- Joey Barton was found guilty of assaulting his wife at a court on Tuesday
- A previous post on X he wrote, said: ‘Men who hit women are s***houses’
Joey Barton has been mocked after his 2015 post condemning domestic violence was dragged up following his guilty verdict on Tuesday.
Barton was found guilty of assaulting his wife after he ‘kicked her in the head’ during a drunken argument in June 2021.
The ex-Man City and Newcastle midfielder, 42, left Georgia Barton, 36, with a ‘golf ball’ sized-lump on her head after threatening to fight her brother and father, a court heard.
Mrs Barton said her husband ‘just hit me in the house’ on a 999 phone call and he has been given a 12-week suspended sentence.
Social media users were quick to point out a previous post on X from Barton in December, 2015.
He wrote: ‘How can you possibly hit women on multiple occasions and blame an incident a decade earlier. Men who hit women are nothing but s***houses.’
Joey Barton was found guilty of assaulting his wife, Georgina, on Tuesday but avoided jail time
A post from 2015 emerged and online users were quick to point out Barton’s hypocrisy
One user replied: ‘Aged like milk, again.’ Another posed: ‘There’s always a tweet.’
Plenty of others shared memes mocking Barton’s hypocrisy and some simply wrote ‘s***house’, using his own statement against him in light of the verdict.
After being found guilty on Tuesday, Barton quickly took to X to say: ‘Really disappointed in the magistrate’s decision today. Especially, after a judge 2 and a half years ago in Wimbledon Magistrates ruled in my favour.
‘I intend to appeal this decision to a higher court, the crown court and whilst this process is ongoing that’s all I will say on the matter.’
He wrote in another post ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’, which translates to ‘our day will come’ – an Irish republican slogan that was coined during the Troubles and was often shouted by IRA defendants and their supporters in court.
As such, the use of the controversial phrase also saw him widely criticised on social media.
In February 2022 Mrs Barton wrote to the Crown Prosecution Service to say she no longer supported the case. The couple are still married. But last year the High Court decided her husband should still face trial.
Convicting the ex-footballer, chief magistrate Paul Goldspring said he believed Barton and his wife had lied to the court about what happened that night.
Barton’s words were used against him by plenty of posts on X after the verdict
One used a Michael Scott meme from the American version of The Office to prove a point
Barton faced an online backlash but has pledged to appeal the decision to a higher court
The former Man City player was found guilty of assaulting his wife, Georgina (pictured)
‘I believe the veracity of the first account and it is supported by other evidence,’ he said. ‘The account on the telephone in the 999 call and to the attending officer is true.
‘I reject the account by Mrs Barton over eight months later and repeated in the witness box by her.’
The judge said a later explanation put forward by Mrs Barton, that she had sustained the injuries accidentally, was ‘unbelievable’.
He added the couple had contradicted themselves during their evidence in trial, because ‘they were not being truthful about what happened’.
Sentencing shamed footballer Barton, Mr Goldspring told him: ‘You’ve been found guilty of an offence of assaulting your wife.
‘The one place your wife is entitled to feel safe and protected is her home, and the one person she is entitled to feel safe and protected by is you, and that’s not what happened in this case.’
