The Bastien Vivès controversy enters the legal field. The designer is the subject of a complaint for the dissemination of child pornography images. Filed by the association Innocence in danger, the latter also targets its publishers Glénat and the Requins Marteaux, announce this Tuesday RMC and France Info.
The association denounces the dissemination in the artist’s works of child pornography, the incitement to commit sexual assaults on minors and the dissemination to a minor of violent messages. At the heart of a controversy for several days, Bastien Vivès saw his exhibition at the Angoulême Festival be canceled after he was accused of promoting child pornography in certain works and public statements.
His comic strip “Petit Paul” presents a child with a disproportionate penis arousing the lust of women, and other titles such as “Les Melons de larage”, where a teenager is raped, and “La Décharge Mentale”, which depicts sexual relations between minors and an adult man, are the subject of a debate on their conformity with the law. For Innocence in danger, “these boards show many minors abused or showing off their intimacy”.
According to the complaint, which we consulted, Bastien Vivès “like the editions of Requins Marteaux and Glénat were perfectly aware of the minority of the characters and the pornographic nature of the situations in which they found themselves. »
“These comics by their trivialization of such acts are a provocation to the commission of sexual abuse of minors for fragile people who might think that such relationships are the norm, further believes Innocence in danger. They were and still are accessible to minors who could perfectly well think that the relationship between an adult and a child or adolescent should happen in this way”.
The International Comics Festival, the most important event of the 9th art, announced on Wednesday the cancellation of the exhibition which was to be devoted from the end of January to this 38-year-old designer. He invoked “threats” which targeted the author and the organizers.
“It was mainly my words that shocked”
“Today I realize that beyond my works, it was above all my words that shocked,” he wrote Thursday on Instagram. “I sincerely regret some of my remarks, and more particularly those against the designer Emma, posted on my Facebook wall to which I would like to apologize. It was gratuitously violent, disrespectful and above all outrageous,” he added.
The controversy also relates to the books of this author, which mix pornography and minors. “They are part of a humorous burlesque genre. This provocative tone, I happened to take it up sometimes, in a clumsy way, in my interviews, ”he justified.
“Absence of offense” had estimated the prosecution in 2019
In 2018, after the publication of “Petit Paul”, Glénat editions defended themselves by stating that “as obscene and provocative as it may be considered, this work of fiction is never intended to play down, favor or legitimize the abuse of minors in any way”.
A report, sent at the time by the Face à l’inceste association requesting the withdrawal of this comic strip, was dismissed for “absence of offense” in February 2019, according to the Nanterre prosecution.