A feminist advocate pretending to be a photographer managed to breach security at a huge international ceremony in Paris and disrupt US Presidential Donald Trump’s motorcade as part of a protest.
With thousands of security forces deployed across the French capital, questions swirled regarding how the woman and two other advocates from the feminist group Femen got so close to scores of world leaders gathered on the Champs Elysees to mark the 100 years since the end of World War I.
Photographers accredited by the French presidential palace noticed that a woman in their midst was using a fake identity, said Ludovic Marin, an Agence France-Presse photographer who heads the media liaison committee with the French presidential palace.
The photographers alerted French presidential officials as well as police, and the woman was led away, Marin said.
However, soon afterward she dashed out onto the Champs Elysees in front of Trump’s motorcade, shouting “fake peacemaker.”
At that point, she was detained along with two other Femen protesters in the crowds of onlookers along the Champs Elysees.
All three had “fake peacemakers” scrawled across their breasts, Femen leader Inna Shevchenko said.
The three are facing charges of sexual exhibitionism, a judicial official said.
Shevchenko would not comment on the fake photographer ploy, saying only that all three arrested advocates had been in areas open to the general public and that their action was peaceful.
Marin expressed concern that the woman “usurped the identity” of a legitimate photographer to get permission to cover the high-security event, and that this could have negative consequences for real photographers seeking permission to cover presidential events.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s office would not comment on how the woman was accredited using a false identity.
A police official said authorities were investigating the breach.
Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner sought to play down the incident, and was quoted by BFM television as saying that the women were unarmed and security of the event was “in no way threatened.”
Shevchenko said the point of the protest was to “denounce this hypocrisy” of holding an event celebrating peace with leaders such as Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, “who represent everything but not peace.”
Trump had an “aggressive attitude toward European leaders and hostile ideas” toward multilateral cooperation, she said.
Macron’s office insisted on the importance of inviting Trump and other leaders because of their role in World War I.
Shevechenko dismissed the “sexual exhibitionism” accusation as an effort by French authorities to “say that women’s bodies are supposed to be regarded as sexual by definition. We claim the opposite, that women’s bodies are sexual when women decide it, and they can be political when we decide it.”
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