Prosecutor opens investigation over anti-Semitic tweets targeting Miss France contestant

The Paris prosecutor office opened an investigation Monday after the minister in charge of citizenship, Marlène Schiappa, filed a complaint over anti-Semitic tweets targeting a Miss France contestant with Israeli roots.

April Benayoum, who represented the Provence region for the Miss France 2021 contest held on Saturday evening, finished the night as first runner-up. But her result was overshadowed by multiple anti-Semitic tweets that popped up after Benayoum mentioned her “Israeli-Italian” father when she presented herself.

“Uncle Hitler, you forgot to exterminate Miss Provence,” one tweet reads.

“Miss France is not an antisemitism contest,” Schiappa said the next day on Twitter. She sent a full referral on the case on Monday to the Paris prosecutor’s office, citing a French law that requires public servants to go to the prosecutor when they are witnessing criminal activity on the job.

Schiappa’s boss, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, said that “police and gendarmerie forces were mobilized.”

“This is sad … but it doesn’t affect me,” Benayoum told Var-matin.

The anti-Semitic tweets also prompted reactions from other political figures, who called on platforms to act faster to squash such content. 

“In the face of this barrage of hatred … platforms don’t want to act, didn’t act,” said Aurore Bergé, a lawmaker with Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche, on Radio Classique Monday morning. “We need to be much faster in deleting these messages … and thus order platforms to delete them since they are not doing it.”

“What I proposed … is to verify that platforms now equip themselves with resources to be able to respond instantaneously to authorities’ injunctions”, said European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who presented the Digital Services Act on December 15, on BFMTV.

This is not the first time a Miss France election was tainted with social media hatred. During last year’s contest, Miss Guadeloupe and Miss France winner Clémence Botino, who is Black, and Miss Île-de-France Évelyne de Larichaudy, who is Asian, were both targeted by racist tweets.

Ghyslain Vedeux, head of the Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN), filed a complaint at the time and told AFP that he was dismayed by “the lack of reaction from authorities, the government or even Marlène Schiappa.”