PARIS (AP) — Olympic boxing champion Imane Khelif has filed a lawsuit in France alleging online harassment after a barrage of criticism and false allegations about her sex life during the Paris Olympics, her lawyer said Sunday.
Khelif, who will be Algeria’s flag bearer at the closing ceremony, won gold in the women’s welterweight category on Friday, becoming a new hero in her native Algeria and drawing global attention to women’s boxing.
The complaint was filed on Friday with a special unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office to combat hate speech on the internet. It accused Khelif of “serious cyber harassment,” said lawyer Nabil Boudi. In a statement, he described it as a “misogynistic, racist and sexist campaign” against the boxer.
It is now up to the public prosecutor to decide whether to open an investigation. As is customary in French law, no suspected perpetrator is named in the complaint, but it is left to the investigators to determine who might be to blame.
Khelif was inadvertently drawn into a global dispute over gender identity and sporting rules after her first fight, when Italian opponent Angela Carini gave up just seconds into the fight, citing pain from the first punches. False claims circulated online that Khelif was transgender or a man, and the International Olympic Committee defended her and condemned those spreading misinformation. Khelif said spreading misconceptions about her “violates human dignity.”
Earlier, Kirsty Burrows, an official in the IOC’s Protection and Mental Health Unit, filed a complaint with French authorities, saying she had received death threats and harassment online after defending Khelif at a press conference in Paris.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said it received Burrows’ complaint on August 4. Agents from the National Unit for Combating Hate on the Internet are investigating the alleged crimes, which include death threats, public provocations with the aim of attacking a person and cyberbullying. Under French law, these crimes, if proven, carry prison sentences of between two and five years and fines of between 30,000 and 45,000 euros.
The International Boxing Federation, which is banned from the Olympics, disqualified Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan from the world championships last year on the grounds that the two fighters had failed unspecified eligibility tests for the women’s competition. The IOC described the arbitrary gender tests imposed on the two women by the sport’s governing body as irretrievably flawed and has defended both boxers since the start of the Paris Games.
Experts say Khelif and Lin’s investigation reflects disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination against female athletes of color when it comes to gender testing and false claims that they are male or transgender.
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