Anti-Brexit Lawyer Claims He Was Blacklisted by Law Firm After Admitting to Killing Fox

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND - OCTOBER 07: Jolyon Maugham QC, one of those behind the legal petitio
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

Anti-Brexit lawyer Jolyon Maugham claims he was blacklisted from a law firm after declaring on social media that he had battered a fox to death on the day after Christmas, while wearing his wife’s kimono.

Mr Maugham was known for his involvement in a number of legal challenges against the government to frustrate Brexit, including his work with Gina Miller. However, he attained a different level of fame when he announced on Twitter that he had dispatched an urban fox after it allegedly became entangled trying to get into the chicken coop at the lawyer’s London property.

“Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?” he wrote on December 26th, 2019.

On Sunday, Mr Maugham claimed that law firm Allen & Overy had blacklisted him, implying it was because of those tweets, according to the Evening Standard.

Maugham claimed: “Am remembering when Allen & Overy’s Head of Litigation told my old Chambers that, so long as I was in Chambers, not only would they not send any work to me, but they would not send any work to any other member of Chambers either.”

When asked why, Maugham responded: “It was in the aftermath of my stupid tweet about killing a fox.”

He added that while the firm “later withdrew the ban on sending work to my old Chambers” he alleged the incident “remains one of the most shocking abuses of power by City blueboods [sic] I have seen” and that he would have kept the incident confidential had Allen & Overy apologised, but, the anti-Brexit activist claimed, they did not.

The December 2019 tweet regarding Mr Maugham bludgeoning the fox to death with a baseball bat led to the UK’s leading animal welfare charity, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), to announce its distress, urging anyone with firsthand knowledge of the incident to contact them.

Thousands of people signed a petition demanding the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecute Maugham for animal cruelty. But in March 2020, the RSPCA confirmed that the lawyer would not be facing legal action.

The animal charity had stated that while it was not illegal to kill a fox, there may be a criminal offence if in doing so the animal faced undue suffering. The RSPCA stated that a post-mortem conducted on the animal indicated that “the fox was killed swiftly”.

Maugham had claimed that he did not know what else to do in the defence of his birds, but later apologised for the callous tone of his tweets.

Elsewhere on his social media page on Boxing Day 2019, he remarked, “I shoot rabbits for food too; and butcher them. I think it’s quite important for anyone who eats meat to have a sense of what’s actually involved,” and mentioned his wife’s kimono, which he was wearing at the time of the incident.

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