from the Battle of Ideas event, and highlighted that the day included a “panel discussion on violence against women”.
Linehan, who gave addresses in Scottsdale, Arizona and Southwark in London to the court, has been banned from mentioning the alleged victim online as part of his court bail.
He is currently prevented from using X, formerly Twitter, at all as part of his police bail in the wake of the airport arrest.
The trial continues.
