Tommy Robinson has just been found guilty of two counts of ‘harassment’ due to social media posts in which he criticised journalists — he faces up to 10 years in prison when the sentence is handed down on 16 December.
In August 2024, Tommy is on a family holiday in Cyprus and posts about the riots; the Daily Mail considers this so important that they send a reporter and a photographer all the way to the island to track him down, and according to Tommy, they even took a photograph of his ex-wife; the article was then published, and as he told the jury, within a few hours people online began posting the name of the hotel where he was staying and urging others to go there, whilst his children were there, so his family had to move to another part of the hotel after he’d spoken to the security staff, and eventually he left the hotel altogether …
… and what does Tommy do then?
He does exactly the same thing to them.
He finds out who wrote it, he hires investigators to track them down, he goes public with it and accuses one of the journalists of having ‘revealed where my children are’, he rings one of them up and effectively asks if it would be alright if he did to them what they had done to him – and that is literally the whole point: He is holding up a mirror.
He told the court that all he wanted was to ask them questions on camera, just as journalists hound people every single day, and that it was an attempt to bring the Daily Mail to the negotiating table, and even the prosecutor admitted that none of this contained direct threats of violence, and yet those who flew to another country to track him down at his hotel are acting as if they are the victims, whilst the man who found out where they live and asked them how it feels is the criminal, and the jury couldn’t even reach a verdict, it was 10 to 2, and on 16 December he is to be sentenced for having done to the Daily Mail exactly the same thing that the Daily Mail did to him first, and we’re all just supposed to nod as if this makes perfect sense!!
X: Matt van Swol
