The 17th civil chamber in the Paris courthouse was full to bursting at 2.30pm on Wednesday May 29th as journalists and members of the public, many of them women, turned up in numbers for a defamation case over a single Tweet.
It was on October 13th, 2017, that journalist Sandra Muller, editorial director of the television and media publication La Lettre de l’audiovisuel, posted an initial message on Twitter. It read: “#balancetonporc!! [editor's note, it means 'squeal on your harasser' or 'abuser'] . You, too, tell your story giving the name and the details of sexual harassment that you've experienced in your work. I'm waiting on you.” Then, four hours later, Sandra Muller sent a second Tweet: “'You've got big breasts. You're my type of woman. I'm going to make you orgasm all night'. Eric Brion, ex-boss of [horse racing TV channel] Equidia. #balancetonporc.'”
Just a few days before these tweets the Harvey Weinstein affair had broken in the United States following articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker. The hashtag #BalanceTonPorc was an almost immediate hit in France. In the United States, meanwhile, the hashtag #MeToo went global. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of accounts of harassment were being put on social media by women.
But in the courtroom in Paris last Wednesday May 29th it was Sandra Muller's second tweet that was at the centre of the proceedings. Éric Brion is claiming 50,000 euros in damages and 15,000 euros in legal costs over that Tweet. It was in some ways a curious hearing as the former horse racing channel director general has acknowledged several times, on radio and in the press, that he uttered those words.
Giving evidence, Éric Brion described the background to his comments. It was in the spring of 2012 and Brion was at the International Market for Content Development and Distribution (MIPTV) conference in Cannes on the French Mediterranean coast. After an “exhausting” day Brion had dinner with friends and then went out for the rest of the evening. It was then that he met Sandra Muller and the two drank several glasses of champaign together.
“I was attracted to her, I liked her a lot,” Brion told the court's president. “And I said to her 'you are my type of woman, you're brunette, you have lovely breasts.' The attraction was not reciprocated. My pride hurt, I left and said boastfully 'it's a shame, I could have made you orgasm all night'.” Éric Brion also acknowledged that the next morning he sent a text message to apologise.
With a few minor exceptions – 'I'm going to make you orgasm” as opposed to “I could have made you orgasm” - the former TV channel boss confirmed making the comments over which he is now taking action. So in what sense were these comments, when published by Sandra Muller, defamatory? His lawyers Nicolas Bénoit and Marie Burguburu produced a number of arguments.
The first was to impute something to the offending Tweet that was not contained in it. Lawyer Nicolas Bénoit placed the second, offending, Tweet, in the context of the first Tweet in which Sandra Muller had urged women to report men who had harassed them at work. The lawyer argued that Muller had sought to represent Éric Brion as a workplace harasser. “It's clear that Ms Muller wanted to impute to Mr Brion the behaviour that she was calling on [women] to denounce,” he told the court. Yet for this accusation to be true, the lawyer said, the journalist would have to be able to show there had been a “definitive verdict” by the courts. Yet Éric Brion had had not only never faced legal action over such claims, no complaints had ever been made against him, Nicolas Bénoit said.
“When Sandra Muller says 'assaulted in your work' I don't know what article of the criminal code she is targeting,” responded the journalist's lawyer, Francis Szpiner. “She is criticising all sexual assault, all harassment, words that feel like assaults.”
But Éric Brion's defence team argued that in her personal attack on their client Sandra Muller was making a link between him and the Harvey Weinstein affair. As proof, Nicolas Bénoit cited the book later published by Sandra Muller. In it she explained how after the Harvey Weinstein affair broke she decided to launch #BalanceTonPorc in a “completely improvised” way. “That was how three simple, stark words were launched on Twitter,” she added. Éric Brion thus became the “first harasser”.
It was not only the spectre of the Weinstein affair that hung over the Paris courtroom during the two-and-a-half hour hearing. There was also discussion of the Baupin proceedings, involving the green MP and former deputy speaker of the National Assembly Denis Baupin, who had faced allegations of harassment, allegations he has always strenuously denied. Brion complained that he had been compared with Baupin by Francis Szpiner on the eve of the case. His lawyer Marie Burguburu said that the two current case in fact stood in stark contrast to the one involving Denis Baupin.
In the case of Denis Baupin there had been “complaints”, the criminal investigation had ended with no charges because the alleged events had taken place too long ago and there were “defamation proceedings whose outcome we know”, she said, referring to the fact that Mediapart and public broadcaster France Inter were cleared of defamation over the affair in April 2019. “But in the Brion case … no complaint, nothing has been deposed,” she said. Lawyer Francis Szpiner referred to the comments he had made apparently linking the Baupin and Brion cases. He told the court that when he had made a reference to the Baupin case he had been talking about “those men who put themselves in the position to be aggressors and afterwards hold to account those assaulted”.
The Sandra Muller took something of a detour and became about the #BalanceTonPorc phenomenon itself. Nicolas Bénoit said it was a “superb” phenomenon but one which at the same time had “created slanders”. Marie Burguburu described it as a “legitimate movement” that had been “damaged and spoiled by Sandra Muller”.
Indeed, in her final speech, Brion's lawyer Marie Burguburu attacked Sandra Muller at some length, describing her as a liar and someone prone to informing on others, a practice which the lawyer said had a “ugly” history “in our country”. The journalist was a woman who made accusations “without troubling herself with lawyers, courts, or the presumption of innocence but who was happy just with the court of public opinion”.
As for her client Éric Brion, Marie Burguburu said he had been reduced to the figure of a “womaniser”, someone who was a little “clumsy” and who had “lacked a little poetry”. His remarks on the evening in question were “not even sexist comments”, said the lawyer. “Nothing was at stake other than relations between a man and a woman,” she said. The lawyer concluded: “Faced with this denunciation, this media guillotine, these lies of infinite violence, and even the prospect of never being able to be chatted up, I have made my choice.”
Defending Sandra Muller, her lawyer Francis Szpiner responded: “I was looking at [Madame] Burguburu and I was thinking she is old, she doesn't see that the world is changing.....The times and the world have changed.” He continued: “If this hashtag has had such a success it's because thousands of women identified with it.” Sandra Muller's other defence lawyer, François Baroin, said: “You can't separate this hearing from the historical and global context that we see today.” As far as he was concerned, Sandra Muller had “opened the way”.
His colleague Francis Szpiner noted: “This trial is seen as, once again, and once too often, as a way of gagging those who fight.” François Baroin told the court: “Either you convict Madame Muller and the gagging will continue, and all women will see it that way, or you dismiss Mr Brion's crazy claims and you will be following the path of society's evolution.”
The court will give its verdict on September 25th.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter