A DJ and LGBTQ+ activist who performed during a controversial scene in the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony has said she is taking legal action after becoming the target of “an extremely violent campaign of cyber-harassment and defamation”, reports The Guardian.
Barbara Butch, who calls herself a “love activist”, had been “threatened with death, torture and rape, and has also been the target of numerous antisemitic, homophobic, sexist and body-shaming insults”, her lawyer said in a post on her Instagram page.
Butch appeared in the scene, titled “Festivity” and described by its director as representing a feast of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus, wearing a silver headdress resembling a halo that art historians have said was typically associated with the sun god Apollo.
Also in the scene – painted blue, almost naked, and sitting in a bowl of fruit – was the singer-songwriter Philippe Katerine, playing Dionysus, as well as a cast of drag queens representing Olympian gods and goddesses including Poseidon, Artemis and Venus.
Critics, including some Christians and US conservatives, interpreted the tableau as a mockery of The Last Supper, the final meal Jesus is said to have shared with his apostles. But Thomas Jolly, the show’s director, has said the Leonardo da Vinci painting, while often parodied, was not its inspiration.
“I think it was pretty clear. There’s Dionysus arriving at the table … Why is he there? Because he’s the god of feasting, of wine, and the father of Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine,” Jolly told BFM TV, adding that the tableau was “a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus … Olympian … Olympianism.”
Katerine said in an interview posted on X that Jolly’s idea was “around the idea of Dionysus, and of the decadence you could imagine at pagan feasts … Some people have seen a reference to the Last Supper, but it was never that. There was no question of religion at all. That is simply not what was represented.”
He told Le Monde he had been “staggered by the reactions … I grew up in the Christian religion, and what is most beautiful in this religion is the idea of forgiveness. So I’m sorry, if there has been a misunderstanding, if I shocked some people. I am very sorry. I think forgiveness can be reciprocal.”