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A criminal complaint filed by Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif has named Elon Musk and JK Rowling. Khelif’s lawyer filed the complaint in a French court and has alleged the pair were part of “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” owing to lies the billionaires told about the boxer online.
The focus of the lawsuit is broad. “On Aug. 13, (The National Center for the Fight Against Online Hatred) contacted the OCLCH (Central Office for the Fight Against Crimes Against Humanity and Hate Crimes) to conduct an investigation into the counts of cyber harassment due to gender, public insult because of gender, public incitement to discrimination and public insult because of origin,” the French authorities told Variety.
Khelif is an Algerian boxer who took home the gold while facing a swarm of online harassment. In an early match, Khelif bested Italian boxer Angela Carini who ended the match early and in tears. At the time, Carini said she’d “never been hit so hard” in her life. After it was revealed that a disgraced organization disqualified Khelif from a boxing match in 2023 for having “XY chromosomes,” dozens of news outlets and posters online uncritically shared the lie that Khelif is a man.
Khelif is a woman. She was assigned that gender at birth. The source of the rumor that she’s a man comes from the Kremlin-backed and long-disgraced International Boxing Association, which disqualified Khelif from a boxing match it ran in 2023. She had previously competed in the 2020 Olympics, where she lost to an Irish boxer, with no problems.
Logan Paul, Elon Musk, Tim Pool, and countless other credulous posters repeated the claim about Khelif in the hours after her match with Carini. But Rowling, who has made posting about gender online core to her identity, has doubled and tripled down on the lie in the face of the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
“Explain why you’re OK with a man beating a woman in public for your entertainment. This isn’t sport,” she said in a post on X. “From the bullying cheat in red all the way up to the organizers who allowed this to happen, this is men reveling in their power over women.” She posted and retweeted about the boxing match 32 times since that initial post on August 1st.
In the aftermath of the lie about Khelif spreading across the planet, Carini—the boxer who kicked the whole thing off—apologized. “It wasn’t something I intended to do. Actually, I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke,” she said.
Rowling has not apologized for lying about Khelif online. She has experience with forced apologies about posts. Earlier this year “J.K. Rowling is a holocaust denier” trended on X after she disputed that Nazis had targeted trans people. In the aftermath, Rowling used her considerable resources and the U.K.’s generous libel laws to go after people who had called her a Holocaust denier.
Journalist Rivkah Brown posted a public apology to Rowling. Brown later told Forward that the public apology had been forced out of her by Rowling’s legal team. She said she doesn’t have “the financial resources to engage in a legal battle with Rowling.”
Nabil Boudi, Khelif’s attorney in Paris, told Variety that apologies don’t change anything. “The lawsuit is filed and the facts remain.”
And the facts are that Rowling and others spread a lie about an Olympic gold medalist’s gender, turning what should have been one of the proudest moments of her life into a nightmare.
