However, a distinction must be made between two things: what Mediapart claims to have established and what a court case may eventually establish. At this stage, no court ruling has determined the authenticity of the messages. But the evidence presented by Mediapart is not described as mere isolated screenshots. The newspaper claims to have obtained conversations from separate sources, to have investigated for several months and to have interviewed eighteen people. Crucially, regarding certain Messenger exchanges, Bardella’s correspondent is said to have requested that Meta download his data, and this extraction is said to have been authenticated by a bailiff. Several media outlets have reported on this methodology.
This is precisely where Bardella’s new defence becomes interesting. His message, reproduced in your screenshot, essentially reduces the case to ‘obscure, manipulable screenshots’. However, this is not how Mediapart describes its fact-checking process. This does not automatically prove that Mediapart is right, but it does mean that Bardella’s challenge and the argument put forward by Mediapart are not exactly on the same level: one emphasises the theoretical possibility of manipulating a screenshot; the other claims to have evidence enabling them to trace the origin of the conversations.
The complaint announced by Bardella is therefore significant. It shifts part of the dispute onto the legal arena. If he maintains that the documents are indeed forgeries, the question of their origin and authenticity could become central to the proceedings. The defamation complaint, with a claim for civil damages, was indeed filed on 30 September, according to the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office as reported by TF1-LCI; Bardella has now also announced a complaint for forgery and the use of forged documents.
Trump or Putin? The comparison calls for precision
One can note rhetorical similarities with certain strategies employed by Donald Trump, without necessarily concluding that Bardella is ‘playing the Trump card’. The observable tactic consists not only of contesting the disputed information, but also of challenging the legitimacy of the source producing it. Bardella does not merely say: ‘these documents are fake’. He portrays Mediapart as a ‘ferociously anti-RN’ media outlet, refers to ‘political opponents’, speaks of an attack on his honour and presents the affair as a campaign directed against his camp.
This results in a classic shift in the debate: from the content to the messenger. The initial question, ‘Are these messages genuine?’, is then accompanied by a second: ‘Can we trust the media outlet publishing them?’. The latter may ultimately become politically more significant than the former.
A comparison with Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, would be far more delicate and, if made without nuance, excessive: the Russian institutional context, the relationship between the government and the media, and the political system are not comparable to those in France. Speaking of a rhetoric aimed at delegitimising the source and political victimisation is analytically more sound than equating Bardella with Putin.
The similarity to certain Trump-style tactics, however, may constitute a relevant angle of analysis: denying everything outright, attacking the media’s credibility, presenting the accusation as politically orchestrated, and shifting the confrontation to the courts. These are similarities in argumentative method, not a political identity between the protagonists.
And this is probably the crux of the matter: we will not know who is telling the truth simply by counting the most categorical statements. Mediapart must be able to document the authenticity and provenance of what it publishes; Bardella may challenge these elements and bring the matter before the courts. The technical evidence, the original sources and, potentially, the court’s findings will carry far greater weight than the verbal abuse employed by either side.
At this stage, therefore, the dispute is no longer simply ‘Bardella versus Mediapart’. It centres on a far more verifiable question: do the original data that Mediapart claims to possess actually allow these messages to be attributed to Jordan Bardella? It is on this factual point that the remainder of the case should be judged.
