The elected environmentalist suffers a wave of cyberstalking after the resignation of Christophe Girard, a moment she called a big step forward in the feminist struggle.
On July 23, Christophe Girard, deputy for culture at the City of Paris, resigned from his post. This follows in particular feminist protests calling for his resignation for his alleged ties to writer Gabriel Matzneff, currently under investigation for "rape of a minor".
The elected official was heard as a witness in the investigation against the writer, to find out whether he was aware of Matzneff's pedophile actions.
On July 23, feminist activists, accompanied by elected environmentalists including Alice Coffin, demanded the departure of Christophe Girard under the windows of the Town Hall, where the first Municipal Council of the term was held. "It is not enough to have a clean criminal record to be deputy mayor of Paris, you also need ethical and moral qualities. Support for Gabriel Matzneff disqualifies Christophe Girard for this kind of responsibility", declared the elected ecologist Raphaëlle Rémy-Leleu during this gathering.
David Belliard, transport assistant, recalls in Le Parisien of July 27 that: “We cannot want renewal and ask the younger generations to conform to the practices of twenty years ago. We will have to learn to work together to come out on top of this affair ”.
Alice Coffin is an activist journalist, co-founder of several feminist collectives. Following this demonstration and then resignation, Internet users became inflamed and inundated with sexist and lesbophobic insults and threats. Police protection was quickly offered to her in the face of the seriousness of the threats, and the elected official finally accepted it.
Alice Coffin has been committed and active for a long time. In 2012, she created the association OUI OUi OUI, a collective defending the openness to all of marriage, adoption and assisted reproduction. It is a feminist, mixed group, in which a wide variety of people participate, in particular many lesbians, mobilized around these three "yeses". In 2013, she created the Association of LGBT Journalists. She also co-created the collective La Barbe which denounces the lack of gender diversity in the assemblies of powers.
However, these positions have sometimes been a source of controversy, and have emerged since this weekend to stir up hatred.
Faced with the figures for gender-based and sexual violence committed by men against women, she found that being a lesbian she runs less risk.
The violence of the attacks suffered over the weekend testifies to the progress still to be made for a public life free from gender-based violence.