• A video with the caption, “Little did they know what awaited them. Don’t mess with the French women!,” is in fact a fake video.
• The video has gone viral and evidently attempts to spread Islamophobia and hate-mongering towards Muslims in France.
A video circulating on social media falsely claims to show an attempted assault by “Muslim immigrants” on young women in France. The footage depicts a group of young men in a pedestrian underpass seemingly confronting some women, leading to a fight where the men end up on the ground after being struck by the women.
The video has been shared over 2,100 times on X, and a screenshot of the video also appears on Facebook with the caption: “In France, a gang of Muslim immigrants tried to assault a group of young women.
“Little did they know what awaited them. Don’t mess with the French women!”
However, all is not as it may appear. The original video was posted on Instagram in November 2023 by Campus Univers Cascades, a stunt team and stunt school in France. It had a caption which read, “Street fight” but also included the hashtags “stuntteam” “choregraphy” [sic] and “stuntlife”.
Although it has transpired that this was in fact a stunt team, we do wonder why the production team opted to use brown actors attacking white women in their video. This depiction continues to project racial stereotypes often propagated by Hollywood.
