Author: Aurelien Breeden / Source: New York Times
Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PARIS — The rumors had been out there for years: A private Facebook group that included many up-and-coming French male journalists was behind waves of online insult, mockery and harassment aimed at women in the business.
Now, with confirmation that a group that called itself the Ligue du LOL existed, it is a moment of reckoning about sexism in the French news media, an insular and still male-dominated industry in a country where the #MeToo movement has met with some resistance.
Some of the men behind the group, whose name means the League of LOL, have issued apologies, and several have been suspended from their jobs.
In one case, a member of the group made a pornographic photo montage of a feminist writer and circulated it on Twitter. In
“For six years, we asked ourselves if we should speak out, and we didn’t dare at first because we knew that what we wanted to say wouldn’t be understood,” said Léa Lejeune, a French journalist at the business magazine Challenges.
Writing about her experience on Slate.fr, Ms. Lejeune said that from 2011 to 2013, members of the group left insulting comments on her feminist blog and falsely suggested she had slept with her boss.
But today, Ms. Lejeune said, “there has been a huge change.”
“It’s similar to #MeToo, in the sense that victims speaking out are finally being heard,” she said.
While the movement has been met with skepticism in France, there have been recent signs of shifting attitudes. Figures published this month, for instance, showed that the French police had received drastically more reports of sexual crimes last year because victims have grown more willing to come forward — a change officials attributed in part to #MeToo.
In the French media, fewer than a quarter of 470 top executives in the country last year were women, statistics published recently show. But even in that male bastion, change has been coming. From journalism schools to newsrooms, the talk now is of sexism — and how to combat it.
The newspaper Libération reported on Monday that in December, HuffPost France fired three journalists who were part of an all-male private discussion channel called “RBF” — as in “Radio Beer Soccer” — where sexist, racist and homophobic comments were commonplace.
And the weekly magazine L’Express reported on Monday that two Vice France employees were fired in 2017 after a similar message group was uncovered.
The Ligue du LOL Facebook group had about 30 members, many of whom are now established journalists, advertising executives, podcasters or bloggers.
Rumors about it had circulated in the French…
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