Bastien Vivès has been accused by some of promoting pedophilia in his albums.
AFP
“Death penalty for pedos”, “we will have your skin”: five people were sentenced Thursday in Paris to suspended prison sentences of two to seven months for having threatened death or violence against the author of comic strip Bastien Vives.
At the heart of a controversy
The five defendants, three men and two women aged 21 to 31, will also have to each pay 500 to 1,000 euros to the designer, for his moral damage, plus 500 euros for his lawyer’s fees, ordered the Court correctional. They appeared for messages posted on social networks, most of them in December 2022.
The cartoonist – who was present at the hearing, where he did not speak – was the subject of heated controversy at the time, with several of his works being accused of promoting pedophilia. The controversy and threats received by the author led the Angoulême International Comics Festival to cancel the exhibition which was to be dedicated to him there.
For the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office, these online threats are all the more intolerable as they can encourage other Internet users to “take action”. “If you consider that Bastien Vivès’ publications are questionable, you have the right to say so, but not to threaten him with death!”, she exclaimed to the attention of the defendants. Most, however, admitted at the bar that they had not really read the works in question.
“I followed a movement”
“I was blinded by things I read on the internet, it’s stupid,” said one, who had sent the designer an image of Kalashnikov bullets, with the words in English “remedy against pedophilia. “I followed a movement. I didn’t know his comics at all,” admitted another, who had written “death penalty for paedos.”
A Fine Arts student admitted to having “exceeded the limits” by sending, in 2020, a message worded “you and all predators like this, we will cut off your balls”. “It was an image,” she defended herself in court. The young woman explained that at the time she was upset by acts of incest of which one of her relatives had been a victim. And that she had “stumbled upon” Bastien Vivès’ album “Petit Paul”, featuring “a child of six or seven years old who has a 50 cm penis and engages in sexual acts with adults” .
“The sprinkler watered”
The complaints concerning this album were closed without further action, noted in this regard one of the author’s defenders, Me Richard Malka. A preliminary investigation into the dissemination of child pornography images has also been ongoing since the beginning of 2023 at the Nanterre Public Prosecutor’s Office, but has still not led to prosecutions, he added. Another young woman had written “Bastien Vivès, we will have your skin, you motherfucker” on Twitter – a network that she used “like a diary”. She explained that she felt “hurt” by a drawing by Bastien Vivès that she found “homophobic”, but admitted not having read his comics.
In this case, Bastien Vivès is a bit of a “watered sprinkler”, noted for his part another defense lawyer, Mr. Denis Hubert, stressing that the cartoonist had been strongly criticized for having launched on Facebook, under a pseudonym, calls for violence against feminist cartoonist Emma. In December 2022, the designer “ended up apologizing half-heartedly, saying that social networks had made him stupid,” observed the lawyer. His client, he stressed, is in the same situation: “he was content to follow the rumor like a sheep of Panurge, without verifying it”.
(afp)
