It seems that it is now allowed to use and spread fake news when it comes to neo-feminist struggles. No matter the approximations, the lies, the exaggerations, what matters is to prove that the women are victims, and the men – white – the culprits. The litany of women doomed to be beaten, raped, insulted, underpaid has swelled and spread as Women’s Rights Day approaches. It’s about showing anti-patriarchal paws, justifying state subsidies, keeping your job and making a career. This is not only lamentable, it is dangerous for the survival of feminism and women’s rights.
The magazine Vanity Fair is carrying out the investigation, as precise as it is terrifying, into a case, dating from 2020, which had completely escaped me: a soprano, Chloé Briot, filed a complaint against a baritone, Boris Grappe, who allegedly sexually assaulted him on the scene, before the viewers, during the representations. I insist: not only the spectators attended the sequence of “sexual aggression”, but the representations as the rehearsals were filmed. Philippe Carbonneaux, assistant to director Joël Pommerat, has replayed the images over and over, and still can’t believe it.
What Chloé Briot describes does not exist, has never existed. Neither in reality nor in filmed, archived, visible reality. The investigators do not see on the videos, the baritone “grabbing the breasts” of the soprano, as she very precisely described it, nor putting his head on her sex. Neither on stage, nor during filmed rehearsals, nor during spinning. After two years of investigation, the prosecutor of Besançon classifies the complaint without follow-up. Nothing, but then nothing at all, confirms the accusations of the soprano, who has continued to work since her complaint. But baritone Boris Grappe has been banned. He became a caregiver in an Ehpad in Germany. His career is shattered. Worse. His complaint for slanderous denunciation was also dismissed.
The injustice of blind militancy
But if it wasn’t a slanderous denunciation, what was it? Roselyne Bachelot, then Minister of Culture, put on her white knight costume and defended the soprano, even though the latter had not yet responded to the summons of the investigators, and made a report to justice with an innate sense of justice. anachronism – justice who was already aware, since there was a complaint. Fabulous Bachelot so quick to noisily break sugar on the backs of his collaborators – which ensures him a paid place on the news channels -, and who quietly participates in a quarry, stirring up the mire – imaginary – which will drown Boris Grappe. The affair is chilling, disgusting, and makes it possible to measure the injustice of blind militancy, the inanity of the “I believe you”, which do not value any fight but sow doubt on all the complaints to come.
And then there was the exit fake news from a spokeswoman for Dare to feminism, an association subsidized by the Paris City Hall which operates in Parisian schools – tremble for your children! – which, under the pretext of denouncing spousal crimes, incriminates the Judeo-Christian culture: “These are systemic facts, that is to say facts that our society engenders. I would also remind you that it is our Judeo-Christian culture which engenders it.” All it takes is a three-minute search, watch in hand, on the UN website to dispute the stupidity of such a statement: 3.5 women out of 100,000 die of spousal crimes on the African continent compared to 0.7 in Europe. and 1.6 in the Americas. Senegal remains the most dangerous country in the world for women, and Mexico holds the record for feminicides: 26,200 women killed between 2010 and 2014.
In the name of Women’s Rights Day, not one activist in need of media light missed the call, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, in the lead, to portray France as a country hostile to women, where rights are is not yet that and where we die at the hands of men, before the shameful split: the parallel with Afghan and Iranian women. Is it necessary to say that this is an insult to women who live under a true patriarchal regime? The Afghan women forbidden to study, to work, to be treated, to wash themselves and the Iranian women who fight to regain their lost rights in the beards of the mullahs and the veils of the raven women, would they be French women who ignore?