Katie Hopkins has been legally required to publish a formal apology on X after being instructed by solicitors acting for Your Party MP Zarah Sultana, admitting that a post she published on 30 March 2026 falsely stated that Sultana “encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists” – a claim Hopkins was required to pin to her profile for a minimum of 24 hours.
The apology, published by Hopkins on X, was required by Bindmans Media and Information Law Practise Group on behalf of their client. The legal notice, reproduced in Hopkins’s post, stated: “On 30 March 2026, I published a post on my X account addressed to Zarah Sultana in which I stated that she encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists. Those statements are false. I was wrong and offer my sincere apologies to Ms Sultana for the harm and distress caused to her.”
Sultana then reposted Hopkins’s legally mandated apology with the comment: “Please retweet.”
Hopkins, in characteristic fashion, added her own gloss to the legally compelled statement: “It is my very great pleasure to do this, and I reiterate my sincere and repeated offer to meet with Miss Zara Sultana in person to resolve our differences.”
Sultana’s response to the misspelling of her name was brief and perfectly timed. “By the way, for future reference it’s Z-A-R-A-H,” she posted 27 minutes later, a reply that has since received 658 likes and been viewed more than 10,000 times.
What Hopkins originally said
On 30 March 2026, Hopkins published a post on X in which she accused Sultana of encouraging and inciting violence and of being “friends with terrorists.” The specific basis for the claim was not specified in the legal apology statement and has not been elaborated on by Hopkins.
The claim that a sitting Your Party MP “encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists” is both a serious personal allegation and a specific legal exposure. Solicitors at Bindmans – one of the UK’s leading civil liberties and media law firms – were instructed by Sultana, and their instructions produced the apology posted Monday.
Who Zarah Sultana is
Sultana is the Your Party MP for Coventry South, a position she has held since 2019. She is one of the most prominent voices on the left, known for her outspoken positions on Gaza, workers’ rights and economic inequality. She was among the Labour MPs who repeatedly defied the whip over Gaza-related votes and has faced significant online abuse as a result of her public profile and her positions on Middle East policy.
She has previously been the target of online harassment and hostile coverage, and the Bindmans instruction to Hopkins represents one of the more high-profile uses of legal mechanisms to compel a correction from a social media figure who operates in the space between political commentary and targeted abuse.
The legal mechanism
The requirement for Hopkins to pin the statement for a minimum of 24 hours is a specific and increasingly used remedy in online defamation cases. Rather than – or in addition to – financial damages, claimants can seek what is known as a “statement in open court” or equivalent public correction that reaches the same audience as the original defamatory statement. Requiring the statement to be pinned to Hopkins’s own profile for 24 hours ensures that the people who saw or may have seen the original post are exposed to the correction.
Bindmans has a track record in high-profile media law cases. The firm has acted in a number of significant cases involving online defamation and has developed expertise specifically in the area of social media and information law.
The reaction
Sultana’s decision to repost the apology with simply “Please retweet” was a studied piece of political communication. It drew maximum attention to Hopkins’s legally compelled admission of falsity without Sultana needing to add anything beyond the words Hopkins herself was required to publish.
The post generated 2,100 retweets, 5,700 likes and 459 replies within hours of being published. The follow-up spelling correction – “it’s Z-A-R-A-H” – added a final note of composed precision that has been widely shared.
Hopkins’s addition to the legally mandated statement – describing it as “my very great pleasure” and reiterating her “sincere and repeated offer to meet with Miss Zara Sultana” – follows a pattern she has deployed in previous legal capitulations: attempting to present a compelled legal apology as a voluntary act of magnanimity. The misspelling of Sultana’s name in that same addendum was, in the circumstances, a gift.
The wider context
The Hopkins-Sultana legal action is not taking place in a political vacuum. As we reported in our coverage of the Golders Green attack aftermath and the broader debate about double standards on antisemitism, the week following the Golders Green stabbing produced a specific escalation in hostile rhetoric directed at Muslim and pro-Palestinian public figures. Sultana is both a Muslim MP and one of the most prominent parliamentary voices on Gaza.
The claim that she “encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists” – now formally acknowledged by Hopkins as false – is precisely the kind of allegation that, made against a Muslim public figure, carries a specific additional weight in the current political climate. The legal remedy Sultana chose – a compelled public correction on the platform where the original false statement was made – is a proportionate and targeted response to that specific harm.
Hopkins has previously been the subject of legal action in multiple jurisdictions for her online statements about public figures. She filed for bankruptcy in 2020, in part as a result of costs orders in defamation proceedings. The Sultana case does not appear to involve financial damages but the compelled apology itself is a form of legal and reputational consequence that the bankruptcy proceedings did not extinguish.
