This is a lie, and an easily provable lie. I’ve spent the best part of three decades funding initiatives and donating to charities serving vulnerable women, including domestic violence shelters. The charitable trust I set up in 2000 focuses on alleviating social deprivation, with a focus on women and children, including female refugees. I’ve funded an initiative to help female ex-prisoners secure jobs, I helped fly professional women out of Afghanistan because they were in danger from the Taliban, I’ve publicly voiced my support for women’s reproductive rights, I founded and fund a women-only rape crisis centre and I’ve campaigned for and funded projects to help single mothers.
I myself am a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, as trans activists never tire of reminding me, whether to hope it happens to me again, or assert, as Maugham has, that I was left with unresolved trauma that leaves me irrational on the subject of physical risk to women.
Maugham is imploding in real time because he’s furious the Supreme Court decision put him back in his box. He was wrong on the law. He pretended it said what it doesn’t. The court reaffirmed the sex-based rights of women, but Maugham’s vanity and delusion make it impossible for him to accept (yet another) loss. So his grift continues, his lies grow bigger and more obvious, and now might be a good time for him to reread the myth of Icarus, because nobody needs clairvoyant powers to foresee how this is going to end.