Olympic boxing champion’s legal professional condemns ‘speculations fuelled via malicious folks’ who posted grievances on-line.
Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer on the centre of a gender dispute on the Paris Olympic Video games, has filed a prison grievance towards the social media platform X for harassment.
The gold medal winner’s legal professional mentioned on Saturday that she filed the formal grievance in France. Khelif and every other gold medallist, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, had been on the centre of a high-profile dispute over gender identification that has provoked heated debate on social media.
Mentioning court docket paperwork, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that the boxing champion “filed a grievance towards X” with the Paris correctional court docket, the nationwide centre for fighting on-line harassment.
Khelif’s legal professional Nabil Boudi mentioned the grievance was once filed on Friday.
“The boxer Imane Khelif has made up our minds to start a brand new combat, a combat for justice, dignity and honour,” he mentioned in a remark as he introduced the grievance for “irritated on-line harassment … [had been filed] to Paris prosecutors”.
“All this is being mentioned about me on social media is immoral. I need to trade the minds of other people world wide,” Khelif mentioned.
People within the grievance had been described as “necessary political figures” with large followings on X, the social media corporate owned via Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The posts focused on Khelif “exceeded 100 million perspectives,” it added.
The theory was once “fuelled via malicious folks,” Boudi mentioned. “The investigation will decide who was once in the back of this misogynist, racist and sexist marketing campaign however will even must worry itself with those that fed the web lynching.”
The furore over Khelif’s eligibility drew hearth from the likes of former United States President Donald Trump, Harry Potter creator JK Rowling and several other right-wing French politicians.
After her gold medal victory on Friday night time, Khelif mentioned profitable was once the very best reaction to “assaults” and “bullying” and declared: “I’m a lady like every other.”
The questions relating to Khelif’s and Lin’s gender had been sparked via the World Boxing Affiliation (IBA).
At a information convention closing week, the IBA’s Kremlin-linked president, Umar Kremlev, claimed the organisation had run “genetic checking out that displays that those are males”.
The IBA threw each boxers out of the sector championships in 2023. The World Olympic Committee, on the other hand, cleared them to field in Paris.
Requested if she would take measures very similar to Khelif, Lin mentioned: “That is one thing I will be able to seek advice from my crew. We can make a decision later what the next move will probably be.”
Following an early spherical victory for Khelif within the ring, Rowling referred to the boxer as a “male” and accused her of “taking part in the misery of a lady he’s simply punched within the head, and whose existence’s ambition he’s simply shattered”.
Trump declared in capital letters on his Reality Social outlet: “I will be able to stay males out of girls’s sports activities”. His vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, argued that “Kamala Harris’s concepts about gender” have led “to a grown guy pummelling a lady in a boxing fit”.
