
Controversial French comedian Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala was sentenced on Friday to four months in prison and ordered to pay a 10,000 euro fine following a decision in two separate cases, i24NEWS reports.
In the first case, M'Bala was tried for "public insult to an official," in this case Frédéric Potier, former interministerial delegate for the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and anti-LGBT hatred, in a video broadcast in September 2020.
The court sentenced him to a fine of 10,000 euros.
He was implicated in another case for "public insult of an anti-Semitic nature" and "contestation of a crime against humanity" in two other videos dating from May 2020 and was sentenced to four months' imprisonment.
His lawyer, Me David De Stefano, indicated that his client was going to appeal the two decisions. Dieudonné, 55, was absent from the audience, according to the report.
The comedian stirred up controversy several years ago when he invented the quenelle gesture, a reverse Nazi salute that has become extremely popular in anti-Semitic and extremist circles across the French-speaking world and worldwide.
He was widely accused of promoting anti-Semitism and already has a string of convictions in France for hate speech and other related offences, and saw his performances banned by French authorities due to their virulently anti-Semitic content. The comedian managed to have some of the bans overturned.
In 2015, a French court convicted Dieudonné of anti-Semitic comments and fined him $24,000.
Dieudonné was also barred from entering Canada in 2016, though he later performed in front of fans in Montreal via video link.
The controversial comedian was also sentenced to two months in jail in Belgium for incitement to hatred over anti-Semitic comments during a show in that country.
Instagram pulled Dieudonné’s account last year because he "had mocked victims of the Holocaust" and used "dehumanizing terms about Jews". He was subsequently banned from video sharing app TikTok as well.