RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Karl Sanchez, better known as the drag queen Nicky Doll, is waging a legal battle against British actor and politician Laurence Fox after Fox called Sanchez and other drag performers “deviant little pedos” after their performance at the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony.
That performance during the July 26 opening ceremony has spurred controversy, with critics likening one scene to Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in what some saw as a mockery of Christianity.
Thomas Jolly, the opening ceremony’s artistic director, told reporters at an Olympics press conference that the scene was not meant to “be subversive, or shock people, or mock people,” according to The New York Times. Jolly also said that he wasn’t inspired by “The Last Supper” and that “the idea was instead to have a grand pagan festival connected to the gods of Olympus.”
Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps added, “If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.”
The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings. #Paris2024 #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/FBlQNNUmvV
— The Olympic Games (@Olympics) July 26, 2024
The day of the ceremony, Fox shared a video of the scene on X and called the performers pedophiles. “No point in getting wound up when the child f**kers want to wind you up,” he wrote in a post still online as of this writing. “Just laugh at the deviant little pedos. Eternity is a bitch.”
Now Sanchez has sued Fox, according to Variety, with his lawyers citing “numerous reports of incitement to hatred, insults, online harassment, threats, and defamation” as well as an “an unprecedented wave of animosity and malice” toward Sanchez since the performance.
“These messages go far beyond artistic criticism and for some convey odious and defamatory amalgams, equating drag performance to pedophilia,” a statement from lawyer Anne Sophie-Laguens added, per Variety. “These comparisons are serious and unacceptable. It is in this sense that justice has been seized, and that any publication or message equating Nicky Doll’s performance with the encouragement of pedophilia practices will be reported.”
Sanchez, a French-born artist, competed in Season 12 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and now hosts Drag Race France.
Fox is best known for his role in the British detective drama Inspector Lewis, in which he played Detective James Hathaway opposite Kevin Whately’s title character across the series’ nine-season run. He has since gotten into politics, founding the right-wing political party Reclaim and unsuccessfully running for London mayor.
The actor-turned-politician recently lost a High Court libel case filed by Stonewall trustee Simon Blake and drag artist Crystal after calling them pedophiles, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
And in comments to TODAY.com last month, Sanchez addressed Fox directly, saying, “I’m about to sue you again for defamation — the same exact topic that you were sued on and lost. This is my kind of activism. I’m going to make him pay for the things that everybody else is saying, because I want to show that it is time now to stop labeling queer people in an evil way.”