Joey Barton “crossed the line between free speech and a crime” with social media posts about Jeremy Vine, Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, a jury has heard.
Former footballer Barton, 43, is on trial at Liverpool Crown Court accused of 12 counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety.
The charges arose out of a series of posts made about television presenter Vine, and football pundits Aluko and Ward, on social media site X in January and March last year.
Opening the prosecution case on Monday, Peter Wright KC told jurors Barton had a “sizeable following on X in excess of two million” and that his comments on the social media platform “may well be characterised as cutting, caustic, controversial and forthright”.
Wright added: “Some may even consider some of them humorous.
“Everyone is entitled to express views that are all of those things. They are even entitled in a democratic, free society to express views that are offensive, shocking or personally rude when considered against and applying the contemporary standards of an open, just, multi-racial, equal and diverse society.
“What someone is not entitled to do is to post communications electronically that are – applying those standards – beyond the pale of what is tolerable in society.
“We say that the defendant Mr Barton crossed the line between free speech and a crime on 12 occasions.
“On 12 occasions between early January and mid-March last year, he engaged in a quite deliberate course of conduct in which he targeted three people, who are in different ways in the public eye, and he subjected them through his posts to a slew of grossly offensive electronic communications with intent to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient or to any other person to whom he intended its contents or nature to be communicated.”
Barton, from Widnes, Cheshire, denies the allegations.
