The Paris Olympics were awesome. Steph Curry’s gold medal heroics and Simone Biles comeback win were some of the greatest sporting achievements I’ve ever seen. I didn’t watch any boxing, but like many I heard about the manufactured controversy around female boxer Imane Khelif.
The gist is that she’s very muscular and not traditionally feminine looking. She beat a Russian boxer last year and the IBA disqualified her saying she failed some non-specified eligibility test that reportedly they won’t disclose to anyone. Bottom line is she was born a female and is a female. She actually boxed in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and it was a non-issue.
A lot of well known people including Elon Musk, JK Rowling, Trump and others posted things online that said or implied Khelif is a man. It led to a lot of harassment toward her, but fortunately didn’t stop her from winning gold.
I read this week an article that Khelif filed a cyberbullying lawsuit, but from what I can tell, that is some sort of criminal complaint as it’s being led by prosecutors. I’m an Illinois lawyer and of course not familiar with French law.
No matter what she’s doing over there, Khelif should consider filing a lawsuit here in the States against anyone based here who defamed/slandered her. There wouldn’t be any criminal charges from that, but certainly could be very significant, as in seven figures, civil remedies available.
Generally speaking these are very hard cases to bring and win. There’s a high standard to show harm, especially when you are a public figure as she is. But when people state blatant and provable lies about you that damage you and are widespread, you have big financial damages and actual winning facts.
Hopefully her lawyers are telling her about this. We see probably ten winning cases of significant value for defamation/libel/slander a year just because most of the times it’s not this egregious or wide spread. There’s a big difference between saying “she looks like a man” which is an opinion and protected speech and stating as a matter of fact that she actually is a man.
So I do hope she sues because it’s a great way to stop people from being reckless online and searching for rage engagement.