Florence Desruol was a freelance consultant living in Lyon when the attacks began in 2009. Hundreds of abusive messages were posted online, a false account was created in her name, and her head was Photoshopped on to pornograph images and published, reports The Guardian.
“I was called a slut, a whore, my face was grafted on to a picture of a naked woman having sex – it was all designed to humiliate and silence me,” she said.
What stood out was that the abuse was coming from a group of young, influential journalists in Paris, many at the heart of prominent newsrooms and websites. About 30 men, several of whom were working for progressive or Left-leaning media, had started a “boys’ club” called the Ligue du Lol (League of Lol).
They are accused of running online harassment campaigns against feminists, female journalists, writers of colour and gay people – often using false accounts to spread racist and sexist abuse and rape-threats. The French media were thrown into crisis this week when the full scale of abuse began to emerge. It has been deemed French media’s #MeToo moment.
“They were the Twitter stars of the moment, they seemed untouchable, but I took them on,” Desruol told The Guardian. She contacted one senior website editor in 2010 to complain about his staff, but the abuse continued. She went to the police, who struggled to understand and instead suggested she quit social media. She drafted a letter to editors of major publications to alert them to the actions of their staff. But before it was sent, the draft was leaked online and the abuse got worse.
“At that point I had a burnout. I couldn’t open my computer, I couldn’t use my phone except to answer calls,” she said. She went offline for a while, returning later to work on Nicolas Sarkozy’s online campaign for the 2012 presidential race. “My harassers would message me saying ‘Flo, Flo, have you taken your pills’ implying I had been in a psychiatric hospital. By that stage they were running a kind of online harassment operation against many people on an industrial scale.”
Eight high-profile journalists and public relations executives who belonged to the group were this week suspended or stepped down amid accusations they targeted feminists and minority writers online. Many issued public apologies while hinting it had been just banter. The group’s founder, Vincent Glad, was suspended by leftwing daily Libération, whose own fact-checking unit broke the story. It also emerged that the websites Huffington Post and Vice had fired several staff over separate closed workplace messaging groups where men allegedly exchanged sexist and racist comments about female colleagues.
Amid the outcry, French government ministers announced new laws to make social media platforms pull hateful posts. But many young female journalists said that the abuse was not only taking place online but in real life too, and that it went beyond the League of Lol’s peak activity between 2010 and 2013.
The scale of the League of Lol’s targeting of feminists, writers of colour and LGBT men was described by senior journalists this week as “vomit-making”. Martin Médus, a blogger who had a Jewish grandparent who was sent to death camps in the second world war, has had his head Photoshopped on to the torso of a man with a swastika tattoo and published. The fashion blogger Kenza Sadoun El Glaoui was Photoshopped on to pornographic images. One writer who challenged the group was Photoshopped into a pornographic image that was sent to children, including his own.