A Frenchman has been fined more than $1,000 and ordered to pay an additional $4,000 in damages to the family of an overweight boy he publicly insulted on Facebook.
It all started a year ago in the Southern city of Beziers, when a housekeeper badly hurt her back trying to lift a child up from his wheelchair to get him to his school’s cafeteria.
Her injury was severe enough that she had to go on sick leave. She decided to share her ordeal on Facebook, and her riled up husband chimed in on the post, insulting the child and blaming him for his wife’s injury.
Jennifer Martinez, the mother of the eight-year-old boy, soon learned about the post from other parents when she came to pick up her son from school. “They showed me copies of the message. It said, ‘My wife just tried to lift a kind of fat pig who had been brought up on or hamburgers. If it were me, I would have made that fatso run.'” she told French radio France Bleu
Her son, Evan, soon found out about the insult, and got predictably upset. He stopped eating and refused to go back to school. His mom eventually had to transfer him to a different school.
“He ran away from the school gates in tears and said he wanted to change schools,” she told France Bleu. “I felt sick. This is my own son. I lost sleep about it.”
Neither the little boy nor his family received an apology from the housekeeper’s husband, which, she said, led them to take the matter to the courts.
The court ruled on Friday that the author of the post should pay a €1,000 fine, and €4,000 in damages to the boy’s family.
“I would have liked an apology to begin with, but now all I want is to annoy him as much as he has bothered us, to support my son and make him understand that it is not to call children ‘fat pigs’. ”
