Three men and two women aged 21 to 31 were sentenced Thursday in Paris to suspended prison sentences of two to seven months for having threatened the author of comic books with death or violence on social networks in December 2022.
“Death penalty for pedos”, “we will have your skin”: five people were sentenced Thursday in Paris to suspended prison sentences of two to seven months for having threatened death or violence against comic book author Bastien Vivès.
The five defendants, three men and two women aged 21 to 31, will also have to each pay 500 to 1,000 euros to the designer, for his moral damage, plus 500 euros for his lawyer’s fees, the court ordered. correctional. They appeared for messages posted on social networks, most of them in December 2022. The cartoonist, who was present at the hearing, where he did not speak, was at the time the subject of a lively controversy, several of his works being accused of promoting pedophilia. The controversy, and the threats received by the author, led the Angoulême international comics festival to cancel the exhibition which was to be dedicated to him there.
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For the representative of the prosecution, these online threats are all the more intolerable as they can encourage other Internet users to “taking action”. “If you consider that Bastien Vivès’ publications are questionable, you have the right to say so, but not to threaten him with death!”, she exclaimed to the attention of the defendants. Most, however, admitted at the bar that they had not really read the works in question. “I was blinded by things I read on the internet, it’s stupid”said one, who had sent the designer an image of Kalashnikov bullets, with the words in English “cure for pedophilia”. “I followed a movement. I didn’t know his comics at all.”recognized another, who had written “death penalty for pedos”.
A Fine Arts student admitted to having “exceeds the limits” by sending, in 2020, a message worded “you and all predators like this, we will cut off your balls”. “It was an image”she defended herself in court.
«Cancel culture»
The young woman explained that at the time she was upset by acts of incest of which one of her relatives had been a victim. And that she was “fallen” on Bastien Vivès’ album Little Paulfeaturing “a child of six or seven years old who has a penis of 50 cm and engages in sexual acts with adults”. The complaints concerning this album were closed without further action, noted in this regard one of the author’s defenders, Me Richard Malka. A preliminary investigation into the dissemination of child pornography images has also been ongoing since the beginning of 2023 at the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office, but has still not led to prosecutions, he added. And whatever it is, “even if he had been sentenced to 250 years in prison for pedophilia, that does not justify death threats”asserted the lawyer.
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Another young woman wrote “Bastien Vivès, we will have your skin, you motherfucker” on Twitter – network she used “like a diary”. She explained that she felt “hurt” by a drawing by Bastien Vivès that she found “homophobic”, but admitted not having read his comics. Rather than death threats, argued his lawyer Me Emma Eliakim, we must see in this act a desire to «cancel» the author, in the sense of «cancel culture»: it was a question of asserting that Bastien Vivès did not have his place “in public space”according to her.
In this matter, Bastien Vivès is a bit “the sprinkler watered”, noted for his part another defense lawyer, Me Denis Hubert, stressing that the cartoonist had been strongly criticized for having launched on Facebook, under a pseudonym, calls for violence against the feminist cartoonist Emma. In December 2022, the designer “ended up apologizing lip service, saying that social media had made him stupid”, observed the lawyer. His client, he stressed, is in the same situation: “he was content to follow the rumor like a sheep of Panurge, without verifying it”.