Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif — who earlier this month was at the center of a hateful misinformation campaign over her gender identity — has filed a formal legal complaint with the Paris public prosecutor’s office alleging she was a victim of “aggravated cyber-harassment.”
Khelif became the target of transphobic attacks after her match against Angela Carini, who quit less than a minute into their first bout. Following Khelif’s victory, public figures including J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance helped disseminate rumors that Khelif is transgender and had an unfair advantage — despite the fact that she was assigned female at birth and has competed in women’s boxing all her career. Khelif’s home country of Algeria is also hostile to LGBTQ+ rights: It criminalizes same-sex relationships and transitioning genders; it also bans changing one’s gender identity on official government documents. These facts didn’t stop critics like Rowling from calling Khelif a “male” or former president Donald Trump saying, “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!”
Though Khelif’s criminal complaint was filed against “X”—meaning unknown persons under French law, allowing prosecutors to investigate all leads — it also explicitly mentions Rowling and Musk. Nabil Boudi, Khelif’s attorney, said that Trump would likely be part of the investigation as well. “Trump tweeted, so whether or not he is named in our lawsuit, he will inevitably be looked into as part of the prosecution,” Boudi told Variety in a statement.
Much of the outcry stemmed from the International Boxing Association’s decision last year to suddenly disqualify Khelif after she defeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva and advanced to the final of the 2023 world championship. (The amateur-boxing government body, which was expelled by the International Olympic Committee last summer, is controlled by Russian sports businessman Umar Kremlev.) The IBA alleged that Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, also a cisgender female athlete, failed the organization’s gender-eligibility tests. However, the IBA has not said what kind of testing it conducted or why the boxers failed.
As the controversy around Khelif’s participation in the Paris Olympics intensified, the IOC criticized the IBA’s 2023 decision. “The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure — especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years,” the IOC said in a statement. “Such an approach is contrary to good governance.” (The IOC does not conduct any sex testing and said that Khelif’s passport identifies her as female, which is the organization’s threshold for eligibility.)
On Friday, Khelif won her first Olympic gold medal after defeating China’s Yang Liu, becoming Algeria’s first Olympic gold medalist in women’s boxing and the country’s first boxer to bring home the gold in 28 years. “I am fully qualified to take part in this competition. I’m a woman like any other woman. I was born a woman, I lived a woman, I competed as a woman, there’s no doubt about that,” Khelif said following the match, addressing her detractors and the misinformation campaign against her. “They are enemies of success, that is what I call them. And that also gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.”