They were six, men and women, aged 19 to 39, to be tried last April for having posted hate messages and calls for murder on Twitter against Mila, a young woman now an adult, harassed online since she published a controversial video on Islam in 2020, massively relayed on social networks.
Among them, four women, including three mothers, identified in September 2021 by the gendarmes of the Central Office for the fight against crimes against humanity, genocides and war crimes (OCLCH).
The Paris Criminal Court rendered its decision on Tuesday afternoon, and sentenced these six people to sentences ranging from 3 months suspended to 4 months in prison, under electronic bracelet.
In its deliberation, the court only retained the count of death threat against only one defendant, Melinda D., mother of two children, already convicted several times for theft, fraud or driving without a license. .
The five other defendants were convicted on the sole count of aggravated harassment.
In addition to the three-month suspended sentences for one defendant and four months for another, two defendants received a four-month suspended prison sentence and two others six-month suspended sentences.
They would incur 2 years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros for online harassment, 3 years and a fine of 45,000 euros for death threats.
All defendants will also have to pay a sum of 3,000 euros to Mila, in compensation for moral damage.
They are also deprived of the right of eligibility for one year.
“That Mila can return to a normal life…”
"The conviction of the six people prosecuted was necessary," said Mila's lawyer, Me Richard Malka, stressing that "just a few words on a social network can have serious consequences for the authors of these words of hatred and violence. ".
“I have no satisfaction in seeing these young people condemned.
My only satisfaction in this file would be that Mila could return to a normal life… and this is not the case, ”he added, about his client who still lives under police protection.
This is not the first time that the harassment suffered by the young woman has been punished by the courts.
Last July, the Paris court sentenced eleven people to suspended sentences ranging from 4 to 6 months in prison.
“We won, and we will win again, rejoiced Mila at the exit of the court.
What I want is for the people who are considered plague victims, who would be banned from social networks, to be (those) who harass, who threaten death, who incite suicide.
I don't ever want to blame the victims again.
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The Mila affair, which had made remarks hostile to Islam, had revived the debate on blasphemy in France.
According to Me Richard Malka, the young woman “has received more than 100,000 hateful messages and death threats promising to be tied up, cut up, quartered, stoned, beheaded, with images of coffins, photomontages of decapitation, of her head bloody” since the publication of his video in January 2020.