Drag queen accused of inciting archbishop’s murder acquitted in Poland

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A court has upheld the acquittal of a drag performer accused of inciting the murder of the archbishop of Kraków by simulating the cutting of the throat of a blow-up doll featuring a picture of his face. The performance took place days after the bishop, Marek Jędraszewski, had made anti-LGBT+ statements.

On Thursday, the regional court in Poznań, the city where the incident took place, brought an end to the long-running case by issuing a final ruling that the drag queen’s behaviour did not meet the legal threshold for criminal incitement or insult.

The episode in question, which drew widespread coverage and commentatory at the time, took place at a nightclub in 2019, where the drag queen – who can be named only as Marek M. under Polish privacy law – was performing under the stage name of Mariolkaa Rebell.

Images shared on social media showed the performer holding a doll with an image of Jędraszewski as well as scissors and fake blood.

A few days earlier, Jędraszewski had likened the “rainbow plague” of LGBT to the “red plague” of Bolshevism. He subsequently repeatedly attacked what he and other conservatives, including the then ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, call “LGBT ideology”, which the archbishop likened to Nazism as well as communism.

Marek M. was charged by prosecutors with public incitement to murder, religious insult and incitement to hatred on the grounds of religious differences. Conviction on the charges could have carried a prison sentence of up to three years.

He pleaded not guilty when the trial began in 2021, arguing that the performance was a form of protest against the archbishop’s rhetoric, not a call to violence. “It was intended to highlight the problem,” he said, quoted by Radio Kraków.

In 2022, the district court in Poznań acquitted the defendant but prosecutors appealed. After a second acquittal, the case reached Poland’s Supreme Court, which partially upheld the appeal and referred the case back to a lower court for reexamination.

Another acquittal followed in October 2024, with the judge ruling that the conduct did not constitute incitement to murder or insult under Polish law. That ruling was again challenged by the prosecution, leading to Thursday’s final confirmation of the acquittal.

The case became part of a broader clash in Poland between the conservative values promoted by the Catholic church and PiS and the increasingly visible and vocal LGBT+ community.

During PiS’s time in power, Poland was repeatedly ranked as the worst country in the European Union for LGBT+ people by ILGA-Europe, a Brussels-based rights organisation.

Although a new coalition government under Prime Minister Donald Tusk that came to power in 2023 has pledged to improve LGBT+ rights, including adding gender identity and sexual orientation to categories protected under hate-crime laws, no such legislation has been introduced.

Last week, the Polish Catholic church’s Institute of Statistics published the results of a survey it had taken among priests, which found that around half of them have experienced aggression in the last year, with most saying that the situation has got worse over the past decade.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Facebook/FB/PrideNews.pl

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.