Olympic champion boxer Imane Khelif filed a complaint in France that named billionaire Elon Musk and author J.K. Rowling as among the high-profile figures to amplify the online attacks against her, according to Variety.
Khelif’s lawyer Nabil Boudi told Variety that Musk and Rowling were named in a criminal complaint that claims she was a victim of cyberharassment related to her gender identity.
Boudi said in a statement posted on X that it was a “misogynist, racist and sexist campaign.”
Photo: AFP
Khelif, who won a gold medal for Algeria in women’s welterweight boxing in Paris, faced intense scrutiny during the Olympics of her biological sex and gender identity, including baseless claims that she is transgender. Last year, she was disqualified from the world boxing championships after a controversial boxing association said she failed an eligibility test.
The debate intensified when one of Khelif’s Olympic opponents, Italy’s Angela Carini, surrendered in the first round of their fight, saying she had “never felt a punch like this.” That triggered a flood of hateful messages on social media alleging that Khelif was a man posing as a woman to cheat.
Rowling and Musk were among the high-profile individuals to post about Khelif being a man.
The owner of X, Musk backed a post saying: “Men don’t belong in women’s sports,” accompanied by an image of Carini.
Rowling posted on X a picture of Khelif, describing her smile as “the smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment.”
The post was seen 122 million times as of Wednesday.
A representative for Rowling declined to comment.
Boudi and a representative for Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint, filed in the Paris correctional court’s national center for combating hate crimes, was filed against “X,” the French equivalent of “John Doe.” This allows for the investigation of authors of social media posts in question, including those written under pseudonyms.
The case highlights the increasing appetite from law enforcement agencies around the world to crack down on online harms, including hate speech and incitement to violence. The UK has charged about a dozen people with offenses related to online speech following the far-right riots that swept through the country after three girls were killed in an attack on July 29.
The French public prosecutor’s office in Paris confirmed it received a complaint on Monday from Khelif and that the center on hate crimes had launched an investigation into charges of “cyberharassment and public insults on the grounds of gender, public provocation to discrimination and public insults on the grounds of origin.”
Under French law, cyberbullying can carry a prison sentence of up to three years and fines. There have been several several high-profile cases over the past few years, including when 28 individuals were fined and sentenced to jail for up to a year in March for harassing businesswoman Magali Berdah online with repeated death threats and insults.
Separately, several artists involved in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics filed cyberharassment complaints after facing online threats, including its artistic director Thomas Jolly, drag queen Nicky Doll and DJ Barbara Butsch.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS