"JP was happy. (…) I don't care what the media say about it." Those were the words of Joëlle Graven, delivered amid a shower of heart emojis, on the evening of Sunday, August 24. She was speaking on a TikTok livestream hosted by an account claiming to be run by a fan of her son, Raphaël Graven, the streamer known as Jean Pormanove, nicknamed JP. Pormanove's death on Monday, August 18, after 300 hours of live streaming during which he was mocked, humiliated and beaten by his channel's co-hosts, sparked a nationwide outcry.

Despite her evident pain, she was adamant: the various people who had appeared with her son in recent years, in videos on the platform Kick, where he had amassed some 190,000 subscribers, "are amazing people," and the violence he endured was simply staged. It was nothing traumatic for him, just "work." "When people go to work, do they take their work home with them? No, they leave it there. So JP, when he did his livestreams, he left it there."

For Pormanove's audience, her comments were priceless. Who better than the mother of the deceased to share in their mourning? In stark contrast to the abusive comments that filled his live chats – "Joëlle we'll fuck her, we'll rape her, we'll tear her into pieces, that slut, JP will be left without smokes, that fat son of a bitch," read the livestream chat during which the 46-year-old died – a flood of tender memes, sorrowful messages and tributes now appeared across the community's networks. "A week without you, dear JP, we still miss you terribly, and we will keep missing you for a long time, we love you so much," a fan wrote as recently as Monday on Discord.

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