GLP are going after Sarah Phillimore and are going to lose - Part Two

[fromorbit]

The Story so Far

Part 1

The first thread
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5400132-glp-are-going-after-sarah-philmore-and-are-going-to-lose?page=1

Get the popcorn folks. GLP is getting ready to lose again.

They are going after barrister Sarah Phillimore for referring to a man as a man. They think they are going to lawfare her into silence.

Her blog:
Here we are now: Entertain us
I have had now 7 years and counting of the various tactics used to 'silence' those who won't comply with prevailing orthodoxy. How are those tactics holding up?
https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/here-we-are-now-entertain-us?

The only thing is other TAs have already tried this on Phillimore multiple times.

They went to the Bar Council their claims were dismissed. They all failed. More to the point this ‘Kate’ is the same guy complaining again who already failed. Sarah Phillimore knows the law and likes explaining it to TAs and making them lose. So she doesn't even resent the attempt.

As Sarah has stated "They pick on someone who not only enjoys this but has now a vast repository of knowledge about the law in this area."

Part 2

So the Fox Basher decided to tell massive lies about Sarah Phillimore now he faces a defamation action.

GLP's case against Sarah rested on evidence from "Kate" and this turned out to be the infamous man in a dress Sophie Sparkles. A guy who was too obnoxious, chaotic and threatening even for the Scottish Greens to tolerate. Even for someone as incompetent as the Fox Basher this plan seemed particularly bad.

A band of helpful gardeners assembled and planted a lot of seeds and soon Sarah's garden was blooming.

Sarah assembled a huge dossier of evidence about Sparkles showing his instability. She carefully built up her case using her excellent legal skills.

After giving the Fox Basher plenty of time to apologise Sarah took action for defamation in December and her blog outlines the story so far nicely:

Letter before Action
I publish here my letter to Jolyon Maugham. There is no freedom of speech to tell harmful lies about others.

For the background to all of this, please see my response to the complaint of the Good Law Project which they made to the Bar Standards Board on August 26 2025. Shortly after this complaint, Mr Maugham chose to assert to his many followers online that I had ‘led a campaign of harassment’ so wicked that it led a trans identifying man to attempt suicide. I deal with that claim at some length in my response. It is not true.

I asked via email on 30 August 2025 for Maugham to delete, apologise and make a donation of £5K to For Women Scotland. His refusal came a few days later in a series of videos posted to TikTok and Instagram where he was clearly excited about the (false) idea that JK Rowling would be joining me in legal action against him. Being able to tell his followers that he faced attack by the Nasty Billionaire Transphobe would clearly have more cachet and would attract more funds to the Good Law Project than a much less sexy tussle with a junior provincial barrister.

I am sorry to disappoint Mr Maugham. It’s just me. Well me, and the so far 990 very generous people who have helped me raise the money to be able to even contemplate this kind of legal action. My grateful thanks to every one of them. I do not think that anyone has ‘freedom of speech’ to tell harmful lies about another person and certainly not a senior member of a regulated profession, who will rely on his status to give his words power and cause harm.

https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/letter-before-action

Now the Bar Standards Board has decided that Sarah has no case to answer and released a letter explaining how the GLP had failed again. Details here:

Right Here. Right Now.

Another stunning technical victory for the Good Law Project shows that sanity is being restored to the public debate about gender identity, slowly but ever so surely.

On 27 March 2026 I received the welcome and to be honest not entirely expected news that the Bar Standards Board was not going to investigate further the complaint of the Good Law Project against me on behalf of trans identifying man Euan Weddell, aka Sophie Molly/Sparkles.

https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/right-here-right-now

GLP are planning to release a statement which will no doubt spin what has happened as much as possible in its usual style.

Will the Fox Basher's long history of misogynistic hatred for any women who has knowledge about biology and legal incompetence come back to haunt him again?

If he is defeated it will be a warning to all TAs that this type of bigotry and massive lies are not going to be accepted legally in a country where women and men are legally equal.

Whatever happen's Sarah's bravery once again will pay a significant part in restoring a world in which discussing the reality of the existence of male and female human beings is accepted.

Her garden still needs more plants, and harvest so far has been excellent and you can keep watching this thread for more proof of that.

I really hope so.

They don't have that level of insight. The onmicause narrative is that plenty of white academics are equally guilty of plagiarism and ignored by the RW press (which incidentally now includes the Guardian apparently) but they harried Jason Arday for the same thing because he was a high achieving black man.

Do you think they actually believe this? Or do they just hope that if they repeat the lie over and over again that other people will believe it?

Anyone who has spent more than two minutes looking at the coverage will know that Arday didn't just plagiarise, he told a series of absurd lies covering the entire period of his life from the moment he was born. Anyone with the faintest understanding of how newspapers work know that this makes him a more interesting story than some dull professor who once copied someone else's work.

I should think that the majority of the people who've noticed this man at all, who neither know nor care that plagiarism is important, will have been made angry because they were lied to and made fools of. Being lied to nearly always annoys people; we see that again and again in MN when a wife whose husband has been having affairs says it's not even him having sex with someone else that has really upset her, it's that he lied to her again and again and took her for a fool.

I think the pig’s head is what gets absolutely everyone riveted to the page. What a gift.

Pity it never happened, really. There is something about stories involving a pig's head that ought to make people suspect they might be total fiction, these days, though.

This story had a tragic ending but as Sarah Ditum* said when interviewed on the Media Show it was very funny. The tall tales & the snooty academics at Cambridge who were so completely taken in by his charming personality that they overlooked his shoddy scholarship. It was the perfect story for the Silly Season.

*As I discovered her surname is pronounced Dyetum not as I had always assumed Dittum.

So true. One of the ironies of all this is that the two organisations most culpable in giving the story traction were the two notionally on Arday's side - the Good Law Project, with its open letter signed by so many senior academics, and the Guardian, with its sensational pig's head story.

Which is why the Omni lot are very unhappy with the Guardian.

Apparently the G gave the story 'legitimacy', because of course some people will only believe a story when its published in a paper with an imaginary sanctimonious halo hovering over it.

Maugham is now saying that the Times' articles are the most 'disgusting' ever published.

The hyperbole is interesting. It's almost like he's trying very hard to convince himself.

"If Maugham is saying it, it must be a lie."

Unfortunately this is becoming a concept that's increasingly difficult to argue with.

I'm 100% sure a lot of them believe it. I follow a lot of omnicause groups and the odd voice cautiously suggesting introspection gets shouted down very quickly. Not just about this, about anything. The loudest most indignant voices shout longest and hardest and most people just sigh and give up.

It's the gaps that tell the real story IMO.

It sounds like 'Trans' Redit, all the heads of the postmodern hydra have a lot in common. They've already claimed their first scalp, Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by his University, they placed him under investigation for discrimination.

I find that fascinating. Nathan Cofnas isn’t JA’s employer, nor does he offer a public service, so in Equality Act terms he doesnt owe a duty of non-discrimination. Obviously he’s not in the UK either; but I’m curious as to what are the terms of the anti-discrimination rules that NC has allegedly broken.

Here's a link to a site that have a piece about it, including the letter the University sent to NC.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/

But isn't the reason any voice of caution, however meek, gets immediately shouted down with shrieks of indignation precisely because they're aware that their arguments are so weak that any questioning will lead to the whole house of cards unravelling?

This is what I always thought about the trans ideology, too. Any voice that questioned the mantra TWAW immediately has to be cancelled because the whole edifice of their ideological construct would come crushing down if people expressed scepticism that male people can be women. Hence the bludgeoning of anyone who doesn't conform to the only permitted belief.

I think it started out as protecting the narrative, they didn't want it questioned because they know, because they've been shown, that their assertions have no weight and can easily be demolished.

But now it's morphed into a matter of political identity, they shout down anyone who thinks differently because they won't tolerate any other world view. Anyone who thinks differently is now the enemy, and cannot be allowed to speak for the sake of humanity, it's taken them to that fired up level of self-righteousness

It's tribalism now, either you're with us or your dead to us type of thinking.

I can understand why Petra de Sutter might be sensitive to accusations that someone was fabricating their life. Probably strikes a little close to home for him.

It Appears Mr Sparkles is starting to realise that GLP is using him, though it seems a pretty mutual case of delusion, though GLP iss the one banking the cash:

https://nitter.net/SVPhillimore/status/2090422265854808235#m

Intersectionality of the grift, Sparkles has become a liability so dump him, he's wised up to them using him and 'trans' to make money. So time to jump on to the CRT grift, despite what the grifters say the fall of Arday is focused on those who are behind it all, the attempt to deify Arday is just to distract critics who are starting to turn their attention to them.

That 'offshore slush fund' as SP termed it, won't fill itself.

Possible that GLP may shift emphasis - rationally it makes more sense. Sparkles is not reliable, a trial will expose that, so it is a huge risk.

However lets see what JM does regarding this lawsuit as I said earlier.

It is crunch time - either JM apologises and pays costs so far.

Or go to full trial which will bring more transparency, and may end in JM being defeated and paying way more.

I think he will go all in and go to trial - ego too large to back down.

Petra de Sutter is a man who claims to be a woman.

If Ghent had really never been aware of Cofnas's objectional views on race until now, then that's another university that couldn't be bothered to do basic due diligence before hiring someone.

What makes you claim Cofnas's objectional views on race, he's an academic who's studying an area certain parties don't want studied.

If the trial is livestreamed I'm booking a week off.

A gynaecologist of all things. I wonder what his motivation was to go into that specialism. Creepy.

Yes. Definitely tribalism. I failed to shout loudly enough during a Two Minutes Hate on JKR started by a trans activist in an otherwise pleasant gathering, and was subsequently attacked unpleasantly (at a meal. so I couldn't simply walk away) by someone else, whom I had previously thought sane and sensible. He was mouthing all the usual lines about how evil she was ("don't you see how she uses her billions just to destroy trans people?") and being really nasty on the assumption that since I had failed to condemn her sufficiently, I was as full of hatred as she is supposed to be. I was shocked, and shaken, and will be avoiding him hereafter. Which means avoiding quite a large part of the life I have been enjoying heretofore.

Unfortunately when I rather sadly said this to my husband, he came out with a lot of the same sort of hatred-inspired garbage about JKR. She doesn't pay taxes, for instance. And when I went and found actual facts (like who owned the yacht he said it was "very convenient" she had disposed of, as if selling a yacht were obviously transphobic) he didn't acknowledge my very careful email, and later told me he wasn't interested in talking about it because he knew nothing about it. (Apart presumably from five anti-JKR points that he had trotted out, all of them inaccurate; and of course the information I had made available to him). And that if I didn't want to talk about things we didn't but if he didn't want to I went on and on about them. In other words, he has accepted "no debate" as a valid way to go through life. He can see, because he is not unintelligent, that his points against her have no validity, so he is running away from admitting it. Oh, and accusing me of being in a cult because I read Mumsnet; he isn't when he reads stuff on Mastodon, obviously.

It's very dispiriting, and makes me dislike him rather a lot when I think about it. And I am too old and tired to leave.