the director and a journalist of “Valeurs Actuelles” definitively sentenced

The weekly published, in August 2020, an article entitled “Obono the African” in which the LFI MP was depicted as a 17th century slave in a village in Chad. The text was accompanied by an illustration showing Danièle Obono with an iron around her neck.

The director and a journalist of the far-right weekly Current values were definitively condemned, Tuesday January 16, respectively for “insults” and “complicity in racist insults” towards LFI MP Danièle Obono, France Inter learned on Wednesday from the elected official’s lawyer, Maître Xavier Sauvignet.

The weekly published, in August 2020, a story entitled “Obono l’Africaine” and subtitled “Where the rebellious deputy experiences the responsibility of Africans in the horrors of slavery”, in which the elected representative of the 17th district of Paris was depicted as a 17th century slave in a village in Chad. The text was accompanied by an illustration showing Danièle Obono with an iron around her neck.

The director and journalist of Current Values ​​already sentenced

In its judgment consulted by France Inter, the Court of Cassation rejects the appeal of Erik Monjalous, director of the publication and Laurent Jullien, editor of the article in question. They received, in November 2022, a suspended fine of 1,000 euros each, the first for “public insult based on origin, ethnicity, nation, race or religion”, and the second for complicity in this crime. The two defendants had notably pleaded for the use of fiction, explaining that this text was part of a series entitled “The Novel of Summer 2020”, in which real people making the news were projected into the past.

The judges of the Court of Appeal had highlighted, among other things, the succession of humiliating situations in which Danièle Obono is placed in this fiction, “the degrading image showing her in chains”and emphasized that “if the other episodes place the characters in humorous or flattering situations, only the character of Mrs. Obono finds herself in a succession of humiliating situations, treated in a particularly realistic way.”