Legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot was reportedly fined over $20,000 for racist comments she made back in 2019. At the time, Bardo published a letter referring to the native residents of La Reunion as “savages.” On Thursday, Le Figaro reported she was fined €20,000, or about $23,100, for the comments. Bardot, 87, was an international sex symbol during the late 1950s and 1960s, starring in dozens of important movies.
In the 2019 letter, Bardot called the Reunionese “natives” who have “kept their savage genes” because of how they treat animals, reports The Telegraph. She called locals “degenerate savages,” singling out the Hindu Tamil population for sacrificing goats. She said the practice evokes the “cannibalism of past centuries” and said the island’s “degenerate” population is “still soaked in barbarous ancestral traditions.”
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The court in Saint-Denis de la Reunion also fined Bardot’s spokesman, Bruno Jacquelin, €4,000 for his role in sending the statement to media outlets on the actress’ behalf. After the letter was published in 2019, France’s then-overseas territories minister Annick Girardin responded to Bardot, noting, “That racism is not an opinion, it’s an offense.”
This was not the first time Bardot has faced fines for racism. This was her sixth similar offense, notes the New York Post. In 2008, she was put on trial for using racial slurs about Muslim communities in a letter she sent to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. She accused Muslims of killing sheep without anesthetizing them. Bardot wrote that she was “fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its habits.” At the end of the trial, she was fined €15,000.
Bardot began her career as a model and started appearing in films in the early 1950s. By the end of the decade, she was one of the most popular international sex symbols. Her movies in the 1950s and 1960s include And God Created Women, Contempt, Viva Maria!, La Parisienne, and The Truth. She stopped making movies in the early 1970s, but continued recording songs and writing books. She has also been an active animal rights activist, establishing the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986.
