Public prosecutors have opened a formal investigation into death threats and cyber-harassment of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Olympic Games opening ceremony, French media have reported.
The probe is the second to be launched into online abuse of people involved in the ceremony after prosecutors this week opened an inquiry into threats of death, torture and rape received by the DJ and LGBTQ+ campaigner Barbara Butch.
Jolly filed a complaint with authorities on Tuesday saying “he had been the target on social media of messages containing threats and insults and critical of his sexual orientation and wrongly presumed Israeli roots”, the prosecutor’s office said.
Charges that could arise from the investigation, to be handled by officers from the French judiciary’s online hate division, included defamation, public abuse and death threats on grounds of origin and sexual orientation, it added.
French media reported than much of the online abuse was in English and a sizeable proportion appeared to come from the US. Jolly is gay but is not Jewish and has no immediate connection with Israel.
The Paris 2024 organising committee 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”.
The committee – which on Sunday apologised for any offence caused by parts of the ceremony – said it offered its “full support to Thomas Jolly and to the ceremony’s authors and artists in the face of the attacks directed against them”.
One of the ceremony’s tableaux, titled Festivity, featured Butch, a cast of drag queens and, playing Dionysus, a semi-naked singer sitting in a bowl of fruit. Some Christian and conservative critics interpreted the scene as a parody of the Last Supper.
Jolly has repeatedly said Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece portraying the final meal Jesus is said to have shared with his Apostles was not the inspiration for the scene, which instead represented a pagan feast of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus.
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French bishops have said they regretted the “excesses and provocation” of the tableau, which they said amounted to “a mockery of Christianity”. Criticism from far-right French politicians and the religious right in the US has been more vituperative.
Art historians have said the scene appears to be based on the Feast of the Gods, by the 17th-century Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert, with which it bears striking similarities. That work is itself, however, seen as a “mythological reimagining” of the Last Supper.
