French police investigate threats against opening ceremony director

Paris: French police are formally investigating death threats and cyber harassment made towards the artistic director of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony after conservative and religious leaders blasted a short skit as “extremely disrespectful to Christians.”

The Paris Prosecutor’s office said on Friday that Thomas Jolly had filed a complaint after receiving threats and online attacks over a kitsch tableau during the ceremony on the river Seine that appeared to parody Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.

The scene, which sparked fury among the Catholic Church, far-right politicians in France and the religious right in the United States, featured drag queens, a transgender model and a semi-naked singer made up as the Greek god of wine Dionysus sitting in a bowl of fruit.

Instagram screenshot shared by Barbara Butch, the lesbian activist who took part in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.Credit: Instagram

Paris 2024 organisers have since twice since apologised, saying there was no intention to show disrespect towards any religious group.

The prosecutor’s office said Jolly, who is gay, filed a complaint on Tuesday, explaining he had been targeted on social media by “threatening and insulting messages criticising his sexual orientation and wrongly assumed Israeli origins”. They were investigating death threats against him, it added.

Officials told Agence-France Presse it “firmly condemned the threats and harassment of which the authors and artists of the opening ceremony, including Thomas Jolly, have been victims”.

Jolly, 42, has said that mocking religions had not been his intention and that the scene was supposed to depict a pagan feast linked to the gods of Olympus – not the biblical scene of Jesus Christ and his Twelve Apostles sharing a last meal before crucifixion.

France’s Central Office for Combating Crimes Against Humanity and Hate Crimes has been charged with the investigation.

French DJ and producer Barbara Butch, who performed in the scene, said on Monday she had filed complaints against people who have harassed and threatened her because of it.

Her lawyer, Audrey Msellati, said in a statement they were doing so because they “can’t stand that she can represent France because she’s a woman, lesbian, fat, Jewish. The problem is their intolerance and their obscurantism.”

In the scene, Butch donned a silver, halo-like headdress in a skit with drag artists on a footbridge, while parading athletes floated underneath on the Seine. She was seated at the centre of a long table, as Jesus is in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, and the other artists surround her, which critics said drew similarities to the gathering of Christ and his disciples in the famous painting.

Jolly told French 24 hour news network BFM after the ceremony: “In France, we are allowed to love, how we want and who we want, we are allowed to believe or not to believe.

“We have a lot of rights, and the idea was to showcase these values,” Jolly said.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo offered her “unwavering support” to Jolly in a statement on Friday.

“Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Paris will always stand by artists, creation and freedom,” she said.

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