First victory for Hapsatou Sy in what has become a legal case around his first name. Returning to the incident which had opposed her to the polemicist Eric Zemmour on the set of “Sunday Earthlings” in September 2018, during which he had declared that the first name of the columnist was an “insult to France”, Hapsatou had estimated in the program “C à vous” that Thierry Ardisson, who presented the “Sunday Earthlings”, had “insulted her that day”.
The former presenter then filed a complaint with a civil action. However, for the court, the words of the entrepreneur and host are “in the register of subjective perception” and she does not attribute to Thierry Ardisson “any specific fact susceptible of proof”, a necessary criterion for a conviction in defamation. On the other hand, he considers that there is “a certain disproportion” between, on the one hand, the choice of the producer to initiate “prosecutions likely to lead, in addition to a pecuniary conviction, to a criminal sanction entered in the criminal record” and , on the other hand, “the subject that motivates them”, which constitutes only the “tiny part of a long interview”.
The trial against Eric Zemmour on January 12
The court also notes that Thierry Ardisson had filed another defamation complaint against Hapsatou Sy, for a book published in 2019, and that if she was sentenced in November 2021 for one of the passages, “she was released for those which were relative to the incident” of September 2018. “Therefore, it must be considered that Thierry Ardisson could, following this previous decision, measure the contours of the freedom of expression which must be left to Hapsatou Sy to to express on this same incident and its consequences, without it having for all that withdrawn”.
He concludes that “the present procedure was initiated and conducted by Thierry Ardisson in a reckless manner”. The decision concerning the complaint of Hapsatou Sy against Eric Zemmour for public insult of a racial nature will be rendered on January 12. During the hearing, on November 4, the prosecution requested a fine of 20,000 euros.