After two opposing sentences, the Supreme Court recognizes the right of a comedian to mock Jeremy Gabriel
ROME. Since he was 12, Jeremy Gabriel has been constantly bullied on TV. Overturning two previous sentences, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that a comedian has the right to mock a young disabled singer, even joking that he wants to drown, in a case that re-proposes the debate on the limits of satire and the need to protect the vulnerable people. The decision, with a 5 to 4 division of judges, puts an end to a legal battle that lasted over ten years. At the center of the story is Jéremy Gabriel, who is now 24 years old, born with deformities in the head, face and ears. From an early age he earned fame as a singer, performing for Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 and singing the Canadian national anthem at a hockey game five years ago. But since 2010, comedian Mike Ward has been targeting Gabriel’s physical appearance and his singing performances, arguing that people are nice to him just because they think he might die.
Bullying
The comedian did not hesitate to joke by claiming that he attempted to drown him. As a teenager, Jeremy Gabriel was bullied at school and prone to suicide. In 2016, the Quebec human rights court sentenced the actor to pay 35,000 Canadian dollars (about 25,000 euros) to the young man and 7,000 Canadian dollars (almost 5,000 euros) to his mother, concluding that Ward damaged their dignity and honor, staining himself with discrimination. Three years later, a Quebec court of appeals upheld the discrimination ruling but canceled the compensation. Finally, the Supreme Court, according to which the comedian said “some hateful and shameful things” without, however, the case rising to the high level set by the local law on discrimination. For the college, his comments “did not incite the public to treat Gabriel as a subhuman.” The majority of judges left open the possibility of challenging discrimination when an artist incites to “denigrate other people or detest their humanity on the basis of their disability or other factors”.
Risk of emulation
The minority of togates criticized the decision: “We will never tolerate conduct that humiliates or dehumanizes children with disabilities. There are no basic principles for tolerating words that have the same abusive effect. Wrapping this discriminatory conduct in the protective cloak of free speech does not make it any less intolerable when the word equates to the deliberate emotional abuse of a disabled child. ” Jeremy Gabriel himself said he was concerned about the message the decision sends to actors about using children as comic subjects.
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