Drag Race France host Nicky Doll is suing U.K. actor Laurence Fox after he called drag performers at the Olympic opening ceremony “deviant little pedos.”
The Paris Olympic opening ceremony on July 26 involved Doll and other drag queens performing as Greek gods in a tribute to the 1635 painting The Feast of the Gods by Jan van Bijlert, which depicts satyrs and gods circling around a table with Dionysis. However, viewers believed this depiction seemed similar to Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which inspired backlash from public right-wing figures.
Fox took to X with his negative response, where he captioned a video of the performance with “No point in getting wound up when the child fuckers want to wind you up. Just laugh at the deviant little pedos. Eternity is a bitch.” Context added by other X users below the post explained that there is no evidence that any of the drag performers are pedophiles.
In response to this incredibly incorrect statement, Doll’s lawyer, Annie Sophie-Laguens, announced a lawsuit against Fox in a statement to Variety on August 3. She explained that Doll experienced “an unprecedented wave of animosity and malice” after Fox’s comments and that the comments count as libel as they “convey odious and defamatory amalgams, equating drag performance to pedophilia.”
Doll responded to Fox’s X post herself, saying, “Since you didn’t learn the first time around when you called my friend (Crystal) a pedo, I’m going to show you that you don’t get to write things like that about queer people for the fun and the misinformation of it and go away with it. See you in court, again.”
Fox recently lost another libel case due to his statements about drag queens. He was sued by Stonewall trustee Simon Blake and drag queen Crystal after he aimed negative comments towards them and was ordered to pay $115,200 in damages per person.
Hopefully, these court cases correct the idea that all queer people are pedophiles, or at the very least, make it legally acceptable to sue those who perpetrate such blatantly homophobic lies.
Photo courtesy of social media
