British comedian Graham Linehan was arrested at the Heathrow airport, Monday, for three of his X posts, reigniting accusations that the United Kingdom is failing to protect free speech.
Linehan was boarding a flight from Arizona to London when a U.S. official told him he “didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed.” Linehan made another flight to London, and when he stepped off the plane at the Heathrow airport, he was greeted by five armed police officers, who told him he “was under arrest for three tweets,” as he recounted in a Substack post.
A van took him from the tarmac to the Heathrow police station, where his belt, bag and devices were confiscated. Then he was locked in a small prison cell. Linehan said, “I kept waking up wondering if it was all actually happening.”
Then Linehan was pulled from his cell for an interview with police officers about his tweets. The officers read each aloud to him.
Linehan had written on April 20, “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
The officers also read two tweets from April 19. Linehan had posted a photo of a city corner in London filled with people draped in and holding the transgender flag. His caption read, “A photo you can smell.”
Also on April 19, Linehan tweeted, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. (Expletive) em.”
Linehan described the interview that followed with the officers. “I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke,” he wrote. “Men who enter women’s spaces ARE abusers and they need to be challenged every time. The ‘punch in the bollocks’ bit was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence. (Not one of my best as one of the female officers said, ‘We’re not THAT small’).”
Part-way through the interview, a nurse came in, took Linehan’s blood pressure and found it was over 200, so he was then escorted to the emergency room. “The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life!” he wrote, adding that he was writing the Substack post from the hospital, after spending eight hours under observation.
The officers gave Linehan a single bail condition: stay off X. “That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes — just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m the U.K., and a demand I face a further interview in October,” Linehan said.
He continued, “To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.”
Linehan’s X account has gone silent in the last 24 hours.