A secret group of mainly male French journalists have been accused of coordinating a sprawling, yearslong campaign of harassment abusing women writers, feminist activists, people of color, and LGBT people.



The group, Ligue du LOL, or LOL League, has been operating for about a decade. So far, three journalists have been suspended, one has resigned, and one has been fired since the accusations were made public online. People working at four of France's biggest news outlets have been implicated.



The LOL League started as a Facebook group in 2009 by journalist Vincent Glad, who now works at one of France's largest newspapers, Libération. The group operated as a shitposting space for people in French journalism and advertising who were popular on Twitter.

The current controversy started when Slate France journalist Thomas Messias tweeted cryptically last week about a "model reporter" who "used to have fun in a pack of feminist stalkers."

The existence of the LOL League has been a rumor within French media since its start, and many young journalists in France immediately understood Messias's tweet was about the group.

Messias's tweet was quoted by Libération journalist and LOL League member Alexandre Hervaud, who sarcastically called it a "brave subtweet" and said he wasn't sure whom Messias was talking about. Then another Twitter user, @IrisKV, asked Hervaud directly about harassing her. Her tweets were the first recent mention of LOL League. Everything seems to have kicked off from here.

Libération then published a piece on its fact-checking vertical investigating the size and influence of the group. The piece was titled "Has the LOL League really existed and harassed feminists on social networks?" and it has been widely criticized since going live last week. Glamour France called the piece "an aberration." Some believed the piece was downplaying the influence of the group.

“CheckNews feels that the critics against its text are unfair, since we were the first outlet in France to actually write about this group,” Jacques Pezet, a journalist for CheckNews told BuzzFeed News. "Of course, this appeared in the CheckNews page, which does a lot of fact-checking, but in no way, did we decide to see this investigation as a 'debunking' of a hoax or a fake news."

By Friday, the #ligueduLOL hashtag was trending throughout France.