'Sinners' star Jayme Lawson calls out BAFTA organisers for exploiting Tourette's advocate

Jayme Lawson is criticising organisers of the BAFTA Film Awards after an onstage incident involving John Davidson, who has Tourette's syndrome, during the ceremony.

Referring to the moment her costars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were interrupted with a racial slur from Davidson during the BAFTA ceremony, Lawson first praised her costars for handling the moment with “grace and dignity”.

“Institutionally, we still don’t understand what inclusion means,” she then pointed out during her February 28 appearance at the NAACP Image Awards.

“Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don’t provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that’s not inclusivity. That’s exploitation.”

She argued that the situation revealed institutional shortcomings around inclusion. Inviting someone into a space without adequate safeguards, she said, amounts to exploitation rather than inclusivity.

Davidson’s “disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses,” Lawson continued, placing blame on BAFTA and the BBC.

She also pointed to editorial decisions made during the telecast, claiming other material was censored while the slur remained audible.  

The broadcast, hosted by Alan Cumming, later prompted apologies from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the BBC, and Davidson himself.

Lindo later said he and Jordan “did what we had to do” in the moment, though he would have welcomed direct outreach from BAFTA afterwards.