The resentment between the two Moix brothers, both writers, was heard Friday in court where Yann is being sued for defamation by Alexandre, who accuses him of violence and harassment. The younger, 48, filed the lawsuit after a TV show, Balance your post on C8 in November 2019, where Yann Moix, four years his senior, accused him of a past of “close to small neo-Nazis” and victim of a “psychiatric drama”, “interned”.
In his indictment, the prosecutor considered, without recommending a sentence, that only one remark was possibly reprehensible: the one where Yann Moix affirmed that his brother had taken “heavy psychotropic drugs for many years”. Alexandre Moix denied having undergone such heavy treatment. He claims to have been hospitalized only once, for three weeks, then to have taken medication for about a year. He also assured, supporting witness, never to have had any political activity.
A four-page letter for Yann Moix, absent from court
Yann Moix did not show up. He sent the Paris Criminal Court a four-page letter explaining his reasons for not seeing his brother, “a dangerous man” in his words. During his plea, his lawyer Jean-Marc Fedida specified that the author of Podium refused to publicly “unpack” the disagreement between the brothers. “Yann Moix made the choice to deviate from legal paths (…) He did not want this trial,” said the lawyer.
The defense demanded an acquittal. According to Me Fedida, accusing someone of being close to neo-Nazis, “for years, jurisprudence has said that it is not defamatory, for a simple reason: it is that the court of the Republic will not be never a court of thought ”. Little surprised by the absence of the defendant, Alexandre Moix was the only one to charge. “My brother doesn’t like my presence on Earth,” he explained.
“May he stop harming my career, my family”
The animosity between the two men had erupted publicly on the occasion of the publication in August 2019 of the novel by Yann Moix Orleans, where he said he had been abused by his parents. But to general amazement, Alexandre Moix, a character absent from this novel, replied a few days later, in an open letter, that in truth his elder had subjected him to physical and psychological abuse.
“I lived with my brother a terrible childhood,” he repeated in court. He told how Yann Moix would have for example “pursued him with a butcher’s knife” or would have torn off a nail by trapping his fingers in a shutter. As an adult, “my brother harassed me for years,” continued Alexandre Moix. For example, he would have called his wife, then pregnant, to tell her: “I’m going to have you abort!” “
“I would have adored that we were two brothers who love each other” but “I had a brother Clockwork Orange », Said Alexandre Moix, referring to Stanley Kubrick’s film. “Nothing stops him (…) I am asking the courts today to ensure that he stops harming my career, my family,” he added.
Yann Moix assumed, in a later novel, Reims, published in May, the error of his youthful anti-Semitic and negationist writings, discussed at length in court on Friday. The civil party read passages from it in their pleadings. The decision was taken under advisement as of November 26.