Eric Zemmour was sentenced, Thursday September 28, in Paris to a fine of 4,000 euros for homophobic insult, for having declared in October 2019 on CNews that homosexual people had “enslaved” the State “for their benefit”. “We are immediately appealing this decision,” his lawyer, Olivier Pardo, told Agence France-Presse.
The Stop Homophobia association had filed a complaint against comments made by Eric Zemmour on October 15, 2019, in the program “Face à l’info”. That day, the program was titled: “Medically assisted reproduction: progress? », after the adoption at first reading in the Assembly of a bill providing in particular for the extension of PMA to female couples and single women.
During a long debate with Nicolas Bouzou, Eric Zemmour notably declared: “We have the whims of a small minority which has control over the State and which enslaves it for its own benefit and which will first disintegrate the society, because we are going to have children without a father and [that] I have just told you that it is a catastrophe and, secondly, who is going to make all the other French people pay for his whims.”
Formal notice from the CSA
After a formal notice from the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), the replay of the show was deleted from the channel’s website at the end of November 2019. The case was debated on May 15, 2023 and the press chamber of the Paris court handed down its decision on Thursday.
“The comments are contemptuous of the people they target, who see their desire for a child reduced to a “selfish whim” and even take on an outrageous dimension since it is attributed to them, to satisfy it, to resort to subjugation of the state apparatus,” the court judges.
“In this, homosexual people find themselves disqualified in the eyes of the public for who they are, their sexual orientation necessarily inducing, according to the defendant, behavior contrary to the general interest,” adds the decision.
The director of CNews, Serge Nedjar, was sentenced to a fine of 4,000 euros, 2,000 of which was suspended. They were ordered to pay jointly to the civil party associations, Stop Homophobia, Adheos and Mousse, a total of 3,000 euros in damages and 2,000 euros in legal fees.
The former far-right presidential candidate and current president of the Reconquest! was definitively convicted twice for provoking hatred, for comments made in 2010 and 2016. Around ten trials await him by the end of 2023.
On September 5, the Court of Cassation ordered that, after two acquittals, he be retried for contesting crimes against humanity, for having claimed in 2019 that Marshal Pétain had “saved” French Jews during the Second World War.
