the Court of Cassation orders a new trial for the polemicist Dieudonné

The Court of Cassation ordered a new trial concerning the comments made in 2020 by the multi-convicted polemicist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala towards the writer and actress Rachel Khan, for which he had been acquitted on appeal, according to a decision consulted on Wednesday. The case dates back to a video of the polemicist published on October 6, 2020 in “answer” to Rachel Khan: “You will remain a poor black woman at the end of the story”.

The latter had written a few days earlier an article entitled “Faced with the rapper’s anti-Semitic punchlines Freeze Corleone let’s not create a Dieudonné 2.0”in which she recalled being the granddaughter of a deportee. For these comments, Dieudonné was first sentenced in September 2022 by the Paris Criminal Court to 10,000 euros in day fines – a fine which, if not paid, can result in prison.

But in 2023, the court of appeal acquitted the polemicist, finding that “in the context in which they were made, the remarks pursued cannot constitute an outrageous expression, terms of contempt or invective”.

In its decision consulted on Wednesday by AFP, the Court of Cassation considered that “the comments made (…) were in reality contemptuous of Ms. Khan, referring to the color of her skin and her paternal African origins with an insulting term to reduce her to the status of an inferior being. prohibiting her from being considered, equal to others, as a member of the Jewish community to which she belongs..

Rachel Khan’s lawyer, Me Richard Malka, who filed the cassation appeal alongside Licra (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), welcomed this referral: “I am obviously satisfied with this decision as the remarks pursued seem to me to characterize the worst of racism and anti-Semitism”.