Far-right activist Damien Lefèvre, better known under the pseudonym Damien Rieu and candidate for the European elections on the Reconquête! list, was sentenced on Friday May 17 in Nîmes to eight months in prison for online harassment, we learned. Agence France-Presse with the parties’ lawyers.
The facts date back to April 2017, when he broadcast on his Twitter account (now renamed X) in the name of Damien Rieu what the plaintiff’s lawyers described as “private video”in which she attacked Marion Maréchal on the Snapchat network.
He subsequently published on the network the name and a good part of the telephone number of the complainant, at the time a journalist. Publications that had “resulted in a massive campaign of denigration, racist insults and online harassment, as well as numerous anonymous calls”, according to Antoine Ory and Mourad Battikh, lawyers for the plaintiff. They welcomed what they considered to be the “first conviction [de Damien Rieu] for facts related to his use of the social network » x.
Damien Rieu’s lawyer, Julien Pinelli, declined to comment, particularly on a possible appeal by his client. For his part, the former spokesperson for the small far-right group Génération Identitaire believes, onhaving been the subject of“a political condemnation” from ” Justice [du ministre Eric] Dupond-Moretti.
In September, Damien Rieu was acquitted in Lyon for defamation of Karim Benzema, for a tweet associating the footballer with armed Islamist fighters. His X account currently has 255,000 followers. Mr. Rieu, unsuccessful candidate of Reconquest! in the 2022 legislative elections in Nice, appears in twelfth place on the list of the Zemmourist party in the European elections, led by Marion Maréchal.