Fifteen people will be tried next October before the Paris Criminal Court for the homophobic cyberbullying of singer Eddy de Pretto after a concert in a church in June 2021.
They will appear on October 3 and 4 for “online harassment with ITT (total interruption of work) for more than eight days and online harassment with ITT for more than eight days committed on the basis of the sexual orientation of the victim”, indicated the wooden floor.
“As part of an investigation followed by the National Pole for the Fight against Online Hate” of the Paris Court of Justice which began its work in early 2021, “seventeen men, aged 20 to 26, were placed in police custody between Tuesday and Thursday,” said the same source.
arrests throughout France
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- Denis, Meuse, again informed the prosecution.
A source close to the case, who confirmed to AFP the seventeen arrests, specified that the arrests had been 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 “A quoi bon” which evokes the difficulties in reconciling his homosexuality and religion.
3,000 hate messages
After his performance, he received nearly 3,000 messages of insults and death threats on social networks, according to Le Parisien.
“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. The latter had filed a complaint, leading to the opening of the investigation.
“These far right homophobes, royalists, anarchists will never win. Love always wins”, wrote the artist on Twitter, before adding “And I will continue to sing my words wherever I am invited to do so”.