Credits: Eric Houdas / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The founder of Legend and former NRJ host announced several defamation complaints on August 12 through his attorney. They target Les Inrockuptibles, Le Monde, and YouTuber TPZ. These publications reported testimony and screenshots accusing him of inappropriate exchanges with teenage girls. In the absence of publicly disclosed complaints, this response settles neither the allegations nor any possible legal handling of them.
A Response Announced Against Three Publications
In a report published on August 12, BFMTV reported an announcement by Me Jade Dousselin, attorney for Guillaume Pley and Legend. She says her clients have decided to file several complaints. The targets are Les Inrockuptibles, Le Monde, and TPZ, behind investigations into the former host and his company.
The defense accuses these publications of relaying or presenting as established allegations it describes as “serious and false.” It says contradictory evidence had been sent to them. This position remains that of Guillaume Pley and his counsel: by itself, it does not constitute a judicial finding.
At this stage, no filing, receipt acknowledgment, case number, or details about the court seized has been made public. It is therefore not possible to separately verify the date, form, and content of each complaint, nor the specific passages being challenged. The phrase “announced complaints” more accurately describes the state of the available information than the claim of a case already documented.
This distinction is crucial. Announcing a complaint is a public statement. Filing it requires an act submitted to the competent authority, and then a ruling requires a court to decide. Defamation is itself a legal classification. The 1881 law defines it as an allegation of a fact that harms a person’s honor or reputation. The Constitutional Council recalled this definition in June 2026. A complaint therefore does not prejudge the outcome of the case.
Testimony and Screenshots At The Heart Of The Investigations
On August 5, Les Inrockuptibles published an investigation into the years when Guillaume Pley hosted Guillaume Radio 2.0 on NRJ. That period ran from 2011 to 2018. The investigation also looks at how Legend operates. Two former fans, minors at the start of the exchanges they describe, recount online conversations they now consider inappropriate. The magazine includes screenshots that, according to its editors, support their accounts.
On August 10, Le Monde published an additional account. A young woman says she received sexually explicit messages in 2011, when she was 14. According to her, they came from a private account in Guillaume Pley’s name. The newspaper says it reviewed the corresponding exchanges.
These elements are testimony and documents published by the outlets concerned. Their full integrity, their context, and the actual sender of each message have not been established by a court decision. The separate allegations about management or the work environment at Legend also call for their own review. They should not be confused with the alleged exchanges with former fans.
Shared Access To Accounts, A Disputed Defense
In an Instagram post on August 7, Guillaume Pley expressed regret about his exchanges with the public and those of his team. At times, the person was a minor. He described some exchanges as inappropriate and lacking judgment. He does, however, maintain that some messages did not come directly from him, since several people, he says, had access to his social accounts.
BFMTV says it reviewed two written, anonymized statements produced by people around him, including one from a former team manager at NRJ. The defense also says that four devices, including three using the radio station’s IP address, had been connected to the accounts. However, no login logs or technical report linking a message to a device or a person has been published.
This version is disputed by former colleagues. Franceinfo reports an Instagram statement by Florent Le Gars, a former collaborator on Guillaume Radio 2.0. According to him, the teams did not have access to private messages and did not send the messages in question. The outlet also cites Amina Kasimi, a former member of Guillaume Pley’s team at NRJ. She said on X that the teams were being assigned responsibilities that were not theirs.
The two claims do not automatically cancel each other out. Shared access, if proven, would not by itself identify the author of each exchange. Conversely, former employees’ denials are not enough to technically establish who controlled an account on a given date. Login data, devices, or legal filings would be needed to move beyond this clash of statements.
What A Proceeding Could Establish — And What It Does Not Yet Prove
If the complaints are in fact filed and lead to prosecution, the legal debate will focus on the statements at issue and how they should be classified. It will also examine the publications’ defenses, including the truth of the alleged facts or their good faith. It will not be enough to conclude that the articles harmed Guillaume Pley’s image in order to find defamation.
Conversely, the possible opening of proceedings would not make all the published allegations true. It would replace neither verification of the authenticity of the screenshots, nor identification of their authors, nor an adversarial review of the testimony. No public judicial decision currently establishes the alleged facts or the defamatory nature of the investigations.
Three questions therefore remain distinct. Who actually wrote the messages? How did the media verify and contextualize the published material? Do some passages legally meet the criteria for defamation? The August 12 announcement opens that debate; it does not resolve it.