Trial in Paris for threatening the young woman who said that Islam is crap

Thirteen people sit on the bench in Paris this Thursday as alleged perpetrators of some of the tens of thousands of insults and death threats received on social media by a minor, an outspoken lesbian, who had criticized the Muslim religion online, who called it “shit”.

The thirteen defendants appearing before the Paris Correctional Court – ten men and three women between the ages of 18 and 30 who do not know each other – are accused of online harassment and death threats, and if convicted, that will It could entail penalties of up to three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros.

The young Mila, who has just turned 18, arrived at the court protected by bodyguards and surrounded by a cloud of cameras, accompanied by her lawyer, Richard Malka, the same one who represented Charlie Hebdo in the trial for the jihadist attack in January 2015 against the humorous weekly. Malka insisted at the entrance of the audience on the “unbearable” situation in which Mila finds herself, who has had to abandon her schooling because the authorities could not guarantee security in her center and must remain “retained” and protected 24 hours of the day for 18 months.

Hours before, the lawyer had denounced what he has repeatedly described as “a digital lynching”.. “Never in the history of this country has a girl received 100,000 hate messages with an obviously sexist, homophobic connotation,” she told France Info in an interview.

The lawyer considered the profile of a good part of the defendants “terrifying” because “they are not criminals, nor fanatics”, they have no criminal record, they are mostly young and without integration problems. “They do not realize – he stressed – the seriousness of their actions” and when the police landed at their homes to arrest them, they were surprised.

He also complained that they try to invoke the right to freedom of expression in their defense, that they consider it exaggerated that they can be sentenced just for a tweet and at the same time criticism of religion is not penalized.. “Blaspheming – Malka recalled – is legal in France and death threats cannot be made, not even on social networks.”

At the origin of this matter, there is a conversation that she had in January 2020 with another lesbian teenager like her with whom they talked about her taste for girls -then minors- and in which a young man interfered who began to insult them.. The discussion escalated, drifted towards religion and Mila, as she later recounted in a video that has gone viral, began to say that “the Koran is a religion of hate, Islam is shit (…) Your religion it's bullshit. To your God I stick a finger up your ass hole.”

violent insults

The girl has justified these comments by relying on her freedom of expression and has emphasized that denigrating a religion is not a racist act. From her video, Mila was rained on the networks thousands of messages with personal insults and threats. Many referred to her lesbian status – “you need a big dick” – and had extremely violent content: “You deserve to have your head chopped off, you disgusting bitch.”

Among these threatening messages, comparisons were made with the teacher who had his throat beheaded in October in the Paris region by a young Chechen jihadist after an Islamist campaign against him for showing his students controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad: “Tell me where do you live, I'm going to make you a Samuel Paty”.

In view of the dimension that the controversy was taking in the virtual space, the justice system opened an investigation for death threats and another in parallel against it for incitement to racial hatred, which was later archived because it considered that “a personal opinion towards a religion” is not criminally reprehensible.