Published
The young woman was the target of a “tidal wave of hatred” from Internet users for having criticized Islam in a video. Six of his harassers will be tried on Monday and Tuesday in Paris.
Aged 18 today, Mila (here, January 15, 2022) will be present at the hearing, her lawyer, Me Richard Malka, told AFP.
AFP
Six men and women, aged 19 to 39, will be tried on Monday and Tuesday in Paris for posting hate messages and calls for murder on Twitter against Mila, a young woman who has been the target of stalkers since her publication of a controversial video on Islam.
Four women, including three mothers, are among the defendants called to appear before the Paris court for “online moral harassment” and “death threats”. One of the defendants should have been tried last June but had then benefited from a procedural defect.
“Over 100,000 hate messages”
The offending tweets were posted at the end of 2020. “It shows that Twitter is the hate network. It is the network that thrives on hate,” said Me Malka. According to her lawyer, Mila “has received more than 100,000 hate messages and death threats promising to be bound, cut up, quartered, stoned, beheaded, with images of coffins, photo-montages of beheadings, her bleeding head.
Among the incriminated tweets, some suggest “smoking her”, others suggesting sexual abuse, while an Internet user wishes to “strangle her with (his) own hands”. “It’s becoming sadly classic,” commented Me Malka.
The young woman was the target of a “tidal wave of hatred” after responding in January 2020 to insults on social networks about her sexual orientation through a vehement video on Islam. Then aged 16 and a half, she had been forced to leave her high school. She has since been living under police protection.
The young woman who claims her right to blasphemy had drawn a new round of threats after the publication of a second controversial video, on November 14, 2020, in which she sharply launched to her detractors: “and last thing, watch your friend Allah, please. Because my fingers in her asshole, I still haven’t taken them out”.
“Do not blame the victims”
The Mila affair, which has become symbolic of the fight for freedom of expression and the right to blasphemy, has taken on very significant media coverage in a country marked by deadly Islamist attacks in 2015 against the satirical weekly “Charlie Hebdo”, which had published caricatures of Muhammad or against the teacher Samuel Paty beheaded in 2020 after showing these same caricatures to students.
Last July, the Paris Criminal Court had already sentenced ten people to suspended sentences of four to six months in prison for “online harassment” and the eleventh, an 18-year-old young woman, for “death threats”. “What I want is that, all together (…) we continue to fight,” commented the young woman leaving the court accompanied by her parents, her lawyer and the agents responsible for her protection.
“What I want is for the people who would be considered plague victims, who would be banned from social networks, to be those who harass, who threaten death, who incite suicide. I never want to make the victims feel guilty again,” she insisted.
Law dating from 2018
The wave of hate messages that affected Mila was “an enterprise of harassment, which had physical and psychological consequences” on the young girl, the court underlined in its judgment.
The offense of cyberbullying was created by a law of 2018. It can be constituted when several people attacking the same victim know that their words or behavior characterize a repetition, without each of these people having acted repeatedly or concertedly.
The defendants face two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros for online harassment, three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros for death threats.
(AFP)