2023-09-19 23:02:49
“I think Benzema wants to send us a message. » In this message published on social networks in 2020, Damien Rieu had associated the ex-Real Madrid striker in a montage with armed Islamist fighters. Three years after the events, and after being sued for defamation by the footballer, the 32-year-old far-right polemicist has just been acquitted by the Lyon criminal court.
The Lyon criminal court considered that this message, even defamatory in terms, could benefit from good faith, which leads to acquittal in press matters. For his lawyer, Pierre-Vincent Lambert, the “factual basis” of the decision is to be found in the “like” that Karim Benzema had posted on Twitter in favor of an athlete from Dagestan, who had described cartoonists as ” enemies of Islam.
“Granting good faith is an aberration”
“I have just won my case against Benzema and his Islamist compromises,” reacted the activist on X (formerly Twitter). “The court recognized that I had every right to denounce the Islamic ambiguities of the Ballon d’Or,” he added.
Insinuating a proximity between the footballer and jihadists “constitutes an insult to those who fight against Islamist terrorism, and to those who have suffered from it in their flesh”, had nevertheless estimated the prosecutor, Alain Grellet, who had requested 10,000 euros fine last June. The unsuccessful Reconquest candidate for the 2022 legislative elections in Nice nevertheless escapes without any sanction.
“Granting good faith to Damien Rieu is an aberration,” reacted the player’s lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, as he left the courthouse. “We have the right to make fun of Karim Benzema, (…) to have an opinion different from his, but to associate him with a terrorist, we do not have the right,” he said during of the hearing in June. Obviously insufficient arguments.
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