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Louise Thomas
Editor
Hercules and Xena are at war again, as Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless faced off on social media over the UK’s race riots.
As violent disorder and unrest continues to spread, thousands of police officers have been deployed to quell disturbances that have led to hundreds of arrests, beatings, stabbings, and mosques under siege.
Sorbo posted a false image comparing the treatment of three alleged rapists which suggested the Muslim man had avoided jail, but it turned out that the man identified was not guilty of the crime claimed.
The post captioned, “This is what’s happening in the UK”, was seen over 76.5 million times as those sympathetic to the far-right flocked to the comments to support the post.
It was reshared by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has faced calls for a travel ban, barring him from entering the UK as he is accused of stoking tensions “at a dangerous time”.
Meanwhile, Lawless appears to be on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to sentiments around the disorder as she shared images sympathetic to immigrants, and reshared a post showing a mob attacking a Black man with the caption, “Arrest them all”.
The pair have butted heads over their political beliefs in 2021, when Lawless called Sorbo a “peanut” when he reshared a widely debunked conspiracy theory that rioters storming the US Capitol were actually antifa agitators undercover.
“No, Peanut. They are not Patriots,” she wrote at the time. “They are your flying monkeys, homegrown terrorists, QAnon actors. They are the douchebags that go out and do the evil bidding of people... who like to wind them up like toys and let them do their worst.”
In an interview with SFX in 2001, Sorbo accused Xena: Warrior Princess as he criticised the show for promoting “lesbianism”.
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He said: “In that show, they had two issues that separated it from Hercules: one, it was heavily into lesbianism, as people know, and number two: it was heavily into violence. It was far more violent than Hercules was.”
The actor also showed resentment when he accused Lawless of securing a role in Spider-Man because she was married to director Sam Raimi’s partner Rob Tapert, in 2007.
According to Newsweek, when the interviews were brought to her attention, she wrote, “HAHAHHAHAHHAAA!! oh, Peanuut! You slay me!”
