His concert in a Parisian church in June 2021 had earned singer Eddy de Pretto an outpouring of hatred online. Nine months later, justice is rampant. After police custody began on Tuesday and ended on Thursday, fifteen people will be tried before the Paris Criminal Court in early October for homophobic cyberbullying. They will appear on October 3 and 4 to “online harassment with ITT (total interruption of work) for more than eight days and online harassment with ITT for more than eight days committed because of the sexual orientation of the victim”according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
“As part of an investigation followed by the National Pole for the Fight against Online Hate” the Paris judicial court which began its work at the beginning of 2021, “Seventeen men, aged 20 to 26, were taken into custody between Tuesday and Thursday”, said the same source. According to the prosecution, police custody was lifted “without prosecution at this stage” and another was still in progress late Thursday afternoon. The arrests took place throughout France: Isère, Rhône, Manche, Paris, Côte-d’Or, Haute-Loire, Gironde, Yvelines, Maine-et-Loire, Doubs, Ille-et-Vilaine, Seine-Saint- Dennis, Meuse.
3,000 messages of insults and threats
A source close to the case specifies that the arrests were carried out by the gendarmes of the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crimes (OCLCH), in conjunction with local police and gendarmerie services. According to this source, the suspects were mostly unknown to the justice system. Some are conservative Catholics, she added.
The facts date back to June 2021. Invited as part of the Qui va piano va sano festival to perform at the Saint-Eustache church in Paris, Eddy de Pretto had performed his piece What’s the point, which evokes the difficulties of reconciling his homosexuality and religion. After his performance, he had received, according to The Parisiannearly 3,000 messages of insults and death threats on social networks. “Do you want to sing sodom in a church? No worries, wear your balls and do the same (sic) in a mosque”, “Fuck your mother”, had notably written internet users, according to screenshots posted on the singer’s Instagram account. Which had filed a complaint, leading to the opening of the investigation.