A week after the festive parade of delegations down the Seine, punctuated by scenes, including the "festivities" segment, on the banks and bridges of Paris, the repercussions of the Paris Olympic Games (JO) opening ceremony continue. Following in the footsteps of DJ Barbara Butch who filed several complaints on July 30, drag queen and host of the TV show Drag Race France Nicky Doll has also taken legal action. She filed a complaint on Friday, August 2, against British activist Laurence Fox for defamation, Le Monde has found. On July 26, Fox, a former actor, posted on his X account a video of one scene, wrongly seen as a reinterpretation of the Last Supper, calling the participating artists "deviant little pedos."

Nicky Doll, whose real name is Karl Sanchez, admitted to being used to hate messages and threats that "don't get to her," but Fox crossed a line that motivated her to file a complaint. The artist explained: "It's a fight I want to wage, so that openly homophobic people are afraid to use the word 'pedophile,' because they'll be attacked. It's one thing to be homophobic. But to associate us with something as horrific as pedophilia, that doesn't have a name, and it clearly won't be attached to mine."

Especially as this isn't a first for Fox. The activist was previously condemned in 2024 for defamation after calling drag queen Crystal and Simon Blake, a major player in the defense of LGBT+ rights, "pedophiles."

"I expected there to be criticism, as a queer person we're used to being singled out. But I never expected to receive such a wave of religious hatred. Right from the start, in our brief, there was never any mention of the Last Supper, but of the Feast of the Gods," Nicky Doll pointed out, echoing the clarifications issued by Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the ceremony, his team and the artists involved in the "festivities" segment.

French investigators have opened an inquiry after Jolly, who is gay, complained of cyberbullying following the performance, sources close to the case told AFP. Jolly filed a complaint on Tuesday, "explaining he had been targeted on social media by threatening and insulting messages criticizing his sexual orientation and wrongly assumed Israeli origins", the Paris prosecutor's office said. They were notably investigating death threats against him, it added.

Among the artists present during the "festivities" tableau, Hugo Bardin, alias Paloma, under her drag-queen name – winner of season 1 of Drag Race France – reported a wave of hatred "quite terrifying" due to the international dimension of the event, while specifying: "I understand that people may have felt hurt or may have had epidermal reactions, but here it's not just a question of saying 'it bothered me'. It's about 'go burn in hell, you pedophile, satanist, sodomite'... I feel like we're under the Inquisition. It's not necessarily more violent than before the Olympics, but it's more absurd."

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