A 39-year-old man has been jailed for sending an “utterly deplorable” email to safeguarding Jess Phillips MP, the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. Jack Bennett, from Seaton, Devon, pleaded guilty today at Exeter Magistrates’ Court to sending malicious communications to three individuals, including the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist.
Bennett admitted to four charges of sending emails that were “indecent or grossly offensive for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety to the recipient”. The charges relate to Section 1(1)(a)(i) of the Malicious Communications Act 1998, which makes it an offense to send a letter, electronic communication, or article conveying “a message which is indecent or grossly offensive” with the intent to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient.
His emails targeted individuals in prominent positions. The Crown Prosecution Service said the email to Phillips was sent on January 2, 2025, accusing her of failing to investigate allegations of sexual exploitation involving “Pakistani men raping white English girls” and branding her a disgrace. This came just one day after Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), described Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” after she rejected calls for a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. Instead, she instructed Oldham Council to carry out its own inquiry into historical child abuse in the town.
While the email to Phillips was at the centre of the case, it was not an isolated incident. Bennett also sent racist and offensive emails to Sadiq Khan in February 2024 and Matt Twist in April 2024. According to the prosecution, his emails to Twist contained “highly offensive and disgusting anti-Semitic” content. In one, Twist is described as a “rat willing to engage in strong-arm tactics against white English patriots”. The court heard that Khan never personally received the messages, as they were filtered, but the rhetoric was described as “poisonous”.
Sentencing Bennett to 28 weeks in prison, District Judge Stuart Smith noted that his email to Phillips had caused her “great distress”. He said: “[She] was concerned for your potential to escalate or to encourage others for violence against her, having in her mind the murder of her colleague Jo Cox.”
Bennett’s defence lawyer, Caroline Salvatore, argued that her client had been influenced by online “right-wing propaganda” during the Covid-19 pandemic. She said he had been “encouraged to become incensed at various issues” and had found their phrases “became part of his vocabulary”. Salvatore described Bennett as “largely socially isolated” and said his behaviour worsened after the death of his father in 2023, which was cited as a “triggering” event.
She added that he had been “genuinely motivated by the perceived incompetence of the people he sent emails [to]”, but he accepted he was trying to be offensive and did “realise how he was wrong”.
Appearing for the prosecution, Hannah Cotton described Bennett’s emails as featuring “serious racist abuse towards politicians”. She requested a five-year restraining orders to be put in place for five years, which the judge granted as part of the sentencing.
