Rapper Booba is due to be tried on Wednesday by the Paris Criminal Court for discriminatory insults against a France Télévisions journalist, Linh-Lan Dao, and an essayist, Tristan Mendès France, as well as for cyber harassment of the former.

The case could, however, be postponed to a later date, according to several sources, as the rapper is not expected to be present at the hearing.

Regarding the journalist, who intends to become a civil party in the hearing, Booba is mainly being prosecuted for aggravated cyberharassment and discriminatory public insults, after comments published on the X network in January 2024.

Linh-Lan Dao's lawyer, Ilana Soskin, told AFP that "the harassment she suffered and the insults based on her origin that were uttered by Booba, followed and relayed by hundreds of internet users, cannot go unpunished, especially since she only did her job: to inform."

As for the essayist Tristan Mendès France, a specialist in digital cultures at the University of Paris-Cité, Booba will have to answer for messages on X in January 2024 in which he wrote about him: "He is nose before shame", accompanied by a photograph of the victim next to another of the serial killer Francis Heaulme, or even for having written "nosfaste".

In September, after Booba was brought before a judge, who issued him a summons to a court hearing and placed him under judicial supervision, Mr. Mendès France told AFP that he was not behind the proceedings, nor did he intend to become a civil party in this case.

"With his fingerprint on X, his messages triggered a spectacular flood of anti-Semitic comments," said the man who is also a specialist in the "conspiracy sphere."

"One must have a lamentable historical culture not to remember the anti-Semitic attacks against the name Mendès France and particularly Pierre Mendès France," the former head of government (1954-1955) of whom he is the grandson, and "whose effigy was brandished during the Pétainist exhibition on the Jews," he recalled.

Booba, whose real name is Elie Yaffa, is also under investigation in two other cases of online moral harassment: since October 2023 against the former queen of influencers Magali Berdah and, since October, against Demdem, a time when the partner of his rival and other heavyweight of French rap, Gims.