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“He has a lot more money than me and he says that I accused him of abusing me in my show,” Beamont (who goes by the stage name Louise Reay) says on her crowdfunding page. “And so he’s suing me, which in my opinion is simply an attempt to silence me.”

“As standup comedians, I believe it’s the very definition of our job to talk about our lives and social issues.”

Photo by Louise Reay/Facebook

The case centres on a comedy show, “Hard Mode,” which Beamont performed at the Edinburgh fringe festival last year and which she started to write while still with her husband. It was billed as a 50-minute performance about censorship and authoritarianism. Audiences were asked to imagine the BBC had come into the control of the Chinese government. “It was in no way a show about her husband,” according to a statement from her lawyers.

“While performing the show after their separation, Louise mentioned her husband a couple of times but this was in the context of telling the audience how sad she was that they had recently separated,” says the statement from Himsworths Legal.

“I can’t repeat the words at this point in proceedings,” Lorna Caddy of Himsworths told the Post in an email. However, the law firm argues Thomas Reay was only mentioned in passing and that “the key sections that he has claimed are defamatory of him were not intended to be understood by the audience to refer to him.”

No right to freedom of expression or artistic licence can extend to the publication of such seriously defamatory and false allegations

Beamont says she referred to her husband “a couple of times — perhaps 2 minutes’ worth of reference in a 50 minute show. The main gist of those references was to tell the audience how sad I was that my marriage had broken down recently.”