prosecuted for insult and defamation, Yann Moix acquitted

The writer Yann Moix, prosecuted for insult and defamation for comments about the police officers who had created a controversy in September 2018, was acquitted on Tuesday September 26 by the Paris court. On September 22, 2018, in Thierry Ardisson’s show “Les Terriens du Samedi” on C8, during a debate around the book by journalist Frédéric Ploquin baptized Fear has changed sideswhich mentioned the work of the police “fear in my stomach” against a backdrop of insecurity, Yann Moix had accused the police of “victimize oneself”. Two police officers were also present on set.

“Your favorite targets are the poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. And I myself, like all French people, am most often a spectator of the harassment that you practice on harmless people. (…) because indeed, with fear in your stomach, you don’t have the balls to go to dangerous places”he declared.

These comments provoked the ire of police unions and the Minister of the Interior at the time, Gérard Collomb, who filed a complaint. The Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) – now the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) – had received more than 2,000 referrals from viewers. Shortly after, Yann Moix said “regret” of the “bad words”defending himself from being « antiflic ».

“Free right to criticize”

On Tuesday, the writer was first acquitted of charges of insulting a public administration. The press chamber notes that its statements were part of a “controversial debate” brand “by a certain familiarity”which allowed “therefore a freedom of tone, exaggeration and provocation”. And this, “all the more so from Yann Moix, who played the role of polemicist”. His argument was based on “free right to criticize”according to the judgment consulted by Agence France-Presse.

Yann Moix was also sued for defamation for comments made the next day on Europe 1, where he responded to the words of Gérard Collomb who had described him as “rude in form, indecent in substance”. “The rudeness and indecency of Gérard Collomb (…)I saw them in the baton blows he lavishes on migrants in Calais all day long when four, five, six, seven, eight police officers are sometimes on a 16 year old child and beat him with blows and gas him”declared Yann Moix.

The court ruled that these comments were not defamatory, because they were a “value judgment” from a “pictorial scene, formulated in general terms” and not a “specific fact which would be attributed to the national police” – precise fact that the offense of defamation presupposes.