Simon Blake & Others v Laurence Fox [2025] EWCA Civ 1321 (Court of Appeal (Civil Division), 17 October 2025)

October 20, 2025

Blake v Fox – The Court of Appeal’s Decision in the Laurence Fox Defamation Case

Introduction

This article examines the Court of Appeal’s decision in Blake & Ors v Fox [2025] EWCA Civ 1321, a high-profile libel appeal concerning social media allegations of racism and paedophilia. The Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Warby giving the lead judgment with Lord Justice Dingemans concurring and Lady Justice Laing in agreement, clarified the serious harm threshold in defamation under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 and corrected errors in the trial judge’s approach to reputational harm. The result was a partial victory for Mr Fox: the appellate court ordered a retrial of his counterclaims, the tweet libel claims, and halved the damages he must pay to the claimants for his own defamatory paedophile tweets.

Background

The dispute arose from an October 2020 Twitter exchange. Three individuals, Simon Blake, Colin Seymour and Nicola Thorp, each posted tweets expressing the opinion that Mr Fox was “a racist.” In response, the actor and political activist Laurence Fox replied with tweets calling each of them a “paedophile.” These exchanges quickly gained public attention. Mr Blake, Mr Seymour and Ms Thorp sued Mr Fox for libel over the “paedophile” tweets, while Mr Fox counterclaimed for libel in respect of the “racist” tweets.

Preliminary issues were tried in the High Court, Media and Communications List, by Nicklin J in 2022 to determine the meaning of the tweets, whether they were fact or opinion, and if they were defamatory at common law. The courts held that each of the claimants’ tweets meant that Mr Fox “was a racist,” which was classified as an expression of opinion and defamatory in tendency. Mr Fox’s tweets were taken to allege that each claimant “was a paedophile,” statements of fact obviously defamatory in nature. With meanings settled, the case proceeded to trial before Collins Rice J in early 2024 on liability, including any defences, and the issue of serious harm to reputation as required by statute.

At trial, the judge found decisively in favour of Mr Blake and Mr Seymour on their claims. She held that being publicly accused of paedophilia by Mr Fox had caused serious harm to their reputations and no defence was available to Mr Fox. As a result, she awarded each of them £90,000 in general damages to compensate the harm and vindicate their reputations. In contrast, the judge dismissed Mr Fox’s counterclaims against all three individuals on the basis that he had failed to prove serious harm to his own reputation from the “racist” tweets. Given that conclusion on the threshold issue, she did not rule on the defences of honest opinion or truth which had been raised by the respondents to justify calling Mr Fox a racist. Notably, Ms Thorp’s claim and the corresponding counterclaim had fallen away by trial: her libel claim was dismissed before trial on the basis that Mr Fox’s “paedophile” tweet about her was obviously a parody and not defamatory, and while Mr Fox had counterclaimed against her as well, all his counterclaims were rejected on the same serious harm ground.

Mr Fox appealed. He contended that the High Court had erred in its application of the serious harm test under the Defamation Act 2013, both in wrongly dismissing his counterclaims and in overstating the harm and damages in the claimants’ favour. The Court of Appeal heard the appeal in July 2025 and handed down its judgment on 17 October 2025.

Legal Framework

Serious Harm Requirement

Section 1(1) of the Defamation Act 2013 provides that “A statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant.” This statutory threshold, introduced in 2014, raised the bar for defamation claims beyond the old common-law test of defamatory tendency. It requires claimants to prove, on the facts, that the publication has caused, or will probably cause, serious reputational damage, rather than merely showing that the words are inherently defamatory. The Supreme Court in Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd [2019] UKSC 27 confirmed that section 1 established a new threshold test focusing on actual impact. In practice, evidence of the statement’s extent of publication and its consequences among publishees is often needed to meet this test. The courts may determine the serious harm issue as a preliminary matter, for example on a strike-out application, to weed out cases where the harm is trivial or purely hypothetical. In Blake v Fox, the serious harm question was central: without proof of serious harm, a libel claim cannot succeed, no matter how offensive or egregious the words might be.

Rule in Dingle

In assessing reputational harm, the common law has long forbidden a defendant from relying on evidence of other publications of the same libel to argue that the claimant already had a bad reputation. The so called rule in Dingle v Associated Newspapers Ltd [1964] AC 371 (HL) prevents a libel defendant from defeating or reducing a claim by showing that others have published similar accusations about the claimant in the past. Each defamatory publication is treated on its own, so far as harm is concerned, otherwise a claimant might be robbed of vindication merely because their detractors had spread the libel widely. As Dingemans LJ observed, “What can be said for the Dingle rule is that it means that a claimant about whom a defamatory statement has been published will not be prevented from vindicating their reputation because earlier defamatory statements to the same effect had been made.” In the present case, this principle was important because Mr Fox’s accusers and the trial judge had pointed to other instances and reports of Mr Fox being called racist – for example media coverage and controversies unrelated to the claimants’ tweets – to suggest his reputation was already tarnished. The Court of Appeal reaffirmed that using such third-party publications to negate new harm is legally impermissible in light of Dingle. The serious harm of a particular libel must be assessed without treating prior repetition as proof that the new publication caused no further damage.

Evidence of Claimant’s Misconduct (“Pamplin” rule)

Relatedly, a defendant may mitigate damages by proving the claimant had a bad reputation independently of the libel, but there are strict limits. Under what is sometimes called the Pamplin principle, from Pamplin v Express Newspapers [1988] 1 WLR 116, a defendant can adduce evidence of specific facts that would have harmed the claimant’s reputation if known, to argue the libel did not make things worse. However, this cannot include prior defamatory allegations by others (barred by Dingle), and it does not depend on the state of the claimant’s actual reputation at the time. The Court of Appeal in Wright v McCormack [2023] EWCA Civ 892 recently examined these rules in depth, stressing that courts should avoid speculative leaps and must isolate the actual impact of the publication in question. In Blake v Fox, Collins Rice J had reasoned that Mr Fox’s reputation as a racist was already so sullied by his own conduct and other publications that the claimants’ tweets made little difference. The appeal court found this approach wrongly conflated general reputation evidence with the specific causal question posed by section 1.

In summary, the key legal points were: (1) the statutory serious harm threshold requires a fact-based analysis of the publication’s impact; (2) a defendant cannot rely on earlier or third-party publications of the same allegation to escape liability (the Dingle rule); (3) a defendant’s reliance on the claimant’s past misdeeds or character to reduce damages is tightly controlled and must not eclipse the serious harm test itself. These principles framed the Court of Appeal’s review of the trial judgment.

The Court’s Reasoning

Appeal on Mr Fox’s Counterclaims, “Racist” Tweets

The Court of Appeal first addressed whether the trial judge had erred in dismissing Mr Fox’s libel claims. Mr Fox advanced several grounds of appeal, two of which succeeded. Ground 1 alleged legal errors in the judge’s approach to serious harm. In particular: (a) that the judge wrongly downplayed the likely harm from the “racist” tweets because they were opinions; (b) that she failed to apply the law on proving bad reputation, that is, she let prior incidents colour the analysis; and (c) that she breached the Dingle rule by using other publications and specific incidents to infer Mr Fox already had a bad reputation.

Warby LJ rejected Mr Fox’s contention (ground 1(a)) that opinions are inherently incapable of causing serious harm. He accepted that an expression of opinion can in some contexts be less injurious than a bald statement of fact, a point recognised in earlier cases, but emphasised this is not a hard rule. The trial judge was entitled to consider that tweets clearly framed as personal opinions might have mitigated their impact. Thus no legal error was found in treating the opinion nature of the posts as a relevant factor.

However, the Court of Appeal upheld grounds 1(b), 1(c) and 2, finding fundamental errors in the judge’s assessment of harm to Mr Fox. Warby LJ observed that the judge had improperly relied on unrelated publications and incidents as evidence that Mr Fox had acquired a bad reputation for being a racist prior to the claimants’ tweets. This was contrary to long-established common law principles, namely the Dingle rule, which apply equally to the serious harm inquiry. In effect, the judge reasoned that Mr Fox’s reputation could not be seriously harmed by these tweets because other people and media outlets had already accused him of racism and some sections of the public already thought ill of him. The Court of Appeal firmly rejected that approach as a matter of law:

“The judge inferred from third-party publications and specific incidents that Mr Fox had acquired a bad reputation for being a racist. That was contrary to long-established common law principles, which apply equally when assessing serious harm.”

Additionally, the Court noted that this use of extraneous material was procedurally unfair – much of it had not been properly proven or pleaded, denying Mr Fox a chance to challenge it. Warby LJ concluded that on a correct approach, the only reasonable finding was that each of the claimants’ “racist” tweets had caused serious harm to Mr Fox’s general reputation. The evidence, including Mr Fox’s loss of a talent agent and public opprobrium following the tweets, compelled that conclusion. The trial judge’s contrary findings – for example, that the tweets did not contribute to Mr Fox’s loss of his agent or acting work – were vitiated by legal error, as she had applied the wrong legal test on causation. Rather than asking whether the tweets had a tendency to cause harm (a mistaken approach the judge appeared to take), she should have assessed whether on the balance of probabilities the tweets had caused or were likely to cause serious harm in fact. Dingemans LJ observed that the judge did not apply the correct test of causation, and one cannot be confident her finding would have been the same had she done so.

Because these errors went to the heart of Mr Fox’s counterclaims, the Court of Appeal set aside the dismissal of his claims and remitted those claims for retrial on the outstanding issues. In practical terms, this means a High Court judge will now reconsider whether the “racist” tweets were defensible, by honest opinion or truth, and, if not, what damages Mr Fox should receive. The appellate court did not decide those questions itself, as the first-instance judge had never ruled on them in light of her threshold finding. The retrial will therefore focus on whether the respondents can successfully invoke a defence for calling Mr Fox a racist, given that serious harm to Mr Fox’s reputation is now established as a matter of law on the appeal.

Appeal on the Claimants’ Libel Claims, “Paedophile” Tweets

The Court of Appeal then turned to Mr Fox’s appeal against the findings on liability and the £90,000 damages awards in favour of Mr Blake and Mr Seymour. Mr Fox argued that the judge had been too lenient in finding serious harm to the claimants, and too harsh in the amount of damages. His first ground was that the judge misapplied the serious harm test by not requiring the claimants to prove someone actually believed they were paedophiles as a result of his tweets. He contended that a libel claimant should demonstrate that readers understood the words literally – that he was accusing them of actual paedophilic behaviour – and believed it to be true, rather than just inferring harm from the gravity of the allegation. The Court of Appeal rejected this argument, confirming that a claimant need not call witnesses to say “I thought the claimant was a paedophile.” It is enough to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that the publication had a tendency to and did cause serious reputational harm in the eyes of some publishees. Given the horrific nature of a false allegation of paedophilia and the wide publication to Mr Fox’s online followers, the trial judge was entitled to infer serious harm even without direct evidence of belief (though in this case there was evidence of substantial adverse reaction).

Mr Fox’s second ground on liability was that the serious harm finding was plainly wrong or marred by procedural irregularities. For instance, he claimed the judge failed to account for the relatively limited scale of publication, arguing that his tweets, while public, did not reach an enormous audience, and gave insufficient weight to his mitigating conduct, such as swiftly deleting the tweets and later apologising. He also complained that the judge considered extraneous materials, like media reports and a statement by Stonewall, an LGBTQ+ charity, supporting Mr Blake, as if they aggravated the harm.

Warby LJ agreed with some of these criticisms, but crucially upheld the core finding that Mr Fox’s defamatory tweets did meet the serious harm threshold. In a nuanced assessment, he found three specific errors in the judge’s approach which, while not negating liability, affected the extent of harm and the quantification of damages:

• Disregard of Mitigation: The judge was wrong to discount all the mitigating steps Mr Fox took post publication. Mr Fox had deleted the offending tweets promptly. The High Court treated these steps as irrelevant, but the Court of Appeal held they should have been given weight as they likely limited the spread and impact of the libels. “They were not unequivocal retractions, and they did not contain an apology. But these steps were inherently likely to result in significant mitigation of the harm initially caused.”
• Media Coverage Treated as Harm: The judge treated the mainstream media’s reporting of the incident as additional evidence of reputational harm to the claimants, when in fact such coverage should mitigate harm. News reports largely condemned Mr Fox’s conduct and would have signalled to readers that the claimants were innocent victims of a baseless slur. Using that publicity to inflate damages was erroneous. If anything, the publicity helped restore the claimants’ reputations by showing that Mr Fox’s accusation was widely disbelieved.
• Stonewall Statement: The judge relied on a statement from Stonewall, where Mr Blake was a trustee, expressing solidarity with him and denouncing Mr Fox, as evidence that the allegation caused reputational harm within that organisation. The Court of Appeal found this illogical. Stonewall’s supportive statement showed the opposite, that the allegation was not believed in those quarters. It was wrong to treat the Stonewall statement as proof of harm; if anything, it indicated the calumny was recognised as false.

These errors did not overturn the finding that Mr Blake and Mr Seymour suffered serious harm – the Court agreed that threshold was plainly crossed given the inherent gravity of a paedophile accusation and evidence of serious distress and reputational impact. However, the extent of the harm was likely overstated by the judge due to her approach. Warby LJ concluded that the £90,000 awards were excessive, going beyond what was necessary or proportionate in the circumstances. He noted that trial judges have a wide discretion in libel damages, but appellate intervention was justified here because the amount went beyond the range properly available on a correct assessment.

After weighing the nature of the libel, the scope of publication, and all mitigating and aggravating factors afresh, the Court of Appeal held that £45,000 for each claimant was sufficient to compensate and vindicate. This halving of the damages reflects the Court’s view that the claimants’ reputations were effectively restored by Mr Fox’s retractions and public support, and that £90,000 was disproportionate. As Warby LJ put it, “awards of £45,000 each would be sufficient to achieve proper compensation and to show the world that there was nothing in the allegations.” The appellate court therefore substituted awards of £45,000 for Mr Blake and Mr Seymour in place of the £90,000 sums, and it confirmed that the findings of liability against Mr Fox stand unaltered, save for the reduction in damages.

Decision and Outcome

The Court of Appeal’s decision can be summarised as follows. Mr Fox’s appeal succeeded in part. The finding that the “racist” tweets did not harm his reputation was overturned. Mr Fox’s counterclaims are reinstated and remitted for retrial on the outstanding issues, specifically whether the tweets were defamatory statements of fact or protected opinions, and whether any defences of honest opinion or truth apply. In allowing this aspect of the appeal, the Court reaffirmed that even an opinion can cause serious harm, and that judges must not dismiss a claim due to a claimant’s pre existing bad reputation unless strictly justified by admissible evidence.

As regards the claimants’ libel awards, Mr Fox’s appeal on liability was dismissed; his tweets were correctly found to have caused serious harm to Mr Blake’s and Mr Seymour’s reputations, but his appeal on quantum was allowed. The damages were found to be excessive and were reduced from £90,000 each to £45,000 each. Accordingly, Mr Fox remains liable to pay general damages to both Mr Blake and Mr Seymour, but in a significantly lower sum.

Conclusion

The decision provides guidance on the proper approach to damages. Mitigating actions by a defendant, such as prompt apologies or deletions, should be given due weight in order to calibrate damages to the true extent of lingering harm. The Court of Appeal’s intervention to halve the awards signals that libel damages must remain proportionate, and that courts should avoid topping up awards based on factors like media echo or supportive statements which do not actually compound the claimant’s injury. The judgment affirms that being falsely accused of something as heinous as paedophilia will almost invariably cross the serious harm threshold, but also that enormous damages are not automatically warranted, especially where the defamatory impact has been contained or counteracted.

Further Reading

• Serious Harm in Defamation; Understanding the section 1 threshold
• Defamation
• Damages awards in Defamation 
• Meaning in Defamation