Jack Monroe has spoken about their legal victory against Katie Hopkins for the first time.
Food blogger Monroe appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire show with lawyer Mark Lewis, following their High Court libel action which found in their favour on Friday.
Monroe won £24,000 in damages, while Hopkins must pay both her own and Monroe’s legal bills, a figure some experts say could exceed £300,000.
The action was over a tweet sent by Hopkins in 2015 which implied Monroe had either vandalised a war memorial or had condoned the act.
Monroe, who identifies outside the binary construct of gender and prefers the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ and title ‘Mx’, told Derbyshire that despite the tweets unleashing “a tidal wave” of abusive messages, including death threats, they bear no ill will to Hopkins.
They said: “I feel quite compassionate and quite sympathetic because nobody needs a £300k legal bill… I’ve emerged the victor and had a lot of public support and I can’t even begin to imagine how she feels at the moment.
“I bear no ill will towards her, I’ve told my Twitter followers not to be unkind, not to be abusive, because I hope if this case achieves anything it’s people being a little bit kinder and a little bit better to each other on the internet. So me, sending my followers in with a pile on, it’s just going to undo all of that.”
Monroe, who would visit their local cenotaph to pray while their brother was on active tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, had earlier demanded Hopkins apologise for the tweets and even “flippantly” suggested they would drop the matter if the mother-of-three made a £5,000 donation to a migrant supporting charity.
But Hopkins refused, leading to the action in which Monroe sued her, claiming the tweets caused “serious harm” to their reputation.
Monroe added: “It’s been stressful. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody but I started it and I had to see it through. It’s been almost two years of endlessly revisiting the vilest and most abusive of messages I’ve received in order to give evidence, write witness statements. I’ve had to delve back down that rabbit hole about a dozen times, into absolute darkness and hatred. It’s put a lot of stress on my personal life, I haven’t really been in a relationship since because everyone thought I was mad to try and take her on.
“It sounds really trite when you talk about it but when you’re caught up in it, in the middle of that storm, and when it’s coming through and you’re trying to read your son a bedtime story, and your phone is flashing up with people calling you every name under the sun and telling you that you’re the worst human being in the world… it permeates every corner of your life.”
Hopkins did not attend the hearing and has not commented on the outcome of the action, other than to tweet a picture of herself in the guise of the Virgin Mary, stating: “I see myself as the Jesus of the outspoken.”
When asked what they thought, Monroe replied: “I was brought up in the church. It takes a certain kind of person to compare themselves to a deity. That’s all we need to say about that.”