After the boxing tournament comes the legal battle. Just hours before winning the gold medal in the women's 66kg Olympic boxing tournament against China's Yang Liu on Friday, August 9, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif began a different battle in the courts. Having been the victim, for more than a week, of a virulent smear campaign concerning her gender identity, the boxer filed a complaint against X with the Paris correctional court's, national center for combating online hate.
The complaint, which Le Monde had the opportunity to see, centers around online "moral harassment." Her victory resulting from the withdrawal in the quarter-finals of her opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini, on August 1, triggered a flood of hate messages around the world across social media: She was described as a "transgender" person deliberately competing in the wrong category, and even a "man" guilty of "violence against women."
Condemning "speculation fueled by malicious individuals," her lawyer, Nabil Boudi, stated in the complaint that "these messages were posted by important political figures," which contributed to their widespread distribution on the X platform, where they were said to have "exceeded 100 million views." This snowballing controversy turned into a real "ordeal" for the 25-year-old Algerian boxer, who was in the middle of an Olympic competition.
A simple tweet from Philippe Vardon, former Reconquête! candidate in the last European elections and parliamentary assistant to three deputies affiliated with the Rassemblement National (RN) group, referring to "blows inflicted by a man against a woman," ended up getting 3.4 million views. The one by former RN MP Gilbert Collard, describing the boxer as an "Algerian transsexual," has been seen over a million times.
These represented a molehill compared to the audience for certain tweets posted abroad, whether by British novelist J. K. Rowling, businessman Elon Musk, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, or US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Far from being limited to France and the world of sports, the campaign of cyberbullying that targeted the boxer was not only "massive," the complaint states, but also "coordinated." "The investigation will have to determine who was behind this misogynistic, racist, and sexist campaign, as well as those who fueled this digital lynching," Boudi told Le Monde.
The complaint lodged by Khelif does not wade into political territory. But beyond the emotions or agendas of one side or another, the controversy seems to have been fanned − if not initiated − by the International Boxing Association (IBA) itself, which is in open conflict with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Relations between the two bodies have been terrible since the IOC banned the IBA in 2023 due to governance scandals, thereby preventing it from organizing the Paris 2024 Olympic boxing tournament.
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