Just Stop Oil protesters found guilty of disrupting Wimbledon tennis matches

Three Just Stop Oil protesters have been found guilty of disrupting the Wimbledon tennis courts with confetti and puzzle pieces.

Deborah Wilde, 69, Simon Milner-Edwards, 67 and William Ward, 66, scaled a barrier and threw the items on the court during The Championships, the world’s oldest tennis tournament, City of London Magistrates’ Court heard on Monday.

Wilde and Milner-Edwards entered Court 18 at around 2.10pm on July 5 last year, during a match between Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov and Japan’s Sho Shimabukuro.

They had denied that the protest on July 5 2023 at Court 18 amounted to aggravated trespass.

The judge said: “Firstly I want to thank all of the defendants for the way they’ve conducted themselves this evening, all of you will have been very stressed.

He said it was “not in dispute” that each defendant “sprinkled some confetti or tinsel and some jigsaw pieces on to that playing field” and said that he “found it a fact” that they were trespassing.

He accepted that the three protesters waited for a break in play, but added: “Nevertheless I find as a fact that each of them intended to cause disruption to the tennis and as a result they did cause some disruption on that day.”

Giving evidence in the trial, Michelle Dite, operations director at the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), which runs the competition, said Wilde and Milner-Edwards threw “around 1,000” puzzle pieces from a jigsaw that had been purchased at the Wimbledon grounds, as well as confetti.

When she arrived, the scene looked “very unsettling” and the players appeared “very frustrated, probably quite intimidated”, she said.

She added: “There (was) glitter, flutter-fetti – orange – and jigsaw puzzle pieces that have been spread around different parts of the court; either side of the net”.

Wimbledon staff cleared the jigsaw pieces and confetti by hand and using leaf blowers, she added.

The pair was arrested at 2.16pm and around two hours later, Ward, also captured on bodycam footage wearing a Just Stop Oil t-shirt, went onto the same court.

By that time, British player Katie Boulter had started competing against Australia’s Daria Saville.

Miss Dite claimed Ward’s protest was met with louder “boos” from the crowd, many of whom had witnessed the first incident too.

That year, AELTC spent “hundreds of thousands of pounds” to manage potential protests after Just Stop Oil demonstrated at the World Snooker Championships and Ashes Test at Lord’s Cricket Ground, she said.

Court 18 is a show court, where many top seeds play in front of “a few hundred” people and there is extensive video coverage, Miss Dite added.

Each defendant denied aggravated trespass for the protest, but admitted they entered the tennis courts.

However, each said it did not amount to the charge.

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