A number of offences of dishonesty
Following up on a question of Screechy Monkey’s, I learn more about belligerent trans activist Stephanie Hayden, who likes suing people.
https://twitter.com/ThrupennyBit/status/1115985104999014401
Do trans women have more to fear from loss of anonymity on social media than gender critical feminists do?
Hayden is Stephanie Hayden, the one who sued to get the personal details of a woman on Mumsnet.
Jamie Hamilton did some digging last November and found a not very dainty past:
The transgender lawyer who has accused Father Ted scribe Graham Linehan of transphobia and is suing him for harassment was once convicted of affray for threatening a man with a golf club, as well as for a number of other offences.
Stephanie Hayden, who is also suing Mumsnet and recently sued a transsexual solicitor, now identifies as a lawyer. But in 1999, when Hayden was a 28-year-old man known as Anthony Halliday, Halliday was charged with assault and affray. In court documents seen by RollOnFriday, the prosecutor in the Preston Crown Court case described how Halliday became embroiled in an argument after he refused to move his car from outside a man’s house in Burnley. When the man said he would use a fork lift truck to remove the car, Halliday “became abusive”, said the prosecution, and threw a punch after calling the victim a “big fat bastard”.
The victim told police that the pair scuffled, and as he walked back to his house he felt a blow to the back of his head. He said he turned around to see Halliday wielding a golf club. After another scuffle in the street, the victim returned to his house, “bleeding from the head”. His wife grabbed a video camera and recorded Halliday as he “picked up his golf club and brandished it, tapping on the glass of the victim’s house”.
The charge of assault was left on Halliday’s file after he pled guilty to the lessor offence of affray. He was sentenced to 150 hours community service, which he subsequently appealed on the basis of another case which he said was similar. It was dismissed as having “no merit” by the Court of Appeal in 2002. The judge noted that Halliday had appeared in court and been convicted in respect of several other crimes, which included disorderly behaviour and “a number of offences of dishonesty”.
A fine upstanding lawyer.
Well that article is guilty of deadnaming, and the golf club identified as a bat, and the victim was retroactively a vicious transphobe for wanting a strange man’s car off his stoop, so he was really asking for Stephanie (who has always and ever been thus) to assault him. Right lucky she showed some restraint, even.
(This comment brought to you by the Poe Solicitors Group)
Sounds like this person had trouble getting their feelings hurt even before transition, about something not related to gender, sex, or pronouns. No wonder they sue now over comments they don’t like on Mumsnet.
“Identifies as a lawyer”?! WTF does that mean? Is he a qualified lawyer, or not?
@maddog1129 #3 – I took “identifies as a lawyer” to be a quippy sarcastic dig at someone who is representing themselves in court (although I did not read the original article, so I’ve no idea if that is actually the case or not).
Hayden does indeed appear to be a lawyer.
I think “identifies as a lawyer” was a sarcastic dig at the whole “identifies as” business. It is comparing Haydon’s pre- and post-transition “identities”: one as a thug with a golf club and the other as a thug with a license to practice law.
Yes, that was sarcasm, but I gather it’s also true – he can’t be a barrister or solicitor in the UK because of the criminal conviction; he calls himself a lawyer but anyone can do that and it doesn’t mean anything. Apparently (this is all second hand, I have no idea myself) real UK lawyers call themselves either solicitor or barrister. That’s not so in the US.
That’s not strictly true, but my bad for accepting all the dozens of news articles that call Hayden a lawyer. Call myself a skeptic?
I checked on the Law Society website and there’s nobody registered as a lawyer in the UK under the name Stephanie Hayden or Anthony Halliday.
If you’re not on the Law Society website then you don’t have a certificate to practice law, that is that.
So Stephanie Hayden is absolutely not a lawyer.
Well, they are both lawyers, but qualified to do different things.
They both have to pass a law degree. Then they each have to qualify in a different professional course (one year), then have to do at least two years apprenticeship as a solicitor or a barrister.
So they are qualified to do different things but it is not uncommon for either to call themself a lawyer. The main difference based on my experience of years of having to go to Law Society dinners as a guest is that all barristers are complete wankers.
But anyway, wanker Stephanie Hayden certainly is. But not a practicing solicitor or barrister.
Fun story, by the way:
At the first Law Society dinner I went to, before mrs latsot married me, some random guy – a solicitor – kept hassling me. He wasn’t even at our table and I hadn’t spoken to him, but he just decided for some reason to single me out in my cheap rented suit and to try push me about a bit whenever I went to the bar or the toilet.
I’m sorry to say that it ended with my punching him, fairly hard – to the general pleasure of everyone there – and grabbing his throat. It was not my finest hour but he’d been provoking me for about four hours for no reason I could fathom.
About four years later he became a partner at mrs latsot’s law firm, hilariously. We’ve met once or twice since, I’ve no idea whether he recognises me.
Anyway, this is how solicitors behave when there’s free booze. I’m told he owns golf clubs, it all fits.
latsot, it is my studied opinion (from conference attendees that I have studied) that it is always a bad idea to have free booze. No exceptions.