43
votes
Imane Khelif brings lawsuit against x for "acts of aggravated cyber harassment”
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk Named in Cyberbullying Lawsuit Filed by Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif After Olympic Win (EXCLUSIVE)
- Authors
- Elsa Keslassy,Alex Ritman
- Published
- Aug 13 2024
- Word count
- 780 words
The article calls this a lawsuit as well as a criminal complaint. And I don't understand enough about French law to know if there is a difference here in translation. However everyone's least favorite author, Musk and others were specifically named. This does not target the company "X" but unknown people. (It's like naming John Doe) I've seen a couple of Instagram story apologies shared on Facebook and Tiktok which makes me think some people realized they did a crime.
Imane has been a fucking queen about this and has avoided afaik redirecting any hate to trans women or trans athletes in a hope to clear her name. I'm so thrilled she won and felt empowered to come back at her harassers.
I don't know if the Taiwanese fighter Lin Yu-ting will be also using legal avenues, but she may not have access to the French courts in the same way. She also got more ignored online because Imane's opponent quitting started this whole thing.
I'm not well versed in Common Law, but my understanding, is that if I punch you in the face in the street. You go to the police, and file a report and press charges against me. I imagine that the district attorney can choose to prosecute or not. If they do, they need a high burden of proof, they will most likely ask you to testify. Whether the jury decides that I'm guilty of battery or not, you can always sue me in civil court, for money, and you'll have to face a lower burden of proof.
This is totally different in French law. I'm not an expert, I just went to law university for one year, before I dropped out :)
If I punch you in the face, you can report it to the police, and it will go into crime statistics. (Déposer une main courante) Or you can formally press charges. (Porter plainte) The thing is that in France, we have a saying "le criminel tient le civil en l'état" (the best translation I could come up with is "civil courts enacts criminal decisions as is"), this means that the civil lawsuits will wait for criminal courts to statute, before ruling with the same decision. Usually, this puts pressure on the public prosecutor to prosecute when you press charges. Because the ruling of the criminal court will affect the ruling of the civil court. During the criminal proceedings, you can be a "civil party", this means that you will be a third party to the criminal trial in addition to the defendant and the public prosecutor, you can bring your own witnesses, and question the ones brought by others, ...
That's why most cases in France start with a criminal case. A criminal case is any case where there is a victim, it could be battery, like in my example, but it could also be "injure à la personne" (lit. insult to a third party), harassment, ... Many of these cases will be ruled directly by a qualified judge and two "assesseurs" (these are full time volunteering citizen, with ~2 weeks of basic training, with an okay pay, they act as two jurors with a judge). Juries are reserved for "blood crimes" as we say in France, which are basically rape, murder and in some cases of child abuse.
Thank you! That mostly clears it up (I think)!
Will it be under French law? JK is in the UK and Elon is in the US, the victim was in France at the time, but is Algerian. Surely they file suits in each respective country of the people being sued.
Edit: article states The lawsuit was filed against X, which under French law means that it was filed against unknown persons. Again though file in the US against the American entity not the French / European one I’m guessing.
It's not filed against Twitter, but against Johns Doe (Gods renaming that site was so dumb.) I read it 3 times and still misunderstood it. The suit says X because that's what X means in French law.
I believe she's filing in French court. I don't know if she'd have to file again in the UK or if France can handle that part or how Brexit impacts that. But like I said this was also listed as a criminal complaint too. From what her lawyer said it sounded like the court/police had the ability to pursue people not in the country. Not sure how effectively. But the way it's set up means she's not suing Rowling or Musk directly, saying "multiple unknown people did this, police please investigate"
I mean they file against the legal entity x llc or whatever it’s not hard. I don’t believe any competent lawyer would not know this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.
Edit: oh my god. This is why renaming twitter was so fucking stupid.
"Porter plainte contre X" in French is a well-known idiom (and probably official legal terminology) that means "press charges against [the yet to be determined responsible entity]". That's why it's not clear.
She is not suing the company formerly known as Twitter.
She's suing "unnamed people" which in France means she's suing essentially "Person X"
X Corp is not being sued.
Ha, sorry it took me a while to figure out. Fucking Elon…
It's a dumb name change.
This is a lot less certain than you think. Jurisdiction in lawsuits like this is something lawyers learn to manipulate to their advantage, even in domestic cases where it's significantly less complex. That said, to give an oversimplified laymans summary: jurisdiction generally relies on the location where either the plaintiff or the defendant is based (with about a million asterisks because there's a ton of complexity that only lawyers ever know). In general, a plaintiff can totally sue people in their own local courts even if those people live in other jurisdictions. It's just a matter of other details and whether they can enforce a judgment later.
Due to the SPEECH Act, the US doesn't enforce defamation suits from countries with weaker free speech protections. However, I don't think the UK has similar protections if Imane received a judgment against Rowling in France. And, of course, as @DefinitelyNotAFae pointed out, this isn't a direct defamation suit against Rowling and Musk, so I'm sure the details from there are even more complex.
The Olympics happening in France probably also matter due to jurisdiction, plus it's possible that Imane trains there/resides there. It wouldn't be particularly odd as an Algerian, but that is just conjecture.
Yeah, jurisdiction is one of those things where it makes total sense why lawyers make the money they do. It's convoluted as fuck.