Woman sentenced for anti-semitism lie

[struggle4progress]

Jon Henley in Paris
Tuesday July 27, 2004
The Guardian

<snip>
Marie-Leonie Leblanc, 23, who said she had been physically and verbally assaulted on a train by six youths of Arab origin, was convicted of denouncing an imaginary crime and placed on two years' probation.
<snip>

On July 9, she walked into her local police station and described the fictitious attack. None of her fellow passengers moved a muscle as the youths slashed her clothes, cut off locks of her hair, knocked over her 13-month-old baby's pushchair and scrawled swastikas on her stomach with a marker pen, she said.

She retracted her story four days later, saying she had inflicted the wounds on herself.

Asked by the judge, Jean Idrac-Virebent, if she had not realised that her allegations of anti-semitism - she is not Jewish - would "unleash passions", she said she had not. Asked why she had pointed the finger at north Africans and black people, she said: "When I watch the telly, they are always the ones who are blamed."
<snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1269904,00.html

[AP]

1. Nice comment on the media there...

[mo5quito]

2. re:

the best line of the entire story... "Asked by the judge... if she had not realised that her allegations of anti-semitism - she is not Jewish..." Come on... hehehe