UK barrister Sarah Phillimore wants to make sure that the legal system clears her name after her social media posts have been painted as hate speech.
What’s worse, she says an anonymous user made sure that the UK police now have her officially recorded for “transphobic and religiously aggravated ‘non-crime hate incident’.” And she learned about it from another Twitter user.
In a campaign she started on CrowdJustice, the leading fundraiser for legal action – Phillimore explains the context of the serious smear against her, that she says is unfounded. While she has been a critic of encouraging children to “transition” to another gender while they are very young, Phillimore says none of her tweets were impolite or hateful in any way.
She does not deny her criticism of the transgender ideology, and while her way of expressing herself often involves humor and satire, she strongly denies any hatred being shown toward any group or religion. But the police secretly had 12 pages of her tweets that they decided to treat as such – even if the overzealous Twitter itself did not see fit to ban or suspend her account for any similar reason.
Phillimore explained that she first heard about her “record for life with the police” in June 2020 from an anonymous Twitter user, only to then confirm that she had been labeled in this way thanks to the “Hate Crimes Operational Guidance” – where “hate” includes think like disliking or being unfriendly towards something/somebody.
Right now, the police are denying Phillimore the right to know who has access to this “record” – and they will not remove it. It contains all her personally identifiable information – full name, date of birth, home address, etc.
Now Phillimore is launching the campaign to raise funds to make the police delete the “record” they have on her, and also hopes to raise the issue of the legality of the “guidance” itself.
She is challenging the accusation of engaging in any “hate speech,” and the recording of her personal data by the police, without even notifying her about its existence.
Update November 10th: The wording of this has been changed to better reflect that the person who reported Phillimore to police is not the same person who let Phillimore know about the list.
