A Fathers4Justice campaigner has been found guilty of defacing a portrait of the Queen with purple paint while it was hanging in Westminster Abbey.
Tim Haries, who told jurors he vandalised the picture to highlight the “social justice issue of our time”, had denied a charge of causing criminal damage of more than £5,000 but was found guilty by jurors at Southwark Crown Court in London yesterday.
The father-of-two smuggled a can of purple spray paint into the abbey on June 13 before scrawling the word “help” on the painting, worth £160,000.
Haries, 42, looked straight ahead as the verdict was announced in front of a public gallery full of supporters, many of them dressed in purple, the colour adopted by the campaign group.
Jurors heard that, moments after committing the act,
Haries told a steward at the abbey: “Sorry mate, I’ve got nothing against the Queen” before telling a police officer he was “guilty as charged”.
Prosecutor Allister Walker said Haries shouted “fathers for justice” as he put the graffiti on the large oil painting before being tackled to the ground by steward Peter Crook.
Photographs of the incident were later posted on a Fathers4Justice Facebook page.
Presenting his own closing speech Haries, who denied a charge of causing criminal damage, told them he carried out the act as a protest against the “social catastrophe” of fathers not being allowed access to their children.
As he summed up the evidence heard in the day-long trial, Judge Alistair McCreath, Recorder of Westminster, directed the jury that direct action or civil disobedience could not be used as a defence in law.
Haries, of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, was given conditional bail to return to the court for sentencing on February 5.