“I can’t take it anymore. I haven’t slept for four days. I’m afraid for me and my family, I’m exhausted.” We are on May 25, 2022 when Magali Berdah utters these words in front of a judicial police officer. The “popess of influencers” has just walked through the door of a Paris police station to file a complaint against Booba and against X. According to the minutes of her hearing, which “Complement of the investigation” was able to consult, she accuses the famous rapper French living in Miami (Florida) and his “army” Internet users “unleashed[er]” on his “networks” social for several days.
>> “Scams, money and politics: the real business of influencers”, watch “Additional investigation” Thursday, September 8 on France 2
An investigation for heads of “threat, harassment and provocation to commit an attack on the integrity of the person because of his religion or his sex” is opened in the wake of the Paris prosecutor’s office and entrusted to the new national pole of fight against online hatred of the judicial court of the capital.
It all started with a story of a fake watch. At the end of December 2021, Booba was attacked from Dubai by ex-reality TV candidate Marc Blata over an alleged counterfeit on his wrist. Stung to the quick, the rapper improvises himself as a whistleblower on the scams in vogue in the universe of Instagram influencers and consorts. One thing leading to another, Elie Yaffa, his real name, goes back to one of the “popesses” of this small virtual world, Magali Berdah. At the head of Shauna Events, a company created in 2016, she mediates between brands and reality TV muses, for a percentage in passing.
According to the “Duke of Boulogne”, who launched a hashtag #influvoleurs2022 and opened a mailbox of the same name, many gullible buyers, for some minors, have never seen the color of their orders (beauty products, Playstation , connected watch…), without being reimbursed, or have received counterfeit items. Based on dozens of testimonies, which “Complément d’Enquête” also read, he filed a complaint at the end of July with his lawyer Patrick Klugman for “misleading commercial practices” and “organized gang scam”. Seized of the file at the end of August, the parquet floor of Grasse entrusted the investigation, according to our information, to the police station of Antibes.
But the approach of the author of the album Ultra did not stop at the judicial level. Magali Berdah claims to be the victim of a real cabal on the part of the rapper, strong in “7 million subscribers” on the networks. The columnist of “Don’t touch my friend”, who has it “2.7 million”quotes during his complaint one of the tweets of the rapper who set fire to the powder on May 17: “@CyrilHanouna, Why do you allow pedo-sociopaths and thieves, scammers, manipulators to participate in your show? A very bad example for the people. The people are not happy and they have mobilized. With or without me, an army has awakened. Watch out…”
From that moment, the businesswoman says she received “several hundred messages and death threats”some of which “anti-Semitic character”, Magali Berdah being of the Jewish faith. Internet users go so far as to speak, according to his complaint, of “stoning” and of “beheading like Samuel Paty”, this teacher murdered by a terrorist in October 2020 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines). Her phone number is broadcast online, she receives “malicious phone calls”, “almost one per minute on certain time slots”, she assures. In possession of a medical certificate “who observes a state of stress and anxiety”the forty-year-old seeks police protection for her and her family.
A request supported by his lawyer three times with the competent authorities. Master Antonin Gravelin-Rodriguez points out that Magali Berdah’s two underage daughters have received an email demanding 5,000 euros on pain of revealing their mother’s postal addresses and that a new complaint will be filed for extortion. On June 26, he warned that his client’s Parisian address had finally been published by the Instagram account “piracy or nothing” with “the floor, the landing door, the photo of his dog, images of the living room of the apartment”. This request for police protection will be refused.
Again heard by the police on July 8, Magali Berdah explains that she had to move and hired two security guards. The Instagram account of one of them has been leaked, along with his schedule. Complaining about “sleeping troubles”she thinks “between 10 and 20,000 the number of messages received since May 17” with the hashtags (keywords) #OKLM (the name of Booba’s Instagram account), #Booba and #LaPiraterie (the name of the rapper’s label).
“I’m afraid that people will come to my house to rob me, abuse my children, my husband and me, or that they will come to our house at night. I’m afraid when I’m in the street that someone will come and hurt me. So I don’t go out of my house.”
Magali Berdahto investigators
Declaring to be under “anxiolytics”, “since June 22”she claims to have “had more than 8 days of ITT”. “I’m very solid but this is very hard. I want him to let me live, his life doesn’t interest me”, she says about Booba. Magalie Berdah mentions to the investigators new messages from the rapper, accusing him in particular of having “sent the Mossad”.
The influencer’s entourage continues to be targeted, according to her lawyer. In a letter dated July 25, Antonin Gravelin-Rodriguez reports to the courts malicious calls to the mother of Magali Berdah and the attack on her 14-year-old daughter in Paris on the evening of July 14, in her car without a license. “Individuals allegedly grabbed her by the hair and punched her”, reports the criminal, specifying that the teenager has not had her injuries noted but that a new complaint will be filed. He also relays a new message from Booba targeting his client on Twitter: “The more you agonize, the more it turns me on.”
Far from sticking, too, to the legal response, Magali Berdah used social networks and the set of “TPMP” to denounce the harassment of which she claims to be the victim of Booba and defend her company Shauna Events. With her lawyers, she obtained the closure of one of the rapper’s Instagram accounts. The latter took legal action to obtain his reinstatement and filed a complaint for “defamation and slanderous denunciation”.
“My client is in no way responsible for these facts and his actions. And Mrs. Berdah, who sometimes takes some liberties with rigor, has never dared to claim the opposite and no one has ever attributed Booba the slightest anti-Semitic statement”responded the artist’s lawyer, Patrick Klugman, in a press release.
“Booba is in the denunciation of a dangerous fact of society: the culture of emptiness and the scams that it makes possible.”
Patrick Klugman, attorney for the rapperin a press release
After months of virtual war through networks and media, Magali Berdah and Booba could end up meeting in court.