The Court of Cassation ruled in favor on Tuesday of Yann Moix, attacked by his brother Alexandre for defamation, considering that there was no reason to condemn him as the Paris Court of Appeal had done. The case concerns a television program from November 2019, Balance ton post on C8. Yann Moix, 55 years old today, violently attacked his younger brother, 51 years old.
Alexandre Moix had filed a complaint for defamation. He criticized his brother for having described him as a man who had taken “heavy psychotropic drugs for many years”, at one time “interned”, and in politics “very, very close to small neo-Nazi groups, Maxime Brunerie and co”, in reference to an extremist who attempted to assassinate President Jacques Chirac in July 2002.
In November 2021, the Paris judicial court acquitted Yann Moix. Alexandre Moix appealed. In October 2022, the Paris Court of Appeal sentenced Yann Moix to 1,000 euros in damages, and 3,000 euros for the plaintiff’s legal costs, for comments on his brother’s political opinions. Yann Moix appealed to the Court of Cassation. And the Court of Cassation finally agreed with him, canceling the entire procedure.
For the supreme court, the court of appeal disregarded the law of 1881, which makes defamation “a precise imputation which necessarily harms honor or consideration”. The words of Yann Moix, according to the Court of Cassation, “are limited to evoking the proximity of the civil party with neo-Nazi or far-right movements, and in particular with one of its members, involved in an attempt to “assassination of a former head of state, which does not constitute the attribution, to the civil party, of a sufficiently precise fact”.
The two men have a very tenacious resentment, which goes back to childhood. It broke out publicly on the occasion of the publication of Yann Moix’s novel Orléans in 2019. During the trial in 2021, Alexandre Moix claimed to have never had political activity, nor publicly expressed his opinions, unlike Yann who had recognized in 2019 to have been the author of anti-Semitic caricatures and texts in a student newspaper, 30 years earlier.
