![Radio France fires comedian Guillaume Meurice Radio France fires comedian Guillaume Meurice](https://media.lesechos.com/api/v1/images/view/66682be73a49281c432930b9/1280x720/01101809718780-web-tete.jpg)
Dismissed for serious misconduct, comedian Guillaume Meurice will no longer work on France Inter. His employer, Radio France, informed him by a letter sent at the end of last week of the end of his contract, indicates an internal email sent this Tuesday by the CEO of Radio France, Sibyle Veil, to Inter employees.
It is the “end of a false suspense”, declared to AFP the columnist of the program “Le Grand Dimanche soir” presented by Charline Vanhoenacker. “I took this decision for repeated disloyalty towards the company,” Sibyle Veil, for her part, justified in her internal message.
At the origin of this divorce, a controversial joke made at the end of October about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the comedian had compared to a “kind of Nazi, but without a foreskin”. This sentence, which had offended some listeners, had earned Guillaume Meurice a reception from his management and had led Arcom to sanction Radio France. The latter claimed his right to make these remarks in the name of freedom of expression.
The prosecutor had also received a complaint in the fall for “provocation of violence and anti-Semitic hatred” and “public insults of an anti-Semitic nature”, which was ultimately closed. The prosecutor nevertheless agreed that “these comments fuel hatred”, recalls Sibyle Veil.
Freedom of expression
Guillaume Meurice, who published a book on this controversy with Editions du Seuil in March, reiterated his joke on the air once the decision to close the complaint was known. Unacceptable in the eyes of Radio France.
“By finally repeating his comments on the air in April, Guillaume Meurice ignored the warning he had received, the warning from Arcom and hijacked the prosecutor’s decision. He left us no other choice than to draw the consequences of his obstinacy and his repeated disloyalty,” writes the president of Radio France.
Guillaume Meurice was suspended from the air at the beginning of May. A decision which led to a day of strike on France Inter on Sunday May 12. At the end of May, the Radio France unions and the France Inter editorial team asked management to renounce “a decision to dismiss” the comedian, believing that this would “create a serious precedent” for “freedom of expression” , indicates AFP.
“Neither freedom of expression nor humor have ever been threatened at Radio France,” insists Sibyle Veil today, reminding Inter employees that several columnists had expressed their support for Guillaume on air. Meurice.
With AFP