Two racist, homophobic British podcasters who had called for the deaths of Prince Harry and his son received prison sentences Thursday on charges of encouraging terrorism.
Christopher Gibbons, 40, was sentenced to eight years in prison, and his cohost, Tyrone Patten-Walsh, 34, was sentenced to seven years, according to a press release from the London Metropolitan Police. Both will be on probation after their release.
On their podcast, they “aired their homophobic, racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and misogynistic views, and on some occasions they encouraged listeners to commit acts of terrorist violence,” the release says.
The men had condemned Prince Harry for being in an interracial relationship — his wife, Meghan Markle, is multiracial — and said he should be “prosecuted and judicially killed for treason,” prosecutor Anne Whyte said in Kingston Crown Court last summer, according to the BBC. They called the couple’s son, Archie, now 4, a “creature” who “should be put down,” Whyte said. “They are dedicated and unapologetic white supremacists,” she continued. “They thought that if they used the format of a radio show, as good as in plain sight, they could pass off their venture as the legitimate exercise of their freedom of speech.”
They also praised mass shootings carried out by right-wing extremists and “posted images of a Nazi executing a Jewish man at the edge of a pit of corpses and Nelson Mandela being lynched,” the Associated Press reports.
They had a right to their views but no right to their views, the judge in their case, Peter Lodder, said in court Thursday, according to the AP. “The evidence demonstrates that you desire to live in a world dominated by white people purely for white people,” he said. “Your distorted thinking is that the white race has ceded too much influence to Blacks and Asians, to Jews and Muslims, to gays, to white liberals. and to white people in mixed-race relationships.”
They were arrested in 2021 and convicted by a jury last July. Both were convicted of eight counts of encouraging acts of terrorism, and Gibbons was additionally convicted of two counts of dissemination of terrorist publications. They had denied the charges.
Pictured, from left: Tyrone Patten-Walsh, Prince Harry, and Christopher Gibbons