The making of a bully – about “Sophia Brooks”, complainant in Graham Linehan’s trial (video transcript)

Published: 01/01/26

I’ve slightly amended the transcript for clarity.

Hi everyone. This is a re-upload of a video I made about the complainant in Graham Linehan’s case, which contained footage taken by the complainant. He managed to get it removed for breach of copyright, by which time it had already had well over 8,000 views. I have edited the copyrighted material out of this version and I have uploaded this  to my website.

(Here it is.  See also below.)

He will no doubt try to get it removed from my site. Not because he doesn’t want the footage seen – I mean, he uploaded it himself to YouTube and it’s been widely shared on social media – but because doing so gives him the sense of power that he desperately craves. In the meantime, I have uploaded a new video about that same person, which contains no copyrighted material and is even more revealing of him than this one is. Here are both videos. Cheers.

Comedy writer Graham Linehan stood trial as a result of a complaint to the police by a young man, whom I will refer to as ‘Tarquin’, which is not the name he uses in real life. Graham was found not guilty of harassment, but guilty of damaging Tarquin’s phone, and he’s appealing that one. I’ve got things to say about the trial and, in particular, my evidence for it, but I won’t say them in this video.

What I want to say in this video has nothing to do with Graham. It’s about an earlier incident, which I think probably helped to embolden Tarquin to keep harassing people and trying to use the police as his personal goon squad – and succeeding!

But the first thing I want to say is that Tarquin may well try to get this video taken down, as he tried with two previous videos of mine that feature him. Here is the big blokey bloke who larps as a young girl, calling me “delusional” and boasting about being able to stop people from seeing my videos. A “bit pointless really,” he opines.

Hmm…It’s almost as if he’s ashamed of what I may show of his behaviour.

He succeeded in getting the first one taken down, and I re-uploaded it recently with the bit showing him edited out, though you can see that edited-out bit on my website. He failed with the second, which was my evidence to the court in the trial of Graham Linehan, which I’ll talk about next time.

The reason he failed to get it removed is that I told YouTube it was already in the public domain and had been seen by thousands of people and, because he tried to get it removed, all I had to do was publicise the fact he’d made a complaint about it to get thousands more views than I would otherwise have got and many more people shared and started uploading it all over the place just to spite him. There’s a name for this phenomenon, isn’t there? What is it? Oh, the Streisand effect – when trying to suppress information backfires and draws more attention to it. So…a bit pointless really.

Now that his chosen name has been in all the newspapers, I could mention it as well but I’m not going to because – as a posh bloke – ‘Tarquin’ suits him much better than the lovely feminine name he’s assumed and which looks every bit as ridiculous on him as any other accoutrement of femininity would.

This video is about what happened the first time I ever saw Tarquin in real life – so far as I know – which was when he turned up to one of Kellie-Jay Keen’s events at Hyde Park in April 2023. I wouldn’t have recognised him even if I could see his face, which I couldn’t because it was entirely covered by some kind of mask – a ski mask or something. And that was the only reason I noticed him at all and I thought he looked a right wally. I mean, it was Hyde Park, not the Swiss Alps or somewhere. Though, having since seen him without the mask, I have to say he does look a lot better with it on.

In fact, he recorded the moment that I noticed him for the first time. This is a still from his footage.

It was really crowded on that particular Sunday at Speakers’ Corner which, as you may know is a corner of Hyde Park where people go and make speeches about whatever they like. That’s been the tradition there for about 200 years, I think, and it’s where Kelly-Jay Keene first started having her Let Women Speak events.

I later learned that Tarquin claimed to have been assaulted and that I had witnessed it and it was all on film. The reason I want to talk about it is because it’s such a good illustration of the dishonesty and hypocrisy and double standards of certain individuals who leapt on that footage and used it to again lie about me and slag me off. I also think that what happened with regard to that incident showcases the two-tier police and criminal justice system we have in the UK. I’m going to show this footage now.

It starts with a shake to Tarquin’s phone as he was filming. The guy whose face I’ve obscured then threw a mock punch, which didn’t land. You have to take my word for this, but he’s smiling as he does it. He doesn’t look angry. He’s just kind of larking about and then he turns away, like it’s forgotten. I don’t condone any of what he did, even though Tarquin was being deliberately provocative. The Let Women Speak event was over, people were moving en masse away from the area and he was standing there in the middle of the crowd, facing most people and ostentatiously filming them close up.

Now, at this point, I want to show a comment that I spotted on bluesky.com when I went there looking for what the nutcases were saying about Graham Linehan’s trial. I found this from a certain nasty piece of work called Helen Islan.

“It is genuinely disturbing to me that so many adults are defending Graham Linehan,” blah blah blah. And then she replies to herself, “In terms of rank hypocrisy, when Maria MacLachlan filmed trans teenagers without consent, the terfs cast her as the victim too when the teen tried to get her camera.”

There were no trans teenagers there, Helen, you lying piece of s***!

It was three adult men, one of whom, aged 25 at the time, was caught and convicted of assault on me. So, there was a pack of lies about me from her and someone else in that thread, but I’ll keep to this one. She’s referring, of course, to the notorious assault on me at that same location, Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, which had happened all of eight years earlier. I hardly ever mention it unless it is to correct one of the many lies they keep telling about it. They keep going on and on about it and when I do correct them, of course, they tell me to shut up and stop dining out on it. They can lie about it to their heart’s content. And I’ve got to put up and shut the f*** up.

Sorry, not happening!

For those who haven’t seen it, I link to a video giving all the detail and showing all the footage and I have no doubt that normal people seeing it will discern a difference between my act of filming a protest from several feet away (and being filmed back) and Tarquin’s act of standing in the middle of a crowd of people filming them close up, athough – to reiterate – I don’t condone any act of trying to physically interfere with Tarquin filming. He has a right to do so.

I know that, according to the law of the land, the word ‘assault’ has a wider meaning than how I think most people understand it. When you hear the word ‘assault’, you’re thinking violence to some degree. I don’t think most people see a tap on the shoulder or a tap on the hand as assault. Whereas, according to the law, you don’t even have to touch someone for it to be an assault. You just have to believe that a physical assault on you is about to take place. If you lay it on thick enough, who’s to say that you weren’t terrified that you were about to have your face broken?

Tarquin laid it on thick enough for that guy to be arrested, charged and convicted of assault and he got a fine, after which his name was posted on social media. And because some of the cultists – including Tarquin – had started spreading this nonsense that I’d seen it, I looked up the defendant. He’s very respectable – not a criminal type by any stretch of the imagination. I managed to contact him and we had a very brief exchange. He confirmed that he did not believe in his own mind that he had assaulted Tarquin and that’s why he pleaded not guilty. He honestly thought the charge was ridiculous. And so do I.

I found an article on Medium written in November 2023, presumably just after the man had been convicted. It’s by Tarquin’s mate, the man who calls himself ‘Freda Wallace’. He quotes Tarquin without naming him or showing a photo… he’s just “the victim”. And he says he had just started recording when the man,

“…came to the side of me and tried hitting my phone out of my hand and then attempted to punch me. He slapped it strongly in a clear attempt to destroy my phone. He also admitted that he had made a jabbing gesture towards me so as to frighten me into leaving and stopping my recording of the event. “

Of course, we don’t know what the defendant said in that trial, but given what the judge in Graham Linahan’s trial said in her written judgment about Tarquin’s lack of credibility and truthfulness, I’m taking whatever Tarquin says with a pinch of salt.

Credibility of the complainant

47. I have some concerns about the credibility of the complainant and the answers which they gave the court. I am not prepared to say that they have given evidence which is entirely incapable of belief and in some aspects, accept that they were giving the court honest evidence. However, I am not prepared to find that they have given me entirely truthful evidence. There are a number of inconsistencies or areas of concern which leads me to this conclusion.

He goes on,

“I personally believe he attacked me as he viewed me as a vulnerable young woman on the other side. He could hit and get away with abusing.”

Now, this is complete nonsense from start to finish. As I said, this was after the Let Women Speak event had finished. It would have started at around 1:00 pm and they last a couple of hours. According to Tarquin’s own notes made just after the incident, which he helpfully uploaded to X recently, he was assaulted at 15:22 hours.

He also says, “he was watching” Let Women Speak. Wrong tense. He maybe had been watching it, but it was over by then. Note the very precise timing. He was apparently a police cadet at the time. Police cadets are a teenage volunteer thing run by police but not themselves part of the police. But it’s possible that the fact that he was a police cadet did incline the police more sympathetically towards him. I have absolutely no doubt he would have tried to leverage that fact in his favour.

But nobody could mistake Tarquin for a vulnerable young woman – or any kind of woman. Nobody standing in a crowd of their enemies, defiantly filming people, could be mistaken for being vulnerable. I think it’s far more plausible that it was because he presented as the very opposite of vulnerable that the guy did what he did. It seems to me that man was kind of saying, “If you’re trying to provoke something, I’m up for it, but I’m only half serious.” He didn’t even knock his hand hard enough to dislodge the phone from it. And if he wanted to destroy it, he would surely – at the very least – have grabbed it from him, especially if he thought he was dealing with a vulnerable young woman.

Going back to the video, as you can see, a couple of seconds later, I appear. I’m in the crowd as we’re all moving away from where the event had been. The expression on my face is vacant. Some might even say “gormless”.

In fact, here’s someone who did. It is none other than the execrable cowardly pervert with a penchant for filming himself in ladies public toilets – Joss Prior – and whose only claim to fame was that, within hours after I was assaulted back in 2017, he put an enormous amount of effort into inventing a fake narrative, positioning me as the instigator and getting it shared very widely, very quickly.

And here he is still banging on about it years later.

He starts with, “gender critical blokes are the absolute worst”. There’s nothing about this bloke to suggest he is gender critical, although he may be because most reasonable people are, really. But I’d never seen him before or since at any gender critical event – and I go to many.  We don’t even know whether he was there in Hyde Park on a sunny Sunday in April specifically for the Let Women Speak event or if he was just drawn to our event because he was in the park anyway and he saw the large crowd.

Next:

“But the gormless woman who appears at the end, Maria Mac…” (note I appear at the end) “still dines out on a scuffle she instigated, then played victim in 2017 that made the press, but she’s completely okay watching this thug smack the camera of a 16-year-old girl”.

Well, apart from the obvious fact that he’s the one dining out on it (here’s a link to the video I made showing his obsessive bullying campaign against me ever since), do you see me watching the incident? No. I appear at the end, like he said. It was an assumption he made from a place of stupidity and malice because that’s what he’s all about. He is the personification of hate.

The woman whose comment I showed earlier, Helen Islan, also posted on Twitter X back in November 2023 about the assault on Tarquin. And this one is just such an extraordinary demonstration of how a slavish adherence to a cult ideology poisons the mind and shrinks the brain.

I mean, imagine that! How could I possibly have seen an assault on a young girl and have zero reaction? What’s wrong with me? It hasn’t entered her thick head that the only reason I had zero reaction was that I did not see any assault and I didn’t even see any typical aftermath to an assault such as the victim recoiling or shouting or crying or anything because it didn’t happen. Tarquin just calmly kept on filming.

But it’s the next thing she says that is totally mind-blowing – I have “form”?

And she’s taken the title of the blog post I wrote after the assault on me and from the body of the blog post, she’s taken a still that was tweeted by another one of these desperados.

The still shows me trying to hold on to the clothing of the young man who’d smashed my camera to the ground to stop him getting away. But in the sick mind of ‘Secret Gamer Girl’ (pictured above), it showed me “thrashing a woman up and down like a rag doll”. And what Helen has done is place that still right under my title as if I had chosen it to illustrate me fighting.

You might imagine that Helen is transgender, but no, it’s worse than that. She has a trans child, who must be a young adult by now and she was apparently supportive of the child’s transition, which makes her a failed parent as far as I’m concerned. I believe she either worked for or volunteered for the Mermaids charity, which makes her an utterly despicable human being, oblivious to reason. Years ago, she made national newspaper headlines for trying to get Miranda Yardley prosecuted for harassment of her. Miranda Yardley is a self-described transsexual who doesn’t claim to be any kind of woman and he isn’t in thrall to gender ideology.

Britain’s first transgender hate crime trial is halted after one day as the judge says there is no case and never was a case.

Daily Mail headline

Debbie Hayden wrote in his column in The Spectator that he had been required to attend court as a witness for the defence. But in the end, he didn’t need to take the stand because, after Helen had testified, the judge ruled that the prosecution had failed to make a case and awarded costs to the defence. (I think she should award me some costs for the shit she speaks about me.) Anyway, Debbie wrote, “After 10 months, this bizarre case where a trans person had been accused of a transphobic hate crime by someone who was not trans was dismissed by a district judge as groundless. How did we get here?”

Well, we got there because the police and Crown Prosecution Service were indulging vicious, spiteful gender lunatics like Helen Islan. There were several more posts from different cultists about me watching this alleged assault on a young girl without reacting, but I’ll just show one more.

This guy, I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned him in a video before, but I did write a comprehensive blog post about him some years ago. He described the assault on me as a “tap on the shoulder”. A tap on the shoulder doesn’t put you on the ground, James. He is one of the worst bullies, one of the most evil cult members. And it’s a mystery to me as to why he, as a straight man, a father of daughters – not trans-identifying, so far as I know – is so devoted to an ideology that allows straight men to access spaces where young girls get undressed.

Needless to say, every part of this comment is a barefaced lie – including the first part, unfortunately. I wish I was JK Rowling’s pal.

Okay, I’m going to leave it there. This video, I’ll admit, feels therapeutic to me to get a few things off my chest. But the main point I wanted to make is that having been indulged by the police and the courts on that occasion, I believe Tarquin has been deliberately trying to provoke some kind of physical attack on himself ever since. He’s a bully and it’s his way of gaining kudos from other bullies in the gender cult.

And it’s yet another indictment of just how our captured police have become.

That’s all.