The drag artist Crystal may have marked Monday by winning an emphatic libel victory against the rightwing activist Laurence Fox but celebrations after the judgment were muted. That was partly thanks to the date – “I’m trying to do dry January” – and partly because the performer had agreed to appear on Sky News on Tuesday morning, which meant a 3am start to fit in two hours of meticulous drag makeup. Crystal, real name Colin Seymour, and Simon Blake, a former Stonewall trustee, had sued the former actor after he called each of them a paedophile on X (formerly Twitter) in October 2020. In response, Fox countersued Seymour, Blake and Nicola Thorp, a former Coronation Street actor, saying all three had defamed him by calling him racist in tweets of their own, which were in response to comments he made criticising support for Black History Month. The tangle of claims and counter-claims may have been complex but the judgment was clear: Fox’s comments about Blake and Seymour were “seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless”, Mrs Justice Collins Rice said. In contrast, she ruled that Fox could not show it was their tweets, as opposed to his own actions, that had harmed his career. (She did not make any judgment on whether he was racist.) Crystal and Blake’s claims won on all counts; his was thrown out. Damages are yet to be determined. It’s been a wearying legal journey of three and a half years, so the judgment was “a huge relief”, Crystal told the Guardian on Tuesday. “We were assured by our excellent legal team the whole way through that we had an excellent case, but you do worry and you do internalise that. It wasn’t until we got the judgment at noon yesterday that I realised how much [anxiety] I’d been holding.” Returning to the spotlight had brought a fresh wave of support – and its opposite, the performer said. “I’m wading through so many nice messages today. But there’s still a lot of people calling me a disgusting paedo freak. So it’s constantly tinged with that level of anxiety, everything that happens in this case.” Crystal, who is originally from Canada and now lives in London, appeared as a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2019 and makes their living as a drag artist. Hostility and trolling is nothing new, they said, but Fox’s remarks had led to the abuse ramping up hugely. “In the year that I [was] on Drag Race, I hadn’t experienced anything like this. He was the first person to call me a paedophile, but since then it’s happened dozens of times. “I’ve been threatened physically, I’ve been sent death threats over email. I’ve been threatened physically in person. I’ve had to wade through swathes of the most disgusting kind of comments you can imagine. And I’m not saying that’s 100% attributable to what he said. But that was definitely the starting point.” Blake, Seymour and Thorp – who did not know each other – had responded to a tweet posted by Fox on 4 October 2020 in which he urged his followers to boycott Sainsbury’s supermarket after it voiced its support of Black History Month “together with our black colleagues, customers and communities”. Fox tweeted that the supermarket, was trying to “promote racial segregation and discrimination”. After each of the three separately called him racist, he responded to all three calling them paedophiles. Does Crystal ever think it might have been easier to say nothing? “Well, that is something that I’ve tried to practise a little bit more recently. [But] I’ve always felt a responsibility to use the platform that I’ve been given to stand up for what I believe in. And, you know, it was a few months after the murder of George Floyd and we were all reeling from that. It felt then – and still feels to me now – so, so, so important to call out racism when you see it.” Do they worry, though, that this kind of action might have a silencing effect on others calling it out online? “I hope not, because we won,” they said. After recent hip surgery, Crystal is recuperating before a busy summer season of DJ gigs and festivals. “I’m looking forward to just getting back to business of entertaining people and making people smile.” First, though, they are planning a night out on Wednesday at a well-known gay bar in east London, “and I’m going to be drinking the bar dry”. It’s a day early for their dry January plan, but under the circumstances they think they’ve earned the right to break it.