Former British soccer star Joey Barton has been given a six-month suspended sentence for making “grossly offensive” posts on the X platform.
In the latest escalation in the British state’s war on freedom of expression, 43-year-old Barton was found guilty last month at Liverpool Crown Court of six counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety.
The conviction related to posts he made targeting the football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko, as well as the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Vine.
Sentencing Barton on Monday, Judge Andrew Menary KC said that “robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.”
”But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.”
Menary went on to describe Barton as “not a man of previous good character” and said he had carried out “a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful.”
While Barton’s comments could definitely be condemned as extremely unkind, most were intended as jokes or crass humor.
During an FA Cup tie in which Ward and Aluko were commentating, Barton described them as the “Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a reference to the notorious British serial killers.
In another post, he mocked Jeremy Vine as a “bike nonce” and asked if he had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.
Hellbound and Down 