or: Day 1 of Graham Linehan’s appeal against his conviction for criminal damage at Southwark Crown Court
The first and most important thing to know about this appeal is that it is essentially a re-trial. In order for Graham Linehan to have a fair re-trial neither the judge nor the two lay panellists sitting either side of her have read the Nov 2025 judgment . This found partially against Linehan (giving him a conviction for criminal damage to a mobile phone) and partially for him (he was acquitted of harassment). Neither the judge nor the panel attended court during last year’s initial trial at Westminster Magistrates Court. By reading that judgment or some of my reportage from that trial you know more about the case than they do. That is weird.
This time round, the Crown Prosecution Service is not attempting to allege any harassment. This is Linehan’s appeal of the single criminal damage charge.
Proceedings began at Southwark Crown Court this morning. Sarah Vine KC appeared for Linehan; Julia Faure Walker for the Crown Prosecution Service. The judge is the Honourable Mrs Justice Tipples, who has a great surname. The hearing has been listed for two days, but closing arguments are now expected to roll into next Friday.
The phone in question belongs or belonged to a young trans activist called Sophia Brooks – known as the complainant. Brooks was 17 when Linehan took the phone out of Brooks’ hand and threw it into the ground outside the Battle of Ideas Festival of at Church House in London on 19 October 2024. None of that is in dispute.
Whether the phone was damaged in the process, whether Linehan was reckless about damaging it, and whether he was using reasonable force to prevent any crime is what tomorrow is going to be about. The cost of the criminal damage to the phone in question was £369. The figure was a repair estimate given by the Apple store in Regent Street in November 2024. The complainant didn’t go through with the Apple repair.
Linehan arrived at court around 9.40am and took his seat in the well of Court 1, behind his legal team. Two journalists were present (later briefly joined by a third before they both disappeared after lunch). Four members of the public were in the gallery, and there was a live link for observers.
A bias issue
The day began with a bit of wobble. Faure Walker rose to flag a “preliminary matter” about an (undiscloed) order made by the judge in another case in November 2024. Brooks had spotted Tipples’ name on arriving at court that morning and drawn his lawyer’s attention to it. Faure Walker said there was “an arguable case that this gives rise to an appearance of bias.”
“I have no recollection of this,” the judge said. The court rose at 10.10am to allow the parties to take instructions.
When the court returned, the Judge reiterated that she had no memory of the order, noting that she had been listed to manage this appeal for a number of days without anyone raising the issue. Faure Walker, having spoken to her opposite number that “the parties know that whatever is in the order the court is well able to put it out of the court’s mind.” The appeal proceeded.
Next: language. Faure Walker said the CPS intended to refer to Brooks as “she” and “her”. The defence was going to refer to Brooks as “he”. Both parties invited the court to use neutral language. The judge obliged. “We will refer to the complainant as the complainant”, she said. The language used was very similar to the position statement used in the original trial at Westminster Magistrates Court last autumn. For purposes of clarity, this website tries, unless explicitly stated otherwise, to describe people according to their natal, or biological sex.
After the language housekeeping, a bit of timetabling. Linehan’s team had a Bad Character Application (BCA) it wanted to make against Brooks. If successful it would not stop the appeal, but would require the judge and her panel to view Brooks’ evidence through the lens of his bad character. The judge wanted to hear the case opened first in order to give her an understanding of the BCA. The parties obliged.
The Crown bats first
Faure Walker told the court the events of 19 October 2024 took place outside Church House in Westminster, the venue for that day’s Battle of Ideas conference. It is not in dispute, she said, that Linehan took and threw Brooks’ phone, that Linehan made the social media posts about Brooks which have been attributed to him, that Brooks is a trans activist, that Linehan held opposing views, and the two had not previously met before 19 October.
The barrister took us back to 11 October, eight days before the phone-throwing confrontation between Linehan and Brooks. This was the day of the LGB Alliance conference at the QEII Centre in London, which was disrupted by teenagers releasing insects inside the venue. Police were called at 4.19pm. Brooks, we were told, did not arrive until around 5pm, did not enter the venue, and stood about 20 to 30 metres away by the barriers. “There is no evidence SB took part, instigated or was involved in the release of insects in that venue,” Faure Walker said. Graham Linehan was not at the conference, but in social media posts he linked Brooks to the disruption and accused him of involvement in an act of “domestic terrorism”.
We then moved back (or forward) to 19 October 2024. On that day Brooks attended the Battle of Ideas with another trans activist, Freda Wallace. A photograph of the pair sitting in the audience during a panel called Gender Wars: No End in Sight? was later posted online by Linehan. During the session, Brooks stood up and started taking photos of the panel. Words were exchanged with another conference-goer, and people started filming. Brooks went back to retrieve his phone, and was escorted out by security at around 3.15pm.
Roughly 20 minutes later, Linehan emerged from the venue and approached Brooks, filming on his phone. Faure Walker said Linehan called Brooks a “groomer”, asked how many he had “groomed”, and called him an “incel”. “These insults illustrate Mr Linehan’s attitude towards the Complainant,” she submitted.
Several hours later, around the time delegates were leaving the conference, Brooks was waiting outside Church House. As Linehan exited with others, Brooks called out “Graham! Graham!” and asked, on camera, why he had called him a “domestic terrorist”. Linehan, said Faure Walker, could have walked away. Instead he responded with “extreme animosity” – telling Brooks he was a “sissy porn watching scumbag” and to “go away groomer”. Brooks, in turn, called Linehan a “scumbag” and an “incel”, and said “you’re divorced”.
“Mr Linehan may have found the Complainant to be annoying and persistent,” said Faure Walker, “but Brooks was not committing any crime, nor in any event a crime which required forcefully removing and damaging the Complainant’s phone.”
“The defendant was angry,” she continued. “He deliberately and forcefully took hold of the phone out of the Complainant’s hand and threw the phone across the street.”
The court watched four short videos taken by Brooks on his phone in the seconds before, during and after the moment Linehan grabbed it. The Crown submitted that Linehan was “proud” of what he had done. Their evidence was a tweet Linehan had sent to Julie Bindel saying: “I’m quite proud that I grabbed his phone and threw it across the road. He was furious.” On 23 October Linehan posted “I firmly believe this guy was behind the attack on the LGB Alliance conference. His escalating behaviour and his association with violent criminals is something that needs to be looked into sooner rather than later.”
“The court is not being invited to take sides in an ideological debate,” Faure Walker said. The Crown’s case was that Linehan caused damage to Sophia Brooks phone, was reckless as to whether it would be damaged, and was not using reasonable force to prevent any crime.
Bad Character
Sarah Vine KC then made her Bad Character Application (BCA) against Brooks under section 100 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Bad character evidence about a non-defendant can be admitted only through specific statutory gateways; the gateway here was that Brooks’s credibility – in particular, his honesty about the state of his phone before Linehan grabbed it – was central to the criminal damage allegation
As part of the BCA, Vine told the court that Brooks had posed as a detransitioned female “in order to infiltrate gender critical campaigning and support groups”, that he “used that infiltration to make bad faith complaints about gender critical campaigners”, and made an allegation of harassment against Linehan that was “untruthful and made in bad faith”.
The application sets the case in a wider frame. Linehan, it said, has been target for trans activists for years and as a result has been “subject to numerous complaints”. The first was made by trans activist Stephanie Hayden in 2018. Hayden, says the application, helped Brooks draft the statement supporting an application for a civil injunction against Linehan in November 2024 after the police initially closed the criminal investigation. The two were later joint complainants in the successful prosecution of gender critical campaigner Sean Doyle under the Online Safety Act for posting an AI-generated image of the pair kissing.
The first allegation that Linehan was harassing Brooks, the application states, came not from Brooks but from a former police officer named Lynsay Watson, who was dismissed from Leicestershire Police for a campaign of harassment against gender critical campaigner Harry Miller. Watson, said Vine, is “a natal male who identifies as female” and was a prolific author of complaints against gender critical campaigners. When forces close those complaints, said Vine, Watson threatens to escalate to the professional standards department, the IPCO and judicial review. Watson was behind the complaint that resulted in Linehan’s high-profile arrest at Heathrow on 1 September 2025 as he returned for trial. To demonstrate how close Brooks was to Watson, Vine took the court to a police log report from 24 October 2024 in which Brooks tells the case management operator he is a “police cadet” and is “being assisted by a former police officer”, in his complaint about Linehan.
The infiltration evidence, said Vine, comes from members of Let Women Speak, a monthly event held by the women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen. Regular attendee Jo Atkins met Brooks at an LWS event in 2022, where he told her he was an 18-year-old detransitioner. Two LWS volunteers, Natasha Brown and Parand Mojabi, added Brooks to an LWS WhatsApp group, where he expressed great distress at the consequences of his “transition” and reported on “detransitioning” as it happened. Brooks was only rumbled when Brown, having attended the second day of Linehan’s trial at Westminster Mags, saw who Brooks was and realised what she’d done. Letting Brooks into the Whatsapp group had given him access to all the women’s mobile numbers and the private info they’d shared..
The BCA also sought to highlight Brooks’ exchange with gender critical activist Maria MacLachlan, whose assault by trans activist Tara Wolf in 2017 resulted in Wolf’s conviction; and of Brooks and Freda Wallace walking around an LWS meeting in Hyde Park in London playing through a speaker, on a loop, a recording of trans activist Sarah Jane Baker shouting “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”.
Other social media material included a post beneath a photograph of Kellie-Jay Keen covered in soup, in which Brooks wished she’d rather been attacked with acid, plus an audio recording in which Brooks appears to threaten “TERFs” with the words “you will pay”.
In summary, said Vine, “it is artificial to disaggregate the events of 19 October 2024 from the history of the Claimant’s conduct towards and hostility towards gender critical campaigners.” Brooks’s credibility “is at the heart of your decisions.”
Faure Walker resisted. The Crown accepted much of the chronology of the police investigation, the influence of others, the relevant social media posts, and the videos from 19 October as admissible. What it did not accept was that wider context was a basis for adducing further evidence in a criminal trial. “The court is more than sufficiently informed as to the context of this offence and those involved,” she said. “That is not a reason to admit evidence in a criminal trial procedure.” Bad faith on social media, she added, was not the same as lying to the police; the defence had not shown the latter.
After lunch, the judge ruled that other than the evidence the Crown had already conceded, the bad character application was dismissed. Reasons will be given tomorrow.
It’s not about me. Well, this bit is.
Then came another issue raised by the CPS. Was I allowed to live tweet the evidence submitted in open court as part of the BCA application. It had been brought to the attention of the CPS that I was live-tweeting, and Faure Walker wasn’t sure I was allowed to do so. “Are you making an application?” asked the judge. Faure Walker assured her she wasn’t. “Then what do you want me to do?”, she asked. There followed a series of long exchanges during which Faure Walker unsuccessfully tried to intimate that by live-tweeting the proceedings in open court I may have done something against the rules.
I am not totally abreast of Sections 8a and 8c of the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 nor how it might apply to a re-trial in the Crown Court. Neither was the judge. Nor did she seem persuaded by the legal point Faure Walker wasn’t necessarily trying to make. Faure Walker insisted she merely wanted to assist the court to ensure the correct procedure was being followed (a good thing – I don’t want to break the rules of the court and be in contempt) and that she wanted to ensure that my live tweeting did not affect the evidence of subsequent possible witnesses who weren’t in the room.
Whilst I appreciate Ms Faure Walker’s desire to assist the court, it did feel like a try-on (even though afterwards she said it wasn’t). When the judge asked me what I thought, I’d had enough thinking time to suggest that this felt like an arbitrary sledgehammer being used to crack a non-existent nut. I couldn’t see how my live-tweeting of a bad character application could threaten the administration of justice. I said I rather suspected the person(s) unknown who had brought the matter to Ms Faure Walker’s attention wanted to stop my tweeting because embarrassing details about their behaviours were being made public. I suggested that whilst it was not an overriding principle, it was well established that the court should bend towards open justice unless it had a very good reason not to. Or at least that’s what it sounded like in my head. It may have been incoherent gibberish.
The court rose again. The judge came back and said she was not convinced the Magistrates Court Act 1980 had any jurisdiction over a Crown Court, and as no one was making an application, no order needed to be made. The judge told me she wasn’t telling me I was allowed to do anything, nor was she telling me I wasn’t allowed to do anything, but she didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t carry on as before. And so we all did.
Brooks in the Box
With the BCA and the court-reporting near miss dealt with, the court finally turned to the case proper. It was nearly 3pm. Sophia Brooks was brought into court and took the oath. He wore black shoes, tight black jeans, a baggy cream jumper, and his long brown hair was worn loose.
Brooks gave his full name as Sophia Abigail Brooks, and confirmed this was the name on his driving licence and passport. He said he was 17 in October 2024. Asked if he was a trans activist, he said yes.
With regards to the LGB Alliance event on 11 October, he said he had arrived around 5pm, had not gone inside, had been 20 to 30 metres from the entrance, and had been there to “counter-protest”. He had nothing to do with the release of the insects which disrupted the event, and had not known about it in advance.
As for the Battle of Ideas event on 19 October, he said he had attended with Wallace, that he had stood up and made his way into the “walkway” in the middle of the room to take photographs of the panel during a discussion about “gender medicine” which favoured “conversion therapy”. As he did so “a short woman with short hair and a white shirt” who might be Kate Barker or Kate Harris “there are two Kates” at the LGBA, he said. “Anyway, this Kate person” had tried to block his camera, it caused a kerfuffle and he had been escorted out of Church House at around 3.15pm.
About 20 minutes later, Brooks said, Graham Linehan had approached him and shouted, “as far as I remember, incel and groomer”. He asked “how many kids have you groomed?” and “stormed into the building”.
Faure Walker played the videos recorded within about two minutes of each other later that day. By this point it is dark. The BoI’s programme of events has finished. People, including Linehan, are leaving the building. In the first video, Brooks calls out “Graham, Graham, do you mind explaining why you called me a domestic terrorist?” Linehan replies “go away groomer, you’re a groomer”. In a subsequent video the two trade insults. Somewhere along the line Linehan comes up with the “sissy porn-watching scumbag” line. Brooks calls Linehan a “scumbag” and an “incel” and tells him “you’re divorced”. Asked why he had brought up the divorce, Brooks said: “He brings up things like groomer and sissy porn – I thought I’d add something which is true.”
Asked to explain “sissy porn” for the benefit of the court, Brooks giggled and said he would try to do so without laughing. He told the judge it was a genre of pornography where a “cisgender man” dresses up in stereotypically female clothes and is sexually humiliated. Faure Walker asked him to tell the court what he meant by “cisgender man”. Brooks replied “natal male”. When asked why Graham Linehan might bring up sissy porn, Brooks said he could think of no reason other than it was connected to Brooks’ “transgender identity”.
The final video shown in court was the infamous phone grab. Brooks said he had “approached Mr Linehan to ask him why he’d called children domestic terrorists…. His face turned to anger, he grabbed the phone out of my hand, put it behind his back, wouldn’t give it back and said ‘go and get your fucking phone’ and threw it into the street, with force.”
Faure Walker took Brooks through photographs of the alleged damage to the phone, and the Apple Regent Street estimate of £369 to repair it; the repair was not, in the end, carried out. Brooks told the court the phone had been “basically immaculate” before Linehan grabbed it. He knew this because he had changed the case “earlier that day, twice”.
Right at the end of his evidence in chief, Faure Walker summarise the case with Brooks. Had the Complainant threatened Linehan? No. Harassed him? No. Committed a crime against him or anyone in the vicinity? No. Was he about to? No.
Proceedings came to a close. Sarah Vine’s cross-examination of Brooks will begin tomorrow. Brooks remains on oath, and has been told not to discuss his evidence or use social media overnight.
Housekeeping
At 9.45am tomorrow, Tipples J will give her reasons for dismissing the bad character application. Brooks’ cross-examination begins at 10. After that, DC Thomas Wells, the officer in the case, is expected to give evidence. The Crown’s case then closes around lunch. It is still not confirmed whether or not Graham Linehan will be called as a witness (a decision which is his legal team’s hands). The other defence witnesses are likely to be Fiona McEnena and Maria MacLachlan if they get called. Closing arguments will almost certainly not be heard until next Friday.
After the judge left court, a cheery Linehan thanked his legal team, wandered over to the small number of supporters in the public gallery and said his goodbyes, promising to be back in time for tomorrow’s 9.45am start. I will also be there, ready to live tweet proceedings.
A special thanks to everyone whose contributions helped make today viable and tomorrow achievable. If you’d like to read the live tweets from today, Andrew of the Dark Arts has already posted them up on the GenderBlog website so you don’t even need a twitter account. I am grateful to everyone who helps keep GenderBlog going.
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