In Côte d’Ivoire, a video extract from a television program created controversy over rape on Saturday June 18. A well-known Ivorian actor, Jimmy Danger, told how he allegedly raped his cousin when he was young, a controversial passage integrated into a sequence where Jimmy Danger plays a rapist. This explains why he refused this role at the start of his career. But women’s rights organizations speak of manipulation.
With our correspondent in Abidjan, Peter Pinto
The passage on the black cat ” – a form of rape, in Ivorian slang -, was it reassembled to save the day for Jimmy Danger and the show? No, assures the general manager of the IvoirTV Music channel, Zoumana Bakayoko.
” The guest refused a role that had been offered to him. And then he explained it. But since he’s an actor, he tried to stage this story, and we skipped the context element just to create the buzz. This is the principle of the show: we make a buzz show, and in general, we take the part that is likely to lead the viewer to follow the show. It is true that for those who have not followed it, they will say that it is an apology for rape, when it is not that at all. »
The sequence was reassembled after the outcry caused by these remarks, believe the feminist organizations which have stepped up to the plate. Among them, the Stop Au Chat Noir association, run by Bénédicte Joan:
” You don’t really need to be an audiovisual expert to see that this is a very rough edit. And that, I really want to denounce this manipulation, and we are not going to drop the fact that we would like to see the whole thing. Even if we have to fight, we will apply ourselves to do everything possible to try to have an answer with the Haca. »
According to her, this case brings to light once again the ” rape culture ” in Ivory Coast :
Jimmy Danger’s video “validates rape culture and takes zero consideration for our law”, according to Bénédicte Joan, of the Stop Au Chat Noir association
The High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (Haca) says it has received many reports on the first video. The channel, for its part, claims to have sent the program to the Haca before its broadcast and to have received the agreement to broadcast. At the High Authority, we do not confirm, but we indicate that the Haca never intervenes before the broadcast of a program.