The representative of the national center for the fight against online hate on Tuesday April 12 requested up to six months in prison against six people, including four women, tried by the Paris Criminal Court for harassment and death threat against Mila .
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The prosecutor requested six-month suspended prison sentences for the only three defendants who showed up at the hearing, eight-month suspended prison sentences for two absent defendants and six months’ imprisonment for the only one, also absent. , who had a long criminal record. The court has set its deliberation for May 24.
“If one day, I meet this girl, I kill her with my own hands”
These six people, aged 19 to 39, had been appearing before the 10th Chamber since Monday for posting hate messages and calls for murder on Twitter against Mila, a young woman who was the target of online harassment after a video vehement that she published on Islam. The defendants “showed at this hearing an inability to present a real apology and to question themselves“, lamented the representative of the public ministry in her requisitions.
On the dock, 19-year-old Sorenza D., the only one to apologize to Mila, furtively wipes her eyes. Mila, 18, looks at her detractors without blinking. “If one day, I meet this girl, I kill her with my own hands“, had posted this frail young woman, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, on her Twitter account in November 2020. “Back then I only spoke that way because that’s how I was raised“Explains the one who evokes a violent father.
A scapegoat”
Mila is “a scapegoat for all the values that we adults have stopped transmitting, he is the scapegoat for our cowardice“, argued Mila’s lawyer, Richard Malka, who warned against the “trivialization“cruelty on the internet and the risk of accepting”this language“as being”that of young people“. Like other defendants, Tristan J., a 19-year-old student, says he didn’t think his tweet could reach Mila. “For me, only my friends watch my tweets“. He had replied to a classmate that it was necessarysmoke it“, for he says, the “to make laugh“.
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“words have meaning“, said Tuesday Me Malka. “For you, these tweets were nonsense, for her, it’s torture“. Mila, 18, lives under police protection. “She can’t even have a dog because it would have to be taken out and she can’t go out freely anymore.“, recalled Me Malka. On her bench, Mila, in a long plum dress and heels, is crying softly. The young woman was the target of a “tidal wave of hateafter responding in January 2020, when she was 16½ years old, to slurs on social media about her sexual orientation through a vehement video about Islam.
The young woman, who claims her right to blasphemy, had attracted 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 mate Allah, please. ‘Cause my fingers in her asshole, I still haven’t taken them out“. “Mila never criticized Muslims, she criticized a religion“, underlined his lawyer, recalling that the”right to blasphemywas a fundamental right. According to her lawyer, Mila has received more than 100,000 hate messages and death threats since her January 2020 video.
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Prosecuting and convicting cyberstalkers has reduced the number of hate messages directed at Mila. Last July, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced ten people to suspended prison terms of four to six months for “online harassment» and an eleventh, an 18-year-old young woman, for «death threats“. “My detractors can’t stand the simple fact that I’m breathing“, said Mila Monday at the opening of the trial.
SEE ALSO – Mila case: cyberbullying, a “total banality” for a defense lawyer (03/06/2021)