Do we like Michael J. Fox?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of using his fame for other people, nothing harmful on the record, and one thin spot: we found little on his views about trans people.
For most of us he's Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton, but the bit that earns him a spot on this page is the second act. He took his fame and built a research foundation, then kept turning up for it year after year.
The numbers are big. By 2021 the foundation had reportedly raised over $1.5 billion in its first two decades, and a 2025 interview put it at more than US$2 billion. In his own words on the cure: “I won’t stop until it happens.”
The harm check comes up clean. We found no harmful words or acts about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and PinkNews calls him and his foundation long-time allies of the LGBTQ+ community. The honest gap is that we found little in his own words on trans issues specifically, so this is a pass on what's there, not a deep dive.
On politics he's been plain. In 2020 he told the Guardian that Trump had played on “every worst instinct in mankind”, and said his old character wouldn't have backed him. In 2006 he fronted ads for candidates who backed stem cell research, copped heat from commentators like Rush Limbaugh, and said “I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.” Where you land on that depends on whether you see it as advocacy or partisanship, but it's his own call, made openly.
The honours match the work. In November 2022 the Academy gave him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Oscar, and his response was typically low-key: “There was nothing heroic about what I did.”
As for allegations, nothing turned up against him personally in our searches, and his latest news is a media blunder, not a scandal. A search did surface a 2014 lawsuit his foundation filed against a lab over stored samples, but we didn't open that coverage, so we've left it out of the file.