She had a job as a columnist with Thierry Ardisson in Sunday Earthlings (C8), seemed fulfilled at the highest point… For Hapsatou Sy, everything changed in September 2018 when, on the set of the show, Eric Zemmour renamed her Corinne, a first name “listed in the calendar“. A lively clash ensued – part of it was cut during editing – and Vincent Cerutti’s companion felt humiliated. More than three years later, the 41-year-old business woman recounts, in aperitif from World of Saturday, January 22, 2022, to have suffered in silence.
The sequence took place in 2018, but it was in March 2021 that Hapsatou Sy broke down. “My body let me down“, she says then. The entrepreneur of Senegalese origin sinks into a deep depression, a burn-out that lasts nine months. She is even hospitalized because of this discomfort. “You say to yourself: ‘Where is the meaning of my life?’“, she remembers. If she got up today, this story with the presidential candidate ruined her life for a long time.
It must be said that after the broadcast of the sequence, Hapsatou Sy had to deal with comments from viewers, on the Web but also on a daily basis. “You wake up in the morning and you have a hundred, a thousand or even two thousand – one of the records – messages of insults“, she remembers. At the supermarket, passers-by have fun with the situation and call her by the first name put forward by Eric Zemmour. And that’s not the worst. In 2019, when she is pregnant with her second child, the hospital anesthesiologist welcomes him with a “Hello Corinne!“ Then the bad buzz has consequences on its business: investors are fleeing! This is too much.
Last September, on Instagram, the mother of Abbie (5 years old) and Isaac (2 years old) had already mentioned this distress. “I am coming out of six months of illness, affected by this evil that I thought smelly but painless“, she then launched. Since then, she has been getting better and better. To begin with, Hapsatou Sy left Canal + and lives between Paris and Saly in Senegal where she launched her concept store. Next step: face Eric Zemmour in court in next September, where he will be tried for incitement to racial hatred.