ELON MUSK SPENT New Year’s Day tweeting about Tommy Robinson, an alias of English far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is currently in prison after admitting contempt of court.
“Free Tommy Robinson,” Musk wrote, along with dozens of other posts on X supporting Robinson and trashing the British government about gangs exploiting children in the UK.
Why was the world’s richest man – who had the night before been partying at Mar-a-Lago with the president-elect of the United States – using a social media company he bought to celebrate a disgraced British convict?
“Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth?” Musk wrote. (Robinson was jailed for contempt of court after repeatedly lying about a teenage assault victim).
Musk also retweeted many posts that made similar claims, including that Robinson was a political prisoner.
One of the posts read: “Tommy warned the world before anyone was paying attention that gangs of migrants were raping young British girls and his country repaid him by censoring him, harassing him, protecting the rapists and by jailing him.”
So, who is Tommy Robinson? Why is he in prison? And is he being silenced for blowing the whistle on the UK’s grooming gangs?
Tommy Robinson’s criminal history begins with a 2005 conviction for assaulting an off-duty police officer who had intervened in a street argument between Robinson and his then-girlfriend. Robinson, who still went by the name Stephen Yaxley‐Lennon at the time, received a one-year prison sentence.
Robinson’s subsequent involvement with crime is too long to list in any detail. In brief: he has been legally found to have committed and instigated further assaults, fraud, stalking, attempted cocaine dealing and using a fake passport to enter America, as well as previously being imprisoned for contempt of court, a subject we will revisit later.
Robinson is currently under investigation for disseminating misinformation that may have instigated riots.
Robinson’s career of political activism is also a long string of brief involvements with far-right and anti-immigration groups, including co-founding the English Defence League in 2009, and joining the pro-Brexit UK Independence party in 2018.
While mostly advocating against Islam and Muslims, Robinson has also embraced Covid-19 conspiracy theories, promoting claims that vaccines cause deaths and cancer.
Despite receiving millions in donations from supporters, Robinson has recently declared himself to be bankrupt, citing £100,000 he lost gambling at one legal hearing.
Tommy Robinson is in jail for repeatedly libelling an assault victim.
In 2018, a video spread on the internet showing a Syrian schoolboy, Jamal Hijazi, being attacked at a school playground. Robinson released his own videos in which he claimed, falsely and without evidence, that the victim was himself a perpetrator of violence.
Robinson said Hijazi was “not innocent and he violently attacks young English girls in his school”.
In clips viewed by nearly one million people, Robinson also claimed Jamal “beat a girl black and blue” and “threatened to stab” another boy at his school.
Robinson’s allegations led to the teenager receiving death threats.
Despite admitting that his accusations were false shortly after posting them, Robinson later defended his allegations in court, which ruled against him in 2021.
Robinson was ordered to pay Hijazi £100,000 in damages as well as his legal costs, and was ordered not to repeat the allegations.
However, after the ruling, Robinson continued to spread the claims against the teenager, including in an hour-and-45-minute documentary that Musk himself recommended people watch on X on New Year’s Day.
Last October, Robinson admitted his contempt of court by continuing to spread the allegations, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In other words, Robinson is in prison for repeatedly telling lies.
Nothing really.
While Robinson has often spoken about the grooming gangs, often to emphasise that many of the crimes involved non-white men exploiting white girls, he does not appear to have had any part in uncovering the crimes or helping to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The most substantial effect Robinson had regarding the grooming gang scandals appears to be breaking reporting restrictions on a trial, almost causing the prosecution of the largest known grooming gang to collapse and child rapists to walk free.
For this, Robinson was jailed for contempt of court, a fact he later used to garner media attention. Robinson claimed to be arrested for speaking out against groomers and that he had been placed in solitary confinement and “mentally tortured” — a claim the prison rejected.
“Mr Yaxley-Lennon was treated with the same fairness we aim to show all prisoners – he had access to visits, television, and showers – and it is totally false to say he was held in ‘solitary confinement’”, a Prison Service spokesman told UK paper The Independent.
The UK Ministry of Justice did not confirm Robinson’s current status to The Journal, but did note: “Those who pose a risk to the good order and discipline of the establishment and to the wellbeing of themselves and others will be separated from the wider population.”
The claim that Robinson is being politically persecuted is odd given that the court order he broke came about as the result of a civil, not a criminal, trial.
Musk’s support of Robinson, as well as his disregard of facts are just the latest instances of an ongoing trend.
Musk has also recently endorsed the Germany’s AfD, a far-right political party whose representatives have been found to engage in racist Facebook groups that posted pro-Nazi memes.
While Musk made too many other false and dubious claims about the UK grooming gang scandal on X since the New Year to tackle, the central claim is that Tommy Robinson is in jail for telling the truth.
The opposite is true: Robinson is in jail for repeatedly telling lies.
With reporting from PA.
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