Minister of Education Gabriel Attal Opens Up About Personal Experience with School Bullying

Minister of National Education since the summer, Gabriel Attal has taken the scourge of school bullying head on. It is also a subject that he experienced personally during his schooling.

We are at the end of middle school, at the École Alsacienne, a posh establishment in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, with a tough selection. “I was 14-15 years old, a student had opened this site on which you had to post comments on the physique of others. On this occasion, I experienced a flood of insults and insults, he confided to Audrey Crespo-Mara in “Sept à quatre”, this November 5. It lasted several months and it was very violent. » “Pedal”, “tafiole” and other “tarlouze” are heard.

It was the time of the very first websites, ancestors of today’s social networks, where you could share photos and comment. The student in question “created these skyblogs. There were both these attacks directed against me and then something very perverse: he posted photos of my friends and he was going to post comments using my identity to insult them. His objective was to isolate me, remembers the 34-year-old minister. Sometimes I arrived at school in the morning and then my friends no longer wanted to talk to me and I understood that it was because he had posted offensive comments, stealing my identity. »

« JI’m going to destroy you”

The trigger, if there was one, Gabriel Attal places it at his cinema release. He is accompanied by a girl that his stalker liked. “I remember that day he said to me: ‘I will destroy you.’ This is what he sought to do behind. »

The adolescent Attal feels “pain” which, at the time, seems endless. Surrounded by a “loving family”, he has never lacked for anything, but he feels, like many adolescents still today, that he “has no one to talk to about it”.

“When I saw messages that called me “PD” or “a jerk,” I didn’t want to talk to my family about it. I told myself that if I talked to them about it they would say to me: “But why is he saying that? “We were going to get into a discussion that I didn’t necessarily want to get into at that time,” he continues in front of the TF1 camera.

The harasser ends up leaving the establishment

He speaks to an education counselor. The thing is taken seriously. The harassing student ended up leaving the establishment after several months. A departure which allowed Gabriel Attal to “move on to something else”. By revealing this intimate experience, the minister wants to convey an essential message: “There is an end to suffering”, it can be overcome and healed. “I am fighting,” he assures, “and I will continue to fight to put in place all the means to put an end to the suffering of young people who are harassed, so that there is someone to listen to them, so that there is an institution that reacts […]. So that the suffering stops. »

They found themselves together at Sciences Po in the same promotion

The suffering has ended but the story of Gabriel Attal and his harasser did not end at the Alsatian School. The two men found themselves at Sciences Po, in the same promotion, without however cross again. “When I got involved in politics, I understood that he didn’t want to let me go. When I was appointed to government, he posted messages on social media, making references to my homosexuality. »

This fame “obviously made him want to attack me again. I understood that he had kept the same obsession. » This ex-comrade released a book in 2019, in which he trashes Gabriel Attal and reveals his homosexuality. The latter – who did not hide but had never spoken about it publicly – drew on his suffering from his college years to gain perspective. “There was a form of incursion into my privacy. It was painful,” he still remembers. He does not complain: “I didn’t want to give him this gift. »

The name of the harassing student is never mentioned in the TF1 program, neither by Gabriel Attal, nor by the journalist. But all the elements mentioned refer to the enmity which links him with the lawyer Juan Branco. In an interview in 2019, Gabriel Attal, at the time Secretary of State for Youth, had also mentioned his former classmate, like him the son of a producer. “ When we were in college, he already hosted a skyblog where he insulted me. I leave him to his fixation and his mythos. […] There is something that hurt me, it was the fact that Juan Branco attacked my father. He died very suddenly three years ago…”

In October 2018, when Gabriel Attal entered the government, Branco tweeted: “Nice sofa promotion for Attal, in a civil partnership with Macron’s political advisor, who without any other reason gets a ministerial morocco. All of Paris knows it, but it seems that these things are not said. We should not rush our dear endogamy. »

Following a portrait published by “ L’Express », the lawyer sent a right of reply to the magazine: “I never created a Skyblog. […] I never wrote on Twitter that Attal, who had never hidden his homosexuality, was “gay”.” “L’Express” responded to the right of reply point by point. Thus regarding the Skyblog, the weekly maintained: « This blog was intended to note the physique of young high school girls from the Alsatian School. In a post dated July 5, 2005, Juan Branco, who introduces himself as “co-administrator”, wrote: “I remind you that the authors of this blog, me and Manu, cannot in any way be held responsible for the comments made in the comments , etc. “A clarification after certain slippages were observed in the comments, which were not “good-natured””.