For justice, the LOL League case is closed

Five and a half years after a scandal with worldwide resonance, the LOL League matter is no longer a matter of justice: the last procedure ended after an agreement between Release and Vincent Glad, one of its former journalists who was fired at the time. This agreement was concluded during the summer, Agence France-Presse (AFP) learned on Wednesday, October 2, from constant sources. When contacted, both parties declined to comment.

Conclusion of judicial proceedings. “It cements once and for all the thesis of a media frenzy” In this case, due to accusations of cyberbullying against journalists in particular, one of the accused told AFP in 2019, on condition of anonymity.

According to this agreement, Release abandoned its appeal following a decision by the Paris labor court in 2022 in favor of Mr. Glad, which therefore becomes final. On July 12, 2022, the labor court sentenced the newspaper to pay a total of almost 52,000 euros to the journalist for a dismissal without real and serious cause and in a humiliating manner.

LOL League is the name of a private Facebook group, created in 2010 by Glad, which brought together around thirty members, including young journalists and communicators. In February 2019, following an article by the verification service ReleaseCheckNews, this group was accused of having committed cyberbullying in the early 2010s on the social network Twitter (now called X), mainly against feminist activists.

These accusations caused several members of the group to be quickly fired. This issue, which has its roots in the small environment of Parisian Twitter, had global media resonance. It had sparked debates about sexism in journalism and online violence.

“Insufficiently characterized crime”

However, on the justice side, the Paris prosecutor’s investigation into harassment was closed without further action in February 2022, due to “insufficiently characterized crime”. In the labor court, before the decision in favor of Mr. Glad, the magazine The Inrockuptibles He was convicted in September 2021 for the dismissal without real and serious cause of an editor-in-chief who was part of the group. Finally, in June 2023, Release and another dismissed journalist, Alexandre Hervaud, reached an agreement to close their dispute with the labor court. Mr. Hervaud was dismissed at first instance and appealed.

Following the impetus of surveys carried out by the sites L’ADN and Next INpact at the beginning of 2020, then Marianne in 2021, several media outlets have concluded in recent years that “Unprecedented media hype” in this matter. They noted that the LOL League had been wrongly described as instigating coordinated cyberbullying actions carried out by all its members.

“Actually, only a few members (…) They were accused of obscene jokes, crude photomontages or repeated mockery, not the group as a whole.The American newspaper thus recognized New York Times in a correction published in April 2021.

In France, Arrêt sur images conducted a critical re-reading of its coverage at the end of 2021. “It is a classic case of media exaggeration, the proportions it has acquired are crazy”its former mediator, Loris Guémart, told AFP in February on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the affair. Freeze frames “It does not say that the matter did not deserve any article”he emphasized. “But it did not deserve the tone of the majority of the articles or the volume of media content published”.

“The end of the process is a great step, but the traces left on the network are a monstrous burden on the reputation of people whose honor was tarnished in 2019”one of the suspects told AFP on Wednesday, pointing in particular to the Wikipedia page dedicated to the case.