For decades, the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was celebrated as the creative force behind hit sitcoms like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. But following his success in television, he has largely focused on anti-transgender diatribes and protests, alienating many former fans and colleagues in the entertainment industry. And, while he’s certainly not the only middle-aged celebrity to pivot to transphobia, he has the dubious distinction of getting arrested for it — twice.
Earlier this year, Linehan’s incendiary comments led to his arrest in the U.K. on charges of allegedly harassing a transgender activist online and in person, with a trial set to begin on Thursday. On Monday, as he arrived in London for that court appearance, he was arrested a second time, again over allegedly abusive social media posts that targeted transgender women.
That latest news drew outraged responses from some of Linehan’s most prominent supporters — also known for sharing transphobic content — including Elon Musk, former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines, and J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter author seethed that the police “are only interested in tweets threatening or inciting violence against women if the ‘women’ in question have dicks.” This public outrage over Linehan’s arrest, even from some who find the content of his posts hateful and toxic, has drawn considerably more attention to how the U.K. polices online speech, a subject of continued controversy. Critics on the opposite side of the political spectrum noted that while they “fundamentally disagree with virtually everything Graham Linehan believes” and find him “beyond awful,” they were worried about creeping authoritarianism and censorship in Britain. Human rights groups likewise sounded the alarm.
“Free speech allows us to dissent, yet Labour and Conservative-led governments have embraced an overbearing approach to online content that has repeatedly been shown to stifle free speech,” says Matthew Feeney, advocacy manager of the non-partisan British civil liberties organization Big Brother Watch. He says it is “deeply worrying” that arrests like Linehan’s are “increasingly common” in the U.K. In another recent case, a man was arrested for allegedly sending racist comments to English soccer player Jess Carter. Another man was jailed in July for voicing support for the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah on social media.
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In a post on his Substack, Linehan described how he was detained by five police officers when he arrived at Heathrow Airport after flying in from Arizona, where he now lives. (He announced plans to leave the U.K. at the end of 2024, claiming that “freedom of speech is in bad shape at the moment” in the country.) “They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets,” Linehan claimed. One of the posts declared, “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.” Another included an image of a demonstration where people waved transgender pride flags, with Linehan calling it a “photo you can smell.” In the last, he commented on the same group: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.”
Linehan maintained to the police who questioned him that he was not inciting violence with his X posts. Then, when a nurse checked his blood pressure and found it dangerously high, he wrote, he was transported to a hospital where a doctor said the condition had likely been brought on by stress.
“What the fuck has the UK become?” Rowling wrote on X on Tuesday, sharing a post about Linehan’s arrest. “This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.” Gaines shared Rowling’s comment and added one of her own: “The UK is a police state that prioritizes abusers, pedophiles, minorities, and migrants at the expense of everyone else,” she wrote. “And you can’t call it out because free speech is gone, free expression is punished, and comedy is effectively illegal.”
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Musk, in the midst of a spree of posts demonizing migrants in Europe as violent invaders and rapists who are destroying the continent’s white majorities, also found time on Tuesday to criticize British law enforcement for detaining Linehan. “Why are police in Britain arresting citizens for social media posts instead of stopping child rape?” he asked on X. “Instead of arresting the violent criminals, the police in Britain are told to arrest people who tell the truth on social media,” he opined in another post. He also called the U.K. a “police state.” (Musk is estranged from his trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, and has said that her transition accounts for his swing to the political right, but Wilson has challenged this narrative, calling it “insane.”)
The world’s richest man went on to endorse the far-right British political party Advance UK as he shared a post from Tommy Robinson, an anti-Islam activist who has served several prison sentences for assaults and other offenses. Robinson had criticized Reform UK, the Nigel Farage-led right-wing party which former deputy leader Ben Habib left this year to form Advance, and which has dealt with months of infighting over whether to disavow Robinson or cater to his supporters.
And Mark Rowley, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, expressed his own frustrations after the arrest, saying in a statement on Wednesday that the government needed to figure out a way to “limit the resources we dedicate to tackling online statements to those cases creating real threats in the real world.” He said that officers are being drawn into an “impossible position” as they become fixtures of “toxic culture-wars debates.”
But the risk of arrest for online speech is not restricted to famous far-right ideologues. Law enforcement in the U.K. averages about 30 arrests per day for alleged violations of communications acts that criminalize “grossly offensive” messages, as well as posts of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character,” or which cause “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” in the individuals singled out for attacks. But fewer than 10 percent of these charges result in sentencing, in part due to out-of-court resolutions and victims declining to support prosecution. Those who have received considerable jail time include individuals who incited racial hatred on social media during the U.K.’s anti-immigrant riots last summer — violence that Musk helped to fuel with X posts about mass immigration leading to “civil war” in the country. He and other critics like J.D. Vance have said Britain is chilling free speech with these cases.
With respect to Linehan’s detainment, Feeney of Big Brother Watch notes that “five police officers arresting someone in an airport for offensive social media posts appears to be a disturbing and disproportionate response that should concern everyone who values free speech.”
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Linehan’s previous harassment charges are related to his alleged abusive online comments about 18-year-old transgender activist Sophia Brooks; he further allegedly damaged her phone during a physical confrontation at a London conference in October 2024. He was arrested the following April, pleaded not guilty in May, and was granted bail on the condition that he not contact Brooks, with a trial set for Sept. 4. “Trans activists are planning to protest” at the courthouse where he is being tried this week, Linehan wrote on Substack, adding, “so bring the nose-plugs.”
Since he was detained on Monday, Linehan has not posted from his X account, in apparent compliance with his latest bail condition. He was permanently suspended from the platform for hate speech in 2020, but had his account reinstated in December 2022, shortly after Musk completed his acquisition of the site. While his relentlessly vicious rhetoric may cause continued issues for him in the U.K., it seems he doesn’t have to worry about X’s head moderator booting him off again anytime soon.