Credits: MFonzatti / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0.
On December 11, 2025, Laury Thilleman broke her silence on Instagram and described a nonconsensual kiss by Ary Abittan in 2013 on the set of Les Enfants de la télé. The video, revived by the Paris controversy of December 6–7 and the words attributed to Brigitte Macron, reactivates a debate. Indeed, according to images circulated online, the debate concerns consent. However, the comedian, who benefited from a non-lieu in April 2024, continues his career. That decision of non-lieu was confirmed on January 30, 2025.
2013, On A Variety Show Set: An Applauded Scene, A Frozen Discomfort
Television memory sometimes has the cruelty of archives: in 2013, on the set of Les Enfants de la télé on TF1, a show hosted by Arthur, Ary Abittan leans toward Laury Thilleman, then Miss France 2011 turned presenter. He grabs her face and kisses her. The audience laughs, the guests smile, production moves on. The moment is captured, broadcast, approved by the mood of the time. The young woman, meanwhile, tenses, turns her head away, lets out a nervous laugh. Body language signals avoidance, shock, that slight step back to catch her breath, while the surrounding hilarity serves as implicit endorsement. The central word is not spoken. At the time, a word whose meaning had not yet fully taken hold was missing: consent.
In the media timeline of those years, variety shows balanced a march toward lightness. They also managed escalating proximity. The gesture was not dissected then. The framework protected it: a show, laughter, a set where boldness becomes currency. It is precisely that framework that later makes the return of the images so cutting: what the room encouraged yesterday shocks today.
Resurgence: When Networks Awaken Blind Spots
Social networks feed a memory that does not fade. December 2025, a short sequence resurfaces on sharing feeds: the video circulates, pauses on those seconds where the young woman tries to pull away. The context has changed, the grammar of consent has too. The clip is no longer an archival curiosity; it becomes a document. Virality has its reasons: another nearby controversy fans the flames.
In Paris, at the Folies Bergère, a show by Ary Abittan was just disrupted by activists from the #NousToutes collective. The day before, backstage, a First Lady slipped words that would become a scandal. Indeed, Brigitte Macron allegedly let fall an invective aimed at “the activists.” According to the recordings, this phrase is analyzed and repeated on loop by those who heard it. They consider the phrase an insult. It is also reclaimed by the people targeted, which intensifies their feeling. The debate ignites because it is not only about the vocabulary of a public figure. Indeed, it reveals a relationship to feminist struggles and a climate that pits methods of action, fears, and defenses against each other. Moreover, it highlights empathy and irony in this context. In this atmosphere, the 2013 archive returns as a symptom.
Laury Thilleman’s Statement: Breaking The Silence, Choosing The Right Words
On December 11, 2025, Laury Thilleman spoke on Instagram. She does not present herself as a belated heroine, but as a witness to herself. She writes that shame, humiliation, a feeling of powerlessness reduced her to silence. She notes that, “at the time, we didn’t talk about consent.” And above all, she articulates a sentence that is both an observation and an ethical frame: “But I did not consent.” The phrase takes five words and rectifies the image we had thought frozen by the 2013 laughter. She explains that the laughter was a mask and served to stay in the spotlight. It allowed avoiding an even greater embarrassment caused by a public contradiction.
Fourteen years separate the sequence and the testimony. The distance gives relief to the intimate experience. She does not claim to rewrite the event; she chooses to restore her absent will. Moreover, she decides to name what had not been named. She does, in sum, what a generation of women learned to do since the #MeToo shockwave: reinsert the line of consent into scenes that media conviviality blurred. The gesture is not a criminal accusation; it is political in the original sense, meaning public and educational.
A Separate Judicial File: The Non-Lieu And Its Recurring Misunderstanding
Legal note (Penal Code). “The complainant retains the possibility of an appeal if new elements emerge.”
The case igniting on networks intersects with another story, judicial this time, but separate: in 2021, a complaint for rape targeted Ary Abittan. After investigation, a non-lieu was pronounced in April 2024, then confirmed on appeal on January 30, 2025. Since then, the comedian resumed his career. In the public sphere, however, the term “non-lieu” carries an ambiguity that clouds the discussion. It is regularly confused with acquittal. Yet, under French law, a non-lieu is a procedural decision: it means there are not sufficient charges to send the case to a trial court. It is not a verdict of innocence after a trial.
Precision is necessary: a non-lieu ends prosecutions within the scope of a judicial investigation. By contrast, an acquittal is pronounced by a cour d’assises at the end of a contradictory debate. Words matter because they shape the interpretation of facts and restore the judicial time its specific logic. This logic is slow, rigorous, and limited by the evidence available at a given time. Moreover, the #NousToutes collective stresses the importance of this point. It recalls the meaning, in law and practice, of stopping a procedure. Thus, this is not about opposing courts to civil society. However, it is crucial to avoid letting semantic confusion add tumult to the turmoil. Should new, serious, and corroborating elements appear, justice could be seized again, at the initiative of the public prosecutor or the parties.
The Macron Sequence: Backstage Clumsiness, Public Blaze
The 2013 archive resurfaces because it intertwines with the reactions sparked in early December 2025. Indeed, the phrase attributed to Brigitte Macron backstage at the Folies Bergère provoked those reactions. A corridor and pre-show smiles appear in the images. Then, a few words are captured by a camera. According to images circulated online, the speed of sharing is impressive. The First Lady’s entourage pleads an intent to console an artist anxious about returning to the stage. The activists perceive a sexist insult directed at women. Indeed, they recall that a non-lieu does not close the social discussion on sexual violence. In a few hours, the retort becomes a rallying cry on social networks. Politics picks up the thread; Parliament comments; actresses, writers, activists adopt it and overturn the stigma.
What is at stake here goes beyond the mood of a public figure. It is the ridge line where several stakes meet. It concerns support for an artist, law, and the memory of victims. Prudence is required: the criminal case is closed by the judiciary; society is not obliged to remain silent. On both sides, it would be beneficial to replace the reflex of camps with a shared grammar. This would consist of recognizing the right to peaceful protest. Additionally, it must ensure that the presumption of innocence does not become a presumption of impunity. Furthermore, it is essential to recall that the dignity of people is not a mere rhetorical instrument. On the contrary, it should be considered an important threshold.
What The Images Say: The Crowd, The Laughter, The Body
Returning to the close-up from 2013 is to measure what, in studio culture, has shifted. Laughter, so dense it covers everything, is no longer enough to defuse. The hand that grabs, the mouth that insists, the head that pulls away: the editing does not lie. It tells how social codes long skewed the perception of acts. In 2013, the notion of a gray area between flirting and coercion was not yet fueling the public conversation. In 2025, it is a core of the debate. That is the paradoxical usefulness of the resurgence: showing how culture manufactures its blind spots and how, little by little, it illuminates them.
Laury Thilleman says it without emphasis: she did not have the words at the moment of the gesture. She has them now. She does not impose blame; she describes. That description is enough to reconfigure the reading of the image. It strips the laughter of its alibi, restores to silence its protective dimension, gives back to “no” its status. On the other side, Ary Abittan has not, as of this writing, commented on the statement. The issue is less his reaction than the collective clarification this testimony encourages.
The Role Of Media: Angles And Responsibilities
By broadcasting the sequence at the time, the media followed the course of entertainment. Today they must resist the symmetrical inverse: the temptation to overdramatize. The coverage of a non-lieu requires precision of terms, the removal of ambiguities. The story of a nonconsensual kiss on a set requires listening attentively to the person concerned. Indeed, she represents the broader audience. This is not about replaying the match fifteen years later, but about learning from the discordance. Indeed, what was applauded yesterday can be unacceptable today. This is explained by the fact that the tools to name what happens have matured.
Culture Of Consent: Learning Without Humiliating
Laury Thilleman’s words can become useful if they open a pedagogical path. This first requires distinguishing cases: a testimony about a nonconsensual kiss on television is not a criminal reproach aimed at the 2021 case. It also requires holding together two demands: protecting creative freedom and ensuring that the ethics of relationships are not erased under the pretext of spectacle. Finally, it demands the right words from public officials: words that repair, not words that sting.
The culture of consent is not a permanent media tribunal. It is a patient social discipline that learns to read signals. It teaches to accept that a smile under the spotlights does not equal consent. It shifts lines without humiliating. It rejects the logic of camps in favor of principles. It reminds, for example, that demanding respect for bodies and wills does not take away the right to perform. Nor does it take away the right to laugh or attend a show. It simply sets the framework in which those rights coexist.
In France, other media scenes have been reread through the lens of these principles since 2017. This shows a collective learning that progresses by successive adjustments.
Facing The Images
The power of images is not to state the truth, but to question what we do with them. Laury Thilleman reviewed the sequence and chose to take it back with words. The gesture seems simple; it nonetheless weakens two illusions: that television defuses everything with a joke, and that justice settles all social discussion. Brigitte Macron, by her unfortunate reply, highlights in negative: sometimes a word burdens more than it comforts. All the more reason to put at the center what consenting means. It is not a moral set piece. It is the minimal requirement without which no laugh, no scene, no line will taste right.