Nicolas Bay, vice-president of Reconquête, is finally acquitted after a defamation complaint filed by rapper Médine

The criminal court ruled that the MEP had not mentioned a “specific fact” by describing the singer as “close to the Islamist movement”. In the absence of verifiable evidence, it is therefore impossible to establish defamation or not.

Sued for defamation by the rapper Médine, the executive vice-president of the Reconquête party, Nicolas Bay, was acquitted by the Paris criminal court on Thursday May 2. The Le Havre rapper filed a complaint in June 2021 for a sentence that the MEP, then candidate in the regional elections in Normandy under the banner of the National Rally (RN), had dedicated to him on his blog. He was indignant that the outgoing Regional Council, led by the centrist Hervé Morin, had subsidized a documentary devoted to the life of the artist, which he had described as “close to the Islamist movement of the Muslim Brotherhood”.

“If the link made between Medina and ‘the Islamist movement of the Muslim Brotherhood’ resonates as an infamy for him, it is only at the cost of an extrapolation that he can see in it the imputation of a precise fact “, the court ruled. However, to be characterized, defamation must concern a “precise fact, likely to be the subject of a contradictory debate on the proof of its truth”recalled the court.

“An opinion whose truth cannot be proven”

According to the jurisdiction, “the qualification of ‘Islamist’, even in reference to the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, echoes one of the items of the electoral program” by Nicholas Bay. Therefore, it is a “opinion” of which “the relevance can be freely discussed within the framework of a debate of ideas but the truth of which cannot be proven”, ruled the court. During the trial in March, the public prosecutor had already considered that the comments made “regarded opinion and value judgment” and not defamation.

Controversial rapper, Médine, absent from the hearing, has been accused in the past of homophobic positions or anti-Semitism. In a message broadcast in August on “resKHANpée”. An expression that he later regretted, denying himself of being anti-Semitic. As for Nicolas Bay, also absent from the hearing, he is expected to appear at the end of September before the Paris criminal court alongside 26 other defendants, including Marine le Pen, for suspicion of embezzlement of European public funds.