En Magnum targets file lawsuit

Sandrine Goeyvaerts and Fleur Godart, two women at the centre of the En Magnum cartoon furore last year, have filed a lawsuit citing sexism and cyber-harassment.

In late November last year the Bettane & Desseauve title En Magnum, published a cartoon which was decried as “crude”, “misogynistic” and “sexist”.

It featured a tall, blonde woman wearing a revealing red dress propositioning a squat, rotund wine merchant in order to make him list her wine.

The woman was widely believed to be a barely-veiled caricature of Godart, founder of a wine agency and a leading figure in Paris’ natural wine scene.

Belgian wine writer Goeyvaerts and another French writer subsequently wrote to the magazine to complain and both claimed they were then subject to a barrage of online abuse not only from other Franco-Belgian wine writers but even the magazine’s editor and Michel Bettane himself.

As reported by Vitisphere, Godart and Goeyvaerts have filed a lawsuit citing cyber-harassment, pointing to a string of abusive messages sent to the pair between the cartoon’s publication in November to January of this year, with some persistent harassers only relenting after they received summons to appear before a Paris court in either February or March.

Bettane, as president of the publishing company, is one of those who has been summoned, and is quoted as saying: “I have been summoned before the seventeenth chamber of the Paris criminal court for insulting a person because of her sex.

“This whole issue is surreal when compared to our beliefs. These people probably suffered cyber-harassment but it didn’t come from Bettane & Desseauve”.

Goeyvaerts said: “The only thing I did was question the relevance of publishing this cartoon which was neither funny nor had any journalistic purpose. In return, I was harassed, insulted and slandered.”