A Turkish court on Friday handed down a five-month suspended sentence to Pınar Yıldırım, a popular social media influencer known as “Pucca,” on charges of insulting men on her social media account, local media reported.
Yıldırım announced the development on Twitter, saying: “I was given a five-month [suspended] sentence for insulting men! I hate to make this comparison, but are you serious about this, [punishing someone for] insulting men, given the increasing number of femicides in the country? I swear this could be one of the top 10 absurd lawsuits in the world.”
“I hope they don’t appoint an expert to find out whether I like men or not. Whatever [bad] happened to me happened because of men! Insulting men… How fragile you are,” she added.
According to the indictment drafted by the İstanbul Anatolian Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, the charges are based on a tweet by Yıldırım in which she said: “I’ve watched numerous movies with homosexuals [characters], finished one after the other, but no, no, no! I still don’t like the despicable, dishonest gender called male.”
The investigation into the tweet, which was posted on July 19, 2020, was launched after a tipoff received by the prosecutor that said Yıldırım was sharing content that constitutes the crime of “openly denigrating a segment of the population on grounds of their social class, race, religion or sectarian, gender or regional differences,” the indictment said.
Yıldırım’s statement regarding the tweet, which was quoted in the indictment, revealed that it was posted in reply to another tweet by her then-husband Osman Karagöz, saying that she was “watching movies involving homosexual characters from morning till night.”
She added that she had no other purpose for posting the tweet and that it hadn’t received any negative reaction back then, denying the accusations against her, according to the indictment.
Femicides and violence against women are serious problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten every day. Many critics say that the main reason behind the situation is the policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which protects violent and abusive men by granting them impunity.