This is the story of a man whose life was destroyed in a matter of seconds because he committed a crime without realising it was a crime, a crime for which there was no obvious victim, and a crime about which nobody formally complained. It is a story of our times if ever there was one.
The man’s name is Richard Crisp. He is 55, married with a grown-up son and daughter, and works – or used to work – as a project manager with the construction group Wates. His Facebook page shows him attending his daughter’s graduation, on holiday with his wife, at the Open golf championship and mourning the late Queen. Those who know “Crispy” describe him as quiet and innocuous, and can scarcely believe he did what he did, or how he managed in an instant to transform himself into a 21st-century pariah.
He lives in a well-kept, three-storey, stone-fronted terraced house on a steepish street in Hillsborough, a pleasant neighbourhood in Sheffield. At the bottom of the street, around half a mile from his front door, is the ground of his beloved Sheffield Wednesday football club, its main gate flanked by a memorial to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, when 97 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the Leppings Lane stand during an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.
At the top of the hill is the smart, century-old Hillsborough Golf Club which is – or was – another of Crisp’s favourite places. He was once club captain. A fellow golfer said he had been a “model member” for 19 years. And then on September 28, 2024, his life imploded.
That was the day that Sheffield Wednesday – “the Owls”, as they are nicknamed – played West Bromwich Albion. During the match, a 57-year-old Albion fan, Mark Townsend, collapsed and died. That evening, having had a drink or two, Crisp posted on X. “Another one to add to the Leppings Lane tally,” he wrote, referring to the Hillsborough disaster. “What are we at now, 98? When we get to 100 we’ll have a party. Up the owls.”
It was a crass tweet, deeply distasteful and not remotely funny. Had Crisp uttered its words in a pub 20 years ago it might have passed with a mere admonishment – “don’t be a dickhead, Crispy”. But this is the digital age and things are different. Within minutes, the tweet had set off on its viral trajectory, triggering a monumental backlash on social media, primarily from Liverpool, West Brom and Sheffield Wednesday fans.
He was called a “rat”, a “tit”, a “nonce”, a “pathetic idiot”, a “sad bastard”, a “joke of a man”, a “Grade A melt”, an “absolute little shithouse”, an “utter fucking moron”, a “vile heathanic (sic) inbred scumbag” and much else besides. “How are you that much of an arsehole at his age!?”, one post asked. Another called him “a horrible human being who is rightly getting hammered”.
But the online lynching was the least of Crisp’s problems. There was going to be a very big price to pay, not just in the parallel universe of Twitter/X, but in the real world. Richard Crisp’s moronic tweet was, in short order, going to cost him nearly everything he held precious.
The following week, he lost his job. His employer Wates, said: “The comments he made over the weekend are unacceptable and completely at odds with our values as a company.”
Sheffield Wednesday banned him for life from its ground, calling his tweet “abhorrent” and saying: “We condemn absolutely this outrageous behaviour and underline our zero-tolerance policy towards unlawful activity on all social media platforms.”
He was also expelled from Hillsborough Golf Club following an emergency meeting of its board. “Richard Crisp is no longer a member,” it said in a statement that was posted online and viewed a million times. “His comments… do not reflect the values of our club.”
Then things got even worse. Mark Allen, the golf club’s manager, contacted the police. He did so not to complain about Crisp’s tweet, but out of concern for the club’s security. His staff had received several messages threatening to burn down the clubhouse and sabotage the greens.
That put the South Yorkshire police in an invidious position, to say the least. The force’s mistakes had been a major cause of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, and it had shamefully compounded those errors by suppressing evidence and accusing the Liverpool supporters of drunkenness. Had the police not prosecuted, they would have been wide open to attack, given their past record.
They duly arrested Crisp. He was charged under section one of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which makes it an offence to send another person “a message which is indecent or grossly offensive”. On October 14, Crisp pleaded guilty at Sheffield Magistrates Court. On January 24 he was sentenced in the same building. Jobless, rejected by his lifelong community, despised by thousands of strangers, he was now a criminal to boot.
Crisp is a man of average height, with glasses, a weak chin and short, neatly cut grey hair. For his second court appearance he wears a black overcoat, dark sweater and grey trousers. He is accompanied by his wife, Karen, his daughter and parents-in-law.
A forlorn figure standing alone in the dock, he says nothing except to confirm his name, address and date of birth. He then looks straight ahead, face inscrutable and expressionless, as Louise Brown, his lawyer, reads a letter to the court in which he admits his post was “derogatory, hurtful, distressing and disrespectful,” adding: “I wish to apologise unreservedly to all the people I have offended and for all the upset and anger I have caused.”
In mitigation, Brown tells the court Crisp had been under ”a great deal of stress” when he posted the tweet. His mother was recently diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s and dementia and he alone was looking after her. He was suffering from depression and “taking solace in alcohol”. She adds that he has since been prescribed antidepressants by his doctor, and begun counselling sessions.
In the event, Crisp avoids a custodial sentence or fine: he receives a 12-month community order and is ordered to pay £200 in costs. He displays neither relief nor dismay. Indeed he shows no emotion at all as the sentence is read out. He looks broken. He probably is broken.
The court is told that after 20 years as a project manager he is now living on a Jobseekers Allowance of £181 a fortnight. It also hears that for a couple of months after posting that wretched tweet, he and his wife received threats and were too afraid to leave their house. They were “scared for their lives”.
Crisp is now a social outcast. Customers at The Park, his local pub, said he used to be a regular, but not any more. It was unclear whether he has been banned from the premises, or is simply too ashamed to show his face.
Crisp’s story begs many questions, the most obvious of which is what on earth possessed him to post such an awful message? Experts say his case is a stark illustration of how the normal rules of social conduct, and the consequences for breaching them, have been completely upended in this age of social media.
“The main reason that this happens is the ‘online disinhibition effect’,” says Dr Mark Griffiths, professor of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University. This is the tendency for people to “behave differently online than they would in real life”.
This tendency can take a benign form, for example when it encourages people to share personal information online that they would have difficulty revealing in other settings.
But then there is the toxic form of online disinhibition. This is when “individuals say things that are more hostile or hurtful than they would in person,” says Griffiths. “The perceived anonymity online means that some people say and do things online that they would never do in face-to-face situations.”
As John Suler, professor of psychology at Rider University, New Jersey, pointed out in his seminal 2004 paper on the subject, the sense of freedom that people experience online offers them “the opportunity to be physically invisible”. This, he says, “amplifies the disinhibition effect. People don’t have to worry about how they look or sound when they type a message. They don’t have to worry about how others look or sound in response to what they say.”
Crisp’s reprehensible post was doubtless a direct consequence of this phenomenon of disinhibition. But the penalty is no longer passing disapproval – it can be an absolute and lifelong shaming. What was once a raised eyebrow is now social death.
Perhaps the most famous example of how a life can be destroyed in a single tweet was the story of a South African woman named Justine Sacco. In 2013, she took a flight from the US to Cape Town. In a stopover in Heathrow, she tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just Kidding. I’m white”. Sacco then shut off her phone, boarded the plane and slept for most of the 11-hour flight down to South Africa.
While she was still in the air, the reaction to her Tweet began to build. A wave of negative publicity rose up, as her tweet ricocheted around on social media, attracting opprobrium everywhere it went. The company she worked for, a New York tech firm, announced that she was now fired. The hashtag “HasJustineLandedYet” began to spread on Twitter, and blogs began furiously speculating about what would happen when she landed.
When Sacco switched on her phone, she discovered she had become a global object of hatred. “Words cannot express how sorry I am,” Sacco said, “and how necessary it is for me to apologise to the people of South Africa.”
But Crisp’s story raises another pertinent question, which is whether he deserved to end up in court. His tweet was undoubtedly foolish, but he had not incited hatred or violence like Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Tory councillor who was jailed for tweeting on the day after last summer’s Southport stabbings: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” At least 30 people were arrested for posting social media messages during the riots.
He had not made a death threat like Glenn Mullen, a Mancunian who recently received two suspended prison sentences for threatening to kill JK Rowling “with a big hammer” and the former Labour MP Rosie Duffield with a gun.
He had not defamed a named individual like the television personality Christian Jessen did when he posted a tweet accusing Arlene Foster, the former Northern Ireland first minister, of having an extra-marital affair (he was ordered to pay her £125,000 in damages).
Crisp’s tweet was nasty, but nowhere near as vicious, dangerous or damaging as these. He would never have imagined it would go viral, and in all probability had no idea that he was committing an offence when he posted it. He would have known it was a crime to commit a theft or violent assault, for example, but would he have been aware of the Malicious Communications Act and its close relation, the Communications Act 2003, which likewise criminalises the sending of “grossly offensive” messages?
Evan Wright, a partner at the London law firm JMW, told the New European that he receives two or three enquiries a week from people facing malicious communications charges. “They are puzzled at why they’re being targeted when there are so many people around them who can say what they want,” he said. Elon Musk, for example, recently used X to assert – with impunity – that a British civil war was “inevitable”, and to call the Labour minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”.
Indeed, it sometimes seems that only “little people” end up shamed and in the dock.
As Yair Cohen, a London lawyer specialising in internet legislation, said: “Ordinary people who are not conversant with the law have no idea whether they’re transgressing. Even lawyers, even people who are familiar with the law and immerse themselves in it – some such as myself – can’t tell. There’s too much of a subjective element there.”
He called the present legislation governing malicious communications “unfit for purpose because it fails to define what constitutes ‘grossly offensive’.” He added: “The subjective nature of the term allows prosecutors and judges to base decisions on personal interpretations, leading to inconsistent and potentially unjust outcomes.”
In the UK, the guidelines on this were issued in 2013 by none other than Sir Keir Starmer, then director of public prosecutions. For an offence to have been committed, the guidance says, the defendant “must be shown to have intended or be aware that the message was grossly offensive”. Moreover, “because the content expressed in the communication is in bad taste, controversial or unpopular, and may cause offence to individuals or a specific community, this is not in itself sufficient reason to engage the criminal law”.
In Crisp’s case, his tweet clearly enraged a lot of Liverpool and West Brom football fans – but nobody, not even the family of the West Brom fan who died, complained to the police. It was the South Yorkshire police themselves, with their doubtless acute sensitivity to anything pertaining to the Hillsborough disaster, who pressed charges. The Crown Prosecution Service agreed, but those charges were never tested in court because Crisp immediately pleaded guilty.
As Crisp left the magistrates court following his sentencing, accompanied by his solicitor but not his family, he wore a scarf wound high around his neck and a flat cap pulled low over his forehead as if to hide as much of his face as possible. He walked straight past the small gaggle of journalists waiting outside with his head down, ignoring their shouted questions and staring fixedly, determinedly at the ground ahead of him. This time, he had no comment to make, nothing to say.
Martin Fletcher is a former foreign editor, US editor and Brussels correspondent of the Times
