Statement from Jolyon Maugham KC: Police report

On 24 November 2025, ‘gender critical’ commentator Richard Dunstan tweeted this about me:

“According to his booky-wook, he was buggered by some dirty old men before he left New Zealand. Maybe he secretly enjoyed it? A little bit. And so what if he did?”

(This is the latest of many mentions on his social media account of me being “buggered by old men” or similar phrases.)

Mr Dunstan is referring to this passage in my book:

“When I was 16, still at school and vulnerable, [my parents] asked me to leave their house. They paid a very small sum of money into my bank account, not nearly enough to live on, until I finished school. I worked cleaning up after my peers at the girls’ secondary school but did not make enough to live independently.

“I moved in with a teacher from the school – a man who took an interest in troubled boys my age. Several times I shared his bed. I then moved to the flat of a depressed bachelor in his fifties who alternated between unsuccessful – from his perspective – transactions with sex workers and similarly impotent passes at me.

In real life, poverty and dignity don’t make comfortable bedfellows.”

For a number of years, Mr Dunstan has pursued a toxic and invasive campaign against me and my family. This is the price you must pay for advocating for any marginalised group. Your choice is to learn to live with those attacks or to cease to do the advocacy. But I believe Mr Dunstan’s suggestion that I enjoyed being raped crossed a line.

The effects of seeing his tweet have lingered with me – I had a physical reaction to his tweet which lasted for several hours – and I remain distressed by it days later.

More broadly, his tweet perpetuates an enormously harmful myth about victims of abuse. It is revolting to suggest that a vulnerable child who is raped enjoys it.

Mr Dunstan is not an anonymous troll. He has close relations with the leading anti-trans charity Sex Matters. The Times recently came to me for comment in relation to one of his allegations. And he is periodically quoted in the far-right blogosphere.

For these reasons, I have referred Mr Dunstan’s tweet to the police. I believe his conduct amounts to an offence under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. I will also take legal advice on other criminal and civil law remedies for his broader campaign against me and my family.