If Laure Manaudou’s swimming exploits made headlines twenty years ago, her private life also stirred up the media. Her sporting prowess began with a gold medal at the Athens Olympics when she was only 17 years old. The fervor led to intense media coverage to which the champion, now 38 years old, was neither prepared nor consenting and which she experienced as “harassment”.
“We need images and we no longer have a choice. Consent was not respected, I was not asked whether we can take this image, whether we can request an interview. It was aggressive,” recalls, in C to youLaure Manaudou, in front of images of journalists gathered on the edges of the pool while she is training, just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
Alert about revenge porn
But the most hurtful images are those, intimate ones, revealed by an ex-boyfriend, which triggered a wave of insults against Laure Manaudou. “For 15 years I received photos with insults, it was a very long time,” she remembers.
A trauma that she also mentioned in her autobiography released in 2022, Between the linesin which she explained that she had been paying “for years a company which is responsible for erasing them from the Internet as soon as they resurface. But regularly, idiots remind me of them, send them back to me on Twitter or put them back into circulation.” If, at the time, the term “revenge porn” did not exist, today it is an offense, punishable by two years of imprisonment and a fine of up to 60,000 euros.
Today the mother of a young teenager of almost 15 years old, Manon (as well as Lou, seven years old, and Sacha, four years old), the sportswoman is very attentive to the risks of revenge porn, against which she warns her daughter elder. “I try to do prevention and tell him that you have to be careful because it happened to me. And you shouldn’t do it. Then there are all the phones, social networks. In my time, twenty years ago, there weren’t that many. So you have to be careful,” warns Laure Manaudou.
