Tommy Robinson’s July 2019 trial in London for contempt of court—stemming from his May 2018 questioning outside the Leeds rape gang convictions—reveals a politically charged campaign by Theresa May’s Attorney General’s office, despite a unanimous Court of Appeal overturning his prior 13-month prison sentence. The prosecution, backed by police helicopters and heavy resources, hinges on claims of distress to convicted men rather than trial disruption, while witness Michelle Dunderdale admitted the court failed to notify the public about a publication ban Robinson didn’t breach. His social media bans (Facebook, Twitter) cost him nearly two million followers, yet Rebel Media’s journalists—including Jessica S., Andrew Lawton, and Avi Yamini—crowdfund their coverage. Levant frames this as a modern echo of British oppression, questioning whether the state is weaponizing legal processes to silence dissent, much like historical crackdowns on figures like Al Capone. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, today I'm in the United Kingdom covering Tommy Robinson's final fateful trial for contempt of court.
If he loses, he'll be back in prison most likely.
So tune in.
Hey, before you go, can you subscribe to become a premium member?
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So you can do that at the Rebel.media slash shows.
All right, here's my special show from London on Tommy Robinson.
You're listening to a Rebel Media podcast.
Tonight, Tommy Robinson is back on trial yet again and risks prison for reporting on a rape gang.
Will the UK's most persistent critic finally be silenced?
It's the 4th of July, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government is because it's my bloody right to do so.
It's the 4th of July, or as the Americans call it, Independence Day.
That's the day the United States, the 13 colonies, formally declared themselves independent of the United Kingdom and laid out their case for why.
It was because they were governed, they argued, by an increasingly tyrannical Great Britain.
They claimed that the government they had once loved had become a tyranny, had undone the traditions of liberty and basic rights.
It's really an amazing document.
It's history, it's literature, it's a political manifesto, it's a restatement of liberty.
Can I read a couple of sentences from the Declaration of Independence?
We Canadians probably don't read it enough.
It's that true American spirit.
I wish we had a bit more of that spirit up here in Canada.
And you'll see why I'm reading this today, not just because it's the 4th of July for our American friends, but because there is now a trial underway today in the United Kingdom itself about Tommy Robinson in its great and ancient capital, London, that I believe is an echo of the tyranny outlined in this Declaration almost 250 years ago.
Let me read a little bit.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I'll stop there.
So it's a Declaration of Independence, not a declaration of war.
They wanted to dissolve their ties with the UK, a divorce, really, because they were free men, they said.
That's the second part, right?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I spent too much time today poking around reading through that document and a dozen things related to it because here we are in 2019 on Independence Day and I see a man named Tommy Robinson who is on trial for being a journalist for reporting from outside the Leeds County Court last May.
Let me read you just two more lines from the Declaration of Independence.
Maybe they'd apply to Tommy.
The Declaration of Independence has a list of grievances, like an indictment, like a prosecutor's case.
Remember, they're making the case for separating from the UK.
Let me read a little bit.
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury.
I think that applies here.
More in a moment on that.
Here's more.
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.
I think that applies to Tommy.
More on that in a moment.
Let me read one more line.
In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms.
Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Tommy In Contempt?00:15:21
Boy, that's good.
Yeah, so really, what's changed in the UK since 1776?
So Tommy Robinson was standing outside the court in Leeds, UK, where a huge rape gang was on trial inside for raping dozens of British girls as young as 11.
Raping them again and again every night, by the way.
Dozens of men working together as a swarm.
The trial was over.
It was now judgment day for the accused rapists.
The jury would reveal their verdict.
Tommy was outside the courthouse.
He had not gone in to the trial itself.
He was talking in general terms about rape gangs and about how little the government had done about them and how politically correct the media was and how it's a real problem.
He was careful to call the rapists that day accused rapists, for they were technically not yet guilty, at least not for a few more minutes until the verdict was handed out.
He was careful not to step physically onto the court property and in fact asked an officer several times.
He had gone into the court to ask officers in the court advice on what reporting restrictions, if any, that there were.
And the court officers admit they did not tell him anything.
And frankly, they themselves did not know.
It was really banal.
It was unremarkable, except that they hate Tommy Robinson over there, and by they, I mean the establishment of all sorts.
I suppose the only other thing I ought to mention is that when the accused rapists were showing up to court where they would be convicted and thus be called convicted rapists, not just alleged rapists, pedophiles to be precise, Tommy asked them how they were feeling about their chances.
Here, watch a bit.
I want you to see this.
All right, lads, how are you feeling?
How are you feeling about your verdict?
How are you feeling about your verdict?
How you feeling about your verdict?
What verdict?
How you feeling about the verdict?
You got your prison bag, are you?
Yeah, look at you.
You've got your bags, we huh?
You've got your bags, we huh?
How you feeling about the verdict?
You've got no guilt.
Is there any guilt?
Is there any guilt, mate?
So really nothing more than Tommy himself is scrummed with by reporters when he himself shows up for court.
Fresh freedom is on trial, not me.
Everyone here is committing contempt to be caught if I'm convicted today.
How do you feel today?
No, no, it's alright, leave them, leave them.
I don't know what you've just done to me.
That's why I'm facing prosecution court.
Asking someone as they walked into trial how they feel today.
Tommy asked the rapist precisely the same thing he's asked.
In fact, he's asked those questions by the British media in a more accusatory way.
I've never seen the UK media do anything as dainty as calling Tommy accused.
They have long ago convicted him of hate crimes, even though he's never been convicted, let alone tried or charged for a hate crime.
So as you know, that day in May of last year in Leeds, Tommy was arrested by a swarm of seven police, taken to the police station, then brought to the judge, where he was tried in less than 10 minutes.
So obviously the judge did not even review the 75-minute live stream that Tommy had broadcast.
Tommy himself did not say a word in that trial.
He did not plead guilty or otherwise accede to his sentence.
He did not have the meaningful right to a lawyer.
The public defender he was assigned had no experience with contempt of court, which is a technical and obscure area of the law.
The public defender did not have Tommy's legal history in front of him, including a previous contempt of court case in Canterbury.
It was a drumhead trial, 10 minutes, finished before lunch, because why waste time?
It's lunch.
And Tommy was immediately shipped off to prison.
Tommy asked the rapists if they were going to prison.
Three hours after that, he himself was taken to prison with a 13-month sentence.
The first journalist to be imprisoned for contempt of court since the 1940s in the UK.
A comfortable enough prison.
But then without explanation or warning, he was moved to one of the most dangerous prisons in the UK that was actually run by the Muslim gangs therein.
Here's part of an interview I did with Tommy shortly after he got out.
I had frets every day, yeah.
You know this heat that we've had here?
I couldn't have my cell windows open because they would be spat through or shit put through them.
Oh my god.
And so I had my windows shut all the time.
And then at the same time as that, I had just frets from everywhere.
And then at the same time as that, I had to peace visit my mother and my wife to tell them that there's intelligence, there's going to be acid attacks on them.
He was dangerous, so they threw him in solitary confinement for his own good for more than two months.
That's illegal, by the way.
And he was threatened with death by the Muslim prison gang, and the Muslim prison gang made his food for that solitary cell so he couldn't eat it.
He just had to eat a piece of fruit in the can of tuna a day.
Every prisoner comes out, you walk into a kitchen canteen and you see the person hand you dinner.
Yeah.
But it's prisoners, which are Muslims.
But I didn't even get to see so that I could see what they've done to all the food.
My dinner was brought to me on a plate and handed to me at my door.
And who knows what happened?
And then I've got them telling me, how was your dinner, Tommy?
Oh, yeah.
So I know.
And it's easy to get anything smuggled.
And it's, and so, yeah, so essentially, but then they, so then they, the prison knew this, and I put in, I've got a copy of everything.
I've put in complaint after complaint saying, look, all you need to do, because I could only spend £12 a week.
£12 a week brought me five tins of tuna.
So basically what I've ate, there's a tin of tuna a day and fruit.
It was the dictionary definition of torture.
As you know, we hear the rebel crowdfunded the cost of his legal appeal and the court of appeal itself in a unanimous ruling released him from prison, tore a strip off the judge and the prison system itself and quashed his conviction.
Absolute vindication, though not a word of it published by the British Media Party.
And the Attorney General of the United Kingdom under an allegedly Conservative government has chosen to prosecute Tommy once again for that same day back in Leeds more than a year ago.
To be clear, the rape trial was not endangered.
It couldn't have been.
The trial was over.
The jury was done deliberating.
They were about to reveal their verdict.
One of the men appealed their conviction, a long-shot appeal, saying, well, Tommy's broadcast had an impact in his conviction.
The High Court judge threw that out as a laughably false desperation bid.
So it is a fact.
He literally did not disturb the trial.
That is a matter of fact.
That is a matter of law.
And he already falsely served 10 weeks in prison, so why is he being prosecuted again for the same thing?
Well, that is what's so insane.
They can't say that he upset or could upset the trial.
It's over.
He didn't.
They noted that he tried to comply with all the rules.
He checked with the police.
He checked with the court officers.
Am I okay to stand here?
So what exactly did he do wrong?
Why are they prosecuting me again?
They are literally arguing, get this, that he caused distress to those rapists on their way into the court.
I'm not kidding.
They're prosecuting him for that.
Again, I kid you not.
Hey, how about taking some of the millions of dollars used to police Tommy's speech and spend that cracking down on the rape gangs themselves?
If you want to shut Tommy up about rape gangs going after British children, it's probably the easiest way to do it.
Stop the rape gangs going after British children.
Then Tommy will shut up.
So he's back on trial today.
And I have been reliably informed that it's the real deal.
It's the big one.
I've been going over there for little skirmishes in court over procedural matters.
For example, at the Old Bailey last time, the judge, two times ago, the most senior criminal judge in the UK called the Recorder of London.
That's an ancient title.
The Recorder of London said it was a controversial and complicated enough matter that the Attorney General would have to decide to proceed with the prosecution.
And the judge threw it back to the politicians.
I thought that was wise.
And I thought the politicians would be wise to let sleeping dogs lie.
Tommy already served more prison time than many violent criminals do for the thought crime of reporting, but now it's actually going back.
It's on.
The substantive hearing will proceed today.
They really are going to do this.
Two days have been set aside for the meat of the hearing.
If he's found in contempt, he could be sent back to prison, possibly even for the duration of the 13-month sentence given to him in Leeds.
By the way, if that happens, I do believe he'll likely be killed in there.
You saw how thin he was when they let him out of prison.
He lost 40 pounds, three stone, as they say in the UK, in 10 weeks.
He was half mad, PTSD, shell shock, a version of it, locked in a box for 23 and a half hours a day, only let out to be screamed at by Muslim gangs threatening to kill him.
He'd go mad if he's not poisoned or stabbed first.
And I think the UK government and Theresa May would be just fine with that.
So I'm recording this commentary right now in Toronto.
And then I'm about to hop on a plane with this pre-recorded.
And hopefully I won't be stopped at the border as some leftist British journalists have demanded would happen to me.
It is a fact that the British media is uniformly against Tommy.
And so now they are uniformly against me too for reporting with some sympathy and accuracy on his case.
The British media, especially the BBC, has three times complained about my coverage, once to the actual Metropolitan Police of London.
I'm not making that up.
Once to the recorder of London himself.
And once last time, they actually interrupted the trial.
They stopped the trial.
The media did.
They passed a note to a clerk who passed it to the judge mid-trial to complain that I was live tweeting from the court as I had permission to do.
They're mad over there, the media.
And they have complete silence, completely silenced Tommy himself.
They kicked him off all the social media, where Tommy used to have one million Facebook followers.
He had nearly a million followers on Twitter.
So now he's voiceless.
So they want to come for us here, the Rebel 2.
We'll see how that goes.
So we'll see.
So I'm going to the UK.
I recorded this in Toronto, getting on a plane, going to the UK.
So we'll see.
If you want to help cover the costs of my flight in the hotel, please do.
Go to realreporters.uk.
I'm also crowdfunding the costs for three other reporters, our own Jessica S. Of course.
She did a great job covering Tommy's political campaign in May, so she's coming over to cover the trial too.
And so is our friend Andrew Lawton, who did a great job the first time.
Remember this?
Before the proceeding even started, this is what they said about Tommy.
Quote, he is in contempt of court.
There's not really any doubt.
And there was one more.
You see, one of the great members of the law enforcement who have done a lot of great work today said to them, at the time there were about 1,500 people, they said, let's just say a few hundred, quote, because we want to give it credit.
That's why I'm here.
Thank you.
Yeah, he's coming, and we're paying for some of his costs.
And of course, the thunder from down under, Avi Yamini, we're covering his flight all the way from Melbourne, Australia.
So between my flight and hotel and Jessica's and Andrew and Avi, it's about $7,000 or $8,000.
Let's call it £4,000, £5,000.
If you can help, I'd be grateful.
Just go to realreporters.uk.
All right.
That's it from Canada.
I pre-recorded this before I flew.
Let's see if I can actually give you an on-the-scene update from the courthouse itself.
For the Rebel.media, I'm Ezra Levant.
Behind me, even though it's almost 5 p.m. here in London, are hundreds of Tommy Robinson supporters who have been here all day.
The crowd at its height was closer to about 3,000.
I'd say there's probably 300 there now.
There's some speeches as you can hear some cheering, some very interesting remarks on the stage earlier today.
A former child victim of these rape gangs, very brave of her to talk about it, and a former police officer who was very decorated, received an award at 10 Downing Street herself, spoke about how the police had been instructed to turn a blind eye to these rape gangs.
So that's what's going on behind me.
But what happened inside the court was even more interesting to me.
As you know, the events that are on trial happened 14 months ago in May of 2018 up in Leeds, and it was about a rape gang trial up there.
Now, generally, contempt of court is when you risk disrupting a trial and maybe having a trial thrown out because of misconduct.
Obviously, with the passage of 14 months' time, we now see as a matter of fact that the trial, in fact, was not disrupted, that it was a successful trial, that the men were convicted, and that any appeals were dashed.
So it is simply a matter of fact, as well as a matter of law, that Tommy Robinson did not disrupt that trial 14 months ago.
Yet he did serve 10 weeks in solitary confinement for it, a prison term that was thrown out by the Court of Appeal.
So, given that the man already served 10 weeks in solitary, which is illegal in itself, by the way, and given that the prosecution was false and the imprisonment was wrong, why are we here again 14 months later?
And you know, I've been coming back to the UK so often.
This has got to be my, I don't know, I've lost count seven, eight times on this matter.
Why?
Why has the UK government spent surely a million pounds on prosecution?
And if you see the dozens and dozens of police and fancy police trucks, and there was a police helicopter, that's got to be a million pounds too.
Why is the government spending millions of pounds policing and prosecuting Tommy for a contempt of court that never happened?
Well, the answer's obvious: it's to turn the process into the punishment, to get Tommy by any way necessary.
I mean, how do they wind up getting Al Capone?
They got him on mail fraud or something.
So I think that's the strategy that Tommy's political enemies in the government are taking.
They can't get him on anything substantive, so they're trying to trump up a fake contempt of court application into a major thing just to waste his time and money.
I don't think they're succeeding.
The large crowds earlier today would suggest that if anything, Tommy's following is growing.
But let me end with my observation of what's going on.
Now, I'm not a British lawyer.
I went to law school in Canada.
I haven't practiced law in a decade, but I know enough to know that the prosecution, before they prosecute anyone, they have to have two tests.
One is, is this prosecution in the public interest?
Does justice require it?
Is the world not right if the prosecution isn't done?
That's clearly not the case here.
There's no public interest in this prosecution, especially since Tommy was already wrongly imprisoned.
The second and maybe more practical test is: is there a reasonable likelihood of conviction?
That is, in Latin, demonimus non-curat lex.
The law doesn't care about trivialities.
You don't, I guess that's both public interest and do you sue.
If there was a trifle, if someone's going 51 in a 50-kilometer an hour zone, you don't sue them.
It's not in the public interest, and you might not even be able to convict.
Tommy's conduct at that court was so minor.
There's no public interest in prosecuting, and what's the likelihood of conviction?
Verdict Today's Triviality00:03:20
And let me tell you what I mean by that.
In the court, the Attorney General, because he could not argue that Tommy disrupted the case, was grasping at straws.
He was scraping the bottom of the barrel for anything, anything.
And one of the main things he said was: when you asked questions of the rapists as they went into trial, you were mean.
And he played the video clips of those.
I'll just show you one of them right now.
So you'll see what I'm saying.
When all Tommy said was, how you feeling about your verdict today?
How you feeling about your chances today?
Here, take a look to see for yourself.
Well, that's how you feeling.
How you feeling about your verdict?
What verdict?
How you feeling about the verdict?
How you feeling about the verdict?
I suck your momst.
You've got no guilt.
Is there any guilt?
So we saw several of those clips, and that's all he said.
I should point out, Tommy did not swear at them.
He did not insult them.
Of course, he didn't touch them or physically block them.
All he did was ask, how you feeling about your chances today?
How you feeling about your verdict today?
You think you're going to get justice today?
That kind of language.
Which, by the way, is more gentle than the language Tommy himself faces every time he walks into this building when the media party scrums him.
And that's it.
That's it.
And for probably an hour, the Attorney General's lawyer was going on about how that would cause stress and anxiety to the rapists and how that in itself would disrupt the trial, even though the trial was over.
It's so lame and weak.
I mean, look, I guess everyone deserves a lawyer, but surely a lawyer has a professional obligation to tell the client, in this case the Attorney General, you got no case, mate.
This is not something that should be prosecuted.
But obviously it was a political decision to prosecute.
So I won't go on in greater detail other than to give you one more little note, which is there were two other witnesses on the stand today besides Tommy, and one of them was Michelle Dunderdale, the operations manager of the courthouse up there in Leeds, and she made a bombshell admission in my mind.
She said that her staff failed that day to give notice to the public that there was a publication ban in place.
They didn't have a notice on the door of the room, courtroom.
They didn't have it in the commuter information system at the court.
And they didn't have it on the TV, the in-house TV screens.
So the phrase Dunderdale herself used was failure.
Failure, failure, failure.
They failed to warn people about a publication ban.
Now, actually, nothing turns on him because Tommy didn't violate a publication ban.
He didn't say about anything going on in the courts.
He didn't know.
He wasn't in the courts.
He was outside giving political commentary.
But with that weak a case, for the prosecution to still proceed was quite something.
This is as close as it gets to a sham trial as I've ever seen in a Western democracy.
If this trial, what, our seventh day in court, 14 months after the incidents in question, if this sort of trial were happening in Russia or Venezuela or Iran, we would call it a political prosecution.
And London itself, the headquarters of Reporters Without Borders, one of the headquarters, the headquarters of Penn International, sorry, they're headquartered here, Amnesty International's headquartered here.
I think Reporters Without Borders is in France.
Not a peep from them.
Not a peep from them.
Headquarters Of Advocacy00:01:30
Well, that's why the rebel is here.
And we brought other journalists with us.
I'm here, of course.
I come all the time.
Jessica S., our young journalist, has come.
My friend Andrew Lawton, an independent journalist from Canada, has come.
Abby Yamini has come all the way in from Melbourne.
And we crowdfunded the cost of travel for these folks.
If you want to help us, please go to realreporters.uk.
I've got to throw one more detail.
I know I said I was done, but I've got to tell you one more thing.
The Attorney General grilled Tommy on the fact that Tommy claims he doesn't think the mainstream media does a good enough job and he thinks the people's media does a better job.
The Attorney General took issue with this.
Like I say, there's politics here.
The government of Teresa May was grilling Tommy Robinson on his outrageous statement that maybe the mainstream media is broken.
Yeah, it is.
And that's not a subject for a million-pound trial.
I'll wrap it up there, but I'll be back here at the courthouse tomorrow morning, bright and early.
I'll be here about 9 a.m. British time, which is 4 a.m. Eastern Time on the east coast of North America.
I'll be live tweeting from court.
Last I checked, I had almost 3 million views of my tweets from court.
I encourage you to follow that if that's of interest to you.
Ezra Levant is my handle on Twitter, easy enough to find.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World, well, I guess it's not our world headquarters, that's Toronto.
On behalf of all of us here in London, home and the Magna Carta to you at home.