“It’s the court of public opinion”: Sarah Ferguson condemns Phillip Schofield backlash
Sarah Ferguson has spoken out against the wave of judgement directed at former This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield and the relationship scandal that swept the world.
The 63-year-old Duchess of York was chatting to businesswoman Sarah Jane Thomson on her podcast, Tea Talks, when conversation turned to Schofield, and his controversial affair with a man - and co-worker - 30 years younger than him.
When news of the affair broke, Schofield stepped down from his 20 year position as the face of This Morning. He later confessed to the Daily Mail that he had lied about the relationship, and informed The Sun that he was “not a groomer”, despite public opinion.
Criticism for the disgraced host flooded social media in the wake of the whole ordeal, with the story and its related rumours splashed across publications worldwide, and it was the backlash that Ferguson wanted to address, namely the idea of ‘cancel culture’ at the centre of it all.
Thomson prompted the discussion by comparing social media’s take to a “huge game of Chinese whispers”, to which Ferguson responded that “it’s like the court of public opinion.”
“And then [that can lead to] massive bullying to the point of extermination of a soul,” she added. “I don’t believe that anybody has that right to judge and exterminate a person’s own beliefs.”
From there, Ferguson encouraged listeners not to leap to assumptions, as “we all have failings”. She asked that everyone instead take a moment “or make a cup of tea before you judge another human being without knowing all the facts”.
“We don’t know the facts,” she pointed out. “We certainly don’t know what people get up to.”
Thomson had her own thoughts to share on the matter, noting that “the problem is, when you’re in the public eye, any failing you make is there to be talked about, and the rest of us don’t have that.
“We don't have that deep examining of where we've gone wrong, and then it's reflected over and over and over.”
And while the two had made their point, Ferguson took a moment to discuss a - in her opinion “spot on” - article by Jeremy Clarkson for the Sunday Times, in which he wrote about the public’s race to condemn Schofield.
“I’ve never seen a witch-hunt like it,” he said, “and what baffles me most of all is that, as things stand, no crime has been committed. I don’t know him at all well and have no skin in the game, but it seems to me he is only guilty of being what he said he was: gay.”
In the article, Clarkson went on to note that the age gap between Schofield and his partner in the affair was receiving a different degree of attention to heterosexual stars in similar relationship situations - from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, who frequently dates women significantly younger than himself, and Al Pacino’s 54-year age gap with his pregnant partner.
“Phil is no longer the genial host of some morning-time televisual cappuccino froth,” Clarkson surmised. “According to the people's court of social media, he's like his brother, a nonce.”
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