Nothing says I can't: the man who took GB News to Ofcom

One phone, one video, fifteen thousand complaints - Liam Rondi

There is a particular kind of British television moment that passes almost without friction, in which something is said about gay people that would once have ended a career, and the programme moves on to the weather. It happens often enough that most people who are targeted by it have learned to absorb it, to mute the clip, to decide that the energy required to object is energy better spent elsewhere. The calculation is usually correct, which is why the moments keep happening.

On 20 June, one of them did not pass. A GB News panel on The Saturday Five was discussing the murder of Preston Davey, a 13-month-old boy, when the right-wing commentator Syntyche Djunga, who posts as Based and Bougie, claimed that gay men and gay couples are more prone to sexually assaulting the children they adopt. Two of her fellow panellists, Cai Wilshaw and Tre Lowe, pushed back at her. The host, Dr Renee Hoenderkamp, told viewers there was evidence for what had been said. There is not.

Watching it, roughly a thousand miles away in the south of France, was Liam Rondi, who had moved there two years earlier in part because of where he felt Britain was heading. He picked up his phone, recorded a response taking the claim apart and told people how to complain to Ofcom. It got 26,000 likes. In the first week it produced around 1,300 complaints. By the end of the summer the figure across two GB News programmes had passed 15,000, and the regulator had opened two investigations into the channel.

An old accusation in new clothes

What strikes Rondi about the claim is not its cruelty but its age. The link between gay men and harm to children is older than he is, he says, and it is not a secret to anyone who has lived as a gay man in this country. It is the first thing reached for. It was the animating logic of Section 28, which for fifteen years forbade the so-called promotion of homosexuality in schools on precisely this reasoning, and the fact that the law was repealed in 2003 has not retired the idea that produced it.

He calls it a cheap shot, and describes it as one of the most damaging accusations that can be levelled at a person, because it does not require evidence in order to work. The accusation is the payload. Once it has been made on a national television channel, in the context of a murdered baby, it has already done what it was going to do, whatever happens afterwards.

The second incident bore that out. On 5 July, on Alex Armstrong Tonight, Caroline Farrow of the campaign group CitizenGO claimed that Pride events celebrate minor-attracted people, a euphemism for paedophiles, and that this was something the LGBTQ+ community had welcomed into its own celebrations. The notion has a traceable origin in coordinated trolling campaigns that manufactured fake MAP pride flags and accounts in order to discredit the community, and no LGBTQ+ organisation has ever endorsed it. Armstrong rejected the conflation on air, describing it as an age-old trope used to demonise gay people. Four days later, on a different GB News programme, Sharron Davies raised the spectre of activist teachers grooming children.

Rondi has been to a great many Pride events, including his local one in France, and reports having seen nothing of the sort at any of them, which is the sort of flat observation that ought to be unnecessary and repeatedly is not.

No newsroom, no organisation, no lawyer

The detail that gives this story its shape is what Rondi does not have. He has no newsroom behind him. No press office, no organisation, no legal team, no agent. He describes fighting it largely on his own, posting every single day for something like three months, and concedes that it is a strange way to spend a summer, campaigning over your own country's broadcasting standards from a country you no longer live in. His answer to that is direct. He is still British, he still cares, and nothing says he cannot.

He is emphatic that he is not a journalist, a description the press has nonetheless started applying to him. Before this happened he did not have much of a platform to speak of. What he had was a phone, a functioning grasp of the Broadcasting Code and the stubbornness to keep going after the point at which most people would reasonably have stopped.

He also had help, and he is careful to say so. The drag performer and writer Bimini built a complaints generator that removed the friction from the process, which Rondi describes as a huge contribution, and the volume that followed is what turned a viral video into a regulatory matter. Zack Polanski and the Good Law Project amplified it. Thousands of ordinary viewers filled in the form.

Why an apology is not a remedy

The most substantial argument Rondi makes concerns what happens next, and it is the part of the interview that deserves the closest attention from anyone who works in broadcasting.

The industry's standard remedy for this kind of failure is the on-air apology, delivered some time after the fact, usually briefly, usually to a smaller audience than the one that saw the original. Rondi's objection is arithmetical rather than emotional. The people who watched the segment two weeks ago are, for the most part, not watching when the correction is read out. The claim has already travelled. The clip has already been screenshotted, reposted and absorbed by people who will never encounter the retraction. By the time the apology airs, he argues, the harm has already been done, and nothing short of a tangible consequence counts as a remedy at all.

The precedent supports him. In February 2025, Ofcom found GB News in breach of the Broadcasting Code after a presenter linked the LGBTQ+ community to paedophiles. The regulator took the matter no further because the channel had apologised on air. Whether the same sequence repeats itself is, in effect, what the current investigations will determine.

What the channel says

GB News says it complies fully with the Broadcasting Code and that it intends to defend the investigations robustly. In response to the earlier of the two incidents, the channel said the remarks were the personal views of a contributor and had been challenged on air by two other panellists, which is accurate as far as it goes, although the presenter's own intervention pointed the other way. The clips have since been removed from the channel's YouTube account. The LGB Alliance has publicly backed the broadcaster.

Ofcom's investigations into both broadcasts remain open. No findings have been published, and nothing has yet been established against GB News.

After the complaints

Asked whether he would go on GB News if they invited him, Rondi does not pause. Point blank he would not, because appearing would lend the channel a legitimacy he does not think it has earned, and because he does not believe the framing of such an encounter would permit anything resembling a fair exchange. He would happily debate the same people somewhere else, face to face, on a platform that could guarantee one.

He talks now about having found his lane, which is a modest way of describing what has happened to him this year. He has watched people around him start to speak up who previously would not have done, and he says he is hopeful about that while being entirely clear-eyed about how frightening the wider direction of travel is. What he wants is more people alongside him, doing the unglamorous administrative work of holding a broadcaster to the terms of its own licence.

The thing he keeps returning to is the date. He cannot quite believe people are still talking like this in 2026. Neither, on the evidence of fifteen thousand complaints, can a great many other people.

Listen to the full interview with Liam Rondi on Outcast World, available now.