BalanceTonPorc

Balance

TonPorc is a French hashtag that gives public form to testimony about sexual harassment and assault. In the novel, it appears both in protest against Alexandre Farel and in a personal account posted by Mila Wizman, connecting a broad movement of women speaking out with the contested, highly publicized proceedings against him.

Meaning and Public Context

Six months before the Farel trial, the Weinstein revelations had prompted women to describe abuse, rape, and harassment through social media as well as other public channels. The hashtag became part of this movement against silence: each woman’s account helped make it easier for others to speak. The novel places the Farel case within that climate, where testimony could gather collective force but also where the public response risked running ahead of the court’s judgment.

The hashtag’s protest language was present outside the Palais de Justice on the morning of the trial. Women in the crowd carried signs calling for an end to impunity and silence, while teenagers displayed photographs of pigs marked with “Farel” and “BalanceTonPorc.” The Femen demonstrators chanted against Farel and against honoring aggressors as television journalists filmed them. The slogan therefore functions not only as a prompt for personal testimony but as a public accusation, turning a name into a symbol before the courtroom had reached its decision.

Mila Wizman’s Tweet

During questioning, Mila was confronted with a tweet she had posted after the Weinstein affair and the launch of #BalanceTonPorc. In it, she recalled being thirteen, sick at summer camp, when an activity leader entered her room on the pretext of taking her temperature and put his hand in her underwear. When asked whether she remembered the post, she collapsed into tears; the question was then repeated. The account brings the hashtag’s broad call to speak into the courtroom as a specific memory of childhood abuse, while the scene records the emotional cost of having that testimony read back publicly.

The tweet concerns an earlier assault, distinct from the events at the center of the Farel case. Its appearance in the trial places Mila’s testimony in a larger history of vulnerability and disclosure, without making the two incidents interchangeable. The hashtag gives her a means of naming what happened to her, while the courtroom turns that statement into evidence to be examined before strangers.

Protest, Media, and Judgment

The novel presents the hashtag within a conflict between public testimony and legal process. Maître Célérier argued that the public had already condemned Alexandre and that the media climate threatened the presumption of innocence. His closing argument described a social-media tribunal made of aggressive, vengeful tweets and contrasted it with the court’s responsibility to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent. These claims do not settle the accusation; they show how the hashtag’s public force became entangled with arguments about fairness, reputation, and the limits of judgment outside court.

The pressure surrounding the case had begun before the trial. After news of Alexandre’s arrest was reported by Agence France-Presse, journalists contacted his parents, while Claire received insults on Twitter. Her earlier interview about the assaults in Cologne collided with her son’s detention on suspicion of rape, making her a target in the same networked public sphere in which women were encouraged to speak. The hashtag’s significance is thus double-edged in the narrative: it opens space for accounts that had been silenced, yet its association with protest also becomes part of the media storm in which identities and reputations are rapidly recast.

Competing Consequences

Witness testimony further complicates the public language of the movement. Rémi Vidal, who said he had initiated the hazing that led to the display of Mila’s underwear at a party, described being shaken by women’s accounts and by his own recognition of the harm involved in humiliating women and questioning their place in engineering schools. He said he could not know whether Alexandre had committed the alleged act and would not speak against Mila simply because he found it difficult to believe his friend capable of it. His testimony distinguishes solidarity with women who want to be heard from a claim to know the facts of a particular case.

At the trial’s end, Jean Farel left without commenting after his son’s verdict, while demonstrators outside continued to dispute whether justice had been done. The scene preserves the divide between a legal outcome and public judgment rather than presenting the hashtag as a simple verdict in itself. Across the novel, #BalanceTonPorc names a collective refusal of silence, but its appearance beside the Farel case also exposes the unresolved tension between making testimony audible and deciding an individual accusation through evidence and due process.