Despite the incalculable death threats and humiliating insults that have ruined his life for years, singer Jérémy Gabriel swears he no longer blames his web stalkers.
• Also read: [VIDÉOS] Jérémy Gabriel ends the saga that has confronted him with Mike Ward for 13 years
“Today I’m very calm,” he replies when asked what he thinks of the people who cowardly attacked him.
“I’ve learned to live with and love these people because they obviously have a problem. Making death threats to someone you’ve never met… I learned to use the power it gave me. I owe all the strength I have today to these people. They gave me the opportunity to get stronger.”
He even announced Thursday morning the drop of the latest civil lawsuit against Mike Ward, ending an eight-year legal saga against the man who made Jérémy Gabriel the target of cruel jokes on a show that aired between 2010 and 2013.
The police
Jérémy Gabriel, with whom Le Journal spoke in connection with a file on online celebrity harassment that will appear in the Weekend notebook, could face life sentences of more than 100 years for those who molested him. Nobody would judge him.
Between 2015 and 2019, at the height of his altercation with Mike Ward, which he credits as the starting point of this outright campaign of intimidation, threats, insults and harassment were his daily fate.
Photo Didier Debusschère/Journal de Quebec
“It was all the time. Sometimes there were four or five of us and we moderated my Facebook page to control and filter messages. I have received several death threats through Messenger on my Facebook page. Every year I’ve had to go to a police investigator in Quebec or Montreal for death threats. It was part of my daily life to receive calls from investigators.
“In 2017,” he continues, a young man took a picture with a gun and said he was going to kill me. He was arrested by the police and was in prison. When I was doing shows you had to add extra security because you didn’t know if people were going to come and cause trouble. At ANTI in Quebec five years ago, people came to threaten them, they had to be kicked out, the police came.
Difficult for his sisters
There were consequences. Even today, the theaters refuse to hire him. The broadcasters didn’t want to deal with the chaos, he says.
Even his studies were affected.
“When I was studying at Cégep de Limoilou in 2016, I was afraid to go there because someone had made threats. He said he knew where I went to school, he would find me and kick my ass.
His relatives were also targeted. “It was very difficult for my sisters. You were in high school when it all started. As it got bigger, they changed their last names.”
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Like the weather
How did he manage to endure and get through this?
“I don’t know. Today I talk to people about it like we talk about the weather, but it’s part of my daily life. In the end you accept your fate. Certainly it’s difficult because you say to yourself: are we going to meet me on Leave the end alone? I understand that people don’t like me, but then do they want my life or do they want to hurt me physically? It’s so much easier to change jobs or just not watch what I do or my song not listening.”
Its storm abated when another, the pandemic, emerged. He found a job in a Quebec hospital and almost completely erased all traces of him on social media. “It went downhill there.”
Nothing will surprise him
By granting the Journal an interview, Jérémy Gabriel knows only too well that he will again receive hate speech, but refuses to remain silent.
“It’s going to happen all the time,” he said resignedly. I expect… I expect everything. I’m only 26 and there’s nothing I haven’t heard. I would be really amazed to be amazed.”
“All that,” he concludes sadly, because I wanted to sing…”